“For such a small state, why can’t it get its act together?” This is a sentiment often evoked when thinking of Rhode Island. From unemployment to pension reform, the Union’s tiniest member seems to have the greatest proportion of problems. One major issue is PK–12 education — the sector that most affects Rhode Island’s future.
The facts of the Ocean State’s schools today are sobering, with direct effects on the state’s economy: 32 percent of citizens live in a household with a median income of less than $35,000 ($10,000 lower than that of neighboring Massachusetts), and about one in five Rhode Islanders receive public assistance. For the state, the challenge then is to give its young people a decent shot at a family-sustaining income that too few of their parents, especially in urban areas, have been able to earn. But as Rhode Island struggles to advance its educational system, its students continue to fall behind national standards.
Currently, 40 percent of Rhode Island and 65 percent of Providence high school juniors are in danger of not graduating due to failing scores on the state assessment. To graduate from high school in Rhode Island, a student needs to score “partially proficient” on the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP). NECAP scores are continuing to rise slowly, but many students, mostly urban, are still not prepared to meet the bar. NECAP has a lower cutoff score and easier content standards than tougher state assessments in Massachusetts and California. The 2012 four-year graduation rate in Rhode Island was a mere 77 percent, a full 8 percentage points lower than that of Massachusetts. Though the NECAP is to be replaced by a new test starting in the 2014–2015 school year, students’ lack of proficiency will remain a serious problem.
Rhode Island tangos with the same devils many other states do: communities segregated by race and class, a lack of sufficient funding, and bureaucratic and operating apparatuses that stymie meaningful change. The state’s lack of success thus far is not due to a lack of effort, though. Commissioner Deborah A. Gist of the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (RIDE) published a well-written, comprehensive 29-page strategic plan in 2010. The General Assembly also recently established a statewide school funding formula. The issue is not a lack of care for students; it is that, far too often, actors in education policy appear to operate in isolation.
Take the 38 Studios debacle, another case of making policy decisions without meaningful scrutiny. In July 2010, the state’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) approved a $75 million guaranteed loan to 38 Studios, a game development company founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, in exchange for 450 jobs that would be brought to the state by the end of 2012. On the surface, it looked like a great deal: lure a high-tech company run by a New England superstar to fill a vacant Providence building with plenty of jobs, all for a loan that will be repaid with interest. Unfortunately, the vetting stopped there. Then-Governor Donald Carcieri (R-RI) saw the high-tech Rhode Island of the future, bought into the deal and shepherded the authorizing legislation through the General Assembly and EDC — with little pushback from either of the two. Too few people in the Ocean State’s part-time legislature have a strong background in policy, so when a leadership figure (such as the Speaker or Governor) signs on, they do, too. Education policy has taken a similar trajectory in Rhode Island.
The absence of a statewide team approach to solving problems significantly detracts from teaching and learning, which ought to be the core of education. Rhode Island needs improved long-term planning and greater intra-government communication to achieve better outcomes in education. This was perhaps best demonstrated by the poorly planned, recent changes to the state’s education policymaking structure.
At the end of its session last June, the Assembly merged the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education with the Board of Governors for Higher Education. The result was a new Board of Education with authority over PK–20 (elementary, secondary and college students) policymaking. Despite the Legislature’s claims of greater PK–20 coordination, there is little evidence to support this approach. Some claimed the Assembly’s leaders orchestrated the merger because they were miffed that the Board of Governors approved in-state tuition for illegal immigrants without the body’s blessing. That may be true, but regardless of whether the Assembly was angered, it is not the real issue at stake. The problem is that the merger was not grounded in good policy or meaningful public discourse, for a number of reasons.
First, the merger does not take into account the structure of teacher education systems. The American public education system naturally bifurcates PK–12 educators from college educators because of how its entry systems are set up. The majority of PK–12 educators go to school for education and take state certification exams. On the other hand, to become professors, tenure-track college educators attain a doctorate in a specific field. In both cases, an authority authenticates the individual educators: RIDE for PK–12 teachers, and higher education institutions for university professors. Yet the methods for entry into each are different, and while there is some overlap — such as individuals with doctorates teaching in elementary and secondary schools — they naturally separate the two groups. It is therefore difficult for individuals to gain meaningful experience in both fields, as teachers are in effect forced to choose one pathway while they are undergraduates.
Although it is auspicious that the governor has filled the new board with appointees who represent a good cross-section of Rhode Island with backgrounds in both PK–12 and higher education, creating a combined board makes little sense because members will typically have expertise in only one level or the other.
Chairwoman Eva-Marie Mancuso of the newly combined board told the Providence Journal in March, “This is about people getting out of their comfort zones, their silos of expertise, and sharing their vision.” That is a noble goal, but it makes little sense to force people out of their silos if they do not have meaningful experiences to share. Instead of having two boards with knowledgeable professionals, Rhode Island now has one board with a membership untrained for roughly half of its responsibilities. The new board may promote collaboration, but it comes at the price of inexperience — hardly an improvement for Rhode Island students.
Second, there is limited evidence that a combined board would be the most successful route. Only three other states have similarly combined boards, and results have been mixed. At the time the bill was heading to a vote, House Finance Committee Chairman Helio Melo told the Journal that he wanted to “make the education system in the state more efficient and effective.” However, the Assembly seems to have forgotten that Rhode Island previously had a combined Board of Education. That board was split in 1982 because it was dominated by K–12 advocates and neglected post-secondary concerns. The new board does have an executive committee that contains the presidents of the state’s public higher education institutions, but there is little reason otherwise to think the outcome will be any different this time.
If the goal is to provide better coordination from PK–20, there are more established alternatives. The Assembly could have created a cabinet-level post, such as a Secretary of Education, giving the sector additional credence on Smith Hill and overseeing overall coordination. The Legislature could also have created a PK–20 “coordination council” or reserved seats on each board for the other’s commissioner or board members. Each of these approaches has political and financial costs, but they all make more sense than the board merger.
The third and most significant issue for Rhode Island government is the rushed nature of the merger in the first place. Regardless of whether the merger is actually a good idea, it never makes sense to upset the paradigm in a way that compromises progress in the interim. The state education establishment, from RIDE to Journal reporters, all seemed to be caught off guard by the proposal. Virtually no public discourse took place because there was simply no time for it to occur, save a few brief opportunities to testify in late May. In fact, now-Chairwoman Mancuso argued against the merger at one such hearing. To her credit, she quickly moved on and now seems to be working hard to establish the new board.
Rather than having a thoughtful, thorough civic conversation with Rhode Islanders, the Assembly buried the merger in the state budget and rammed it through at the last minute, not even as its own bill. Regardless of the opinions of the merger plan’s backers in the Assembly, it was impossible for them to have all the information necessary for sound policymaking when they voted, due to a lack of a robust public conversation. In this case, the Assembly did everything they could to avoid important citizen debate on the measure, which had no clear need to pass and could have been taken up at the beginning of the next session less than six months later, with ample time for discussion.
Moreover, this rushed process is also evident in the final implementation of the merger. From the outset, the Assembly created a situation in which the new board would exist without any members actually sitting on it. Because the merger was passed at the very end of the session, even if the Governor vetted nominees over the summer, they could not have taken office, as the Senate would not be in session to give advice and consent. As a result, no one was appointed to the board until more than two months after its effective date. It was reckless for the Assembly to set up a situation in which a board that oversees an over-$3-billion enterprise in Rhode Island would have no appointees for over a fifth of its first year — a situation that legislators should have foreseen before the bill passed.
As if getting citizens to actually sit on the board wasn’t problematic enough, newly appointed members now walk into a bureaucracy with no clear administrative structure. To be fair, when the Assembly merged the former boards, they directed the newly combined board to create an operating structure and “submit to the Governor and the General Assembly its final plan” no later than July 1. But devising the leadership chart six months after the formation of a major board that oversees the education of hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders is reckless at best. This is the type of “buy now, pay later” scheme that swindles needy families, one that Rhode Island should be smart enough to avoid.
Transitions, especially of this magnitude, should be executed in a deliberative, intentional manner. Even if this merger might at some point enhance PK–20 coordination at the board level, especially in a state as small as Rhode Island, it is not worth upsetting the establishment in a way that prevents the accomplishment of meaningful work for a year in the interim. Rather than creating unnecessary turf wars and artificial confusion, the Assembly should have waited and more thoroughly explored the idea of combining the boards at the start of the new session.
In true Rhode Island fashion, the failure of education policy ultimately results from the state leaders’ constant search for a quick fix instead of a focus on what is tried and true: ensuring high standards, providing strong support and building a community of achievement. Most leadership professionals will tell you that it takes incremental, sustained change over a long period of time to truly affect an organization or enterprise. Rhode Island has seen a last-minute merger without public input and infighting within the education establishment — and who is left last on the priority list? The students themselves.
In fact, students lost their representation on the combined board. The Board of Governors once included a full-voting college student, and legislation passed last session added a non-voting high school representative to the Board of Regents. Both positions were eliminated when the boards combined. And in a standard misstep of the Assembly, the bill authorizing the Board of Regents student member was enacted five days after the statute merging the boards; in other words, Smith Hill combined the boards and then enacted legislation to add a student member to a soon-to-be-defunct board.
A large part of the blame for these mistakes rests with the Ocean State’s legislature — not the individual legislators but rather the structure of the Assembly itself. Its part-time nature leads to decisions that are rarely fully thought out. Representatives and senators have other concerns on their mind: their day job, family and other myriad everyday responsibilities. They simply do not have enough time to devote to the important complexities of policy development. Legislators have to do what the average citizen does and run the state on the side.
In any representative democracy, there is room to disagree; in fact, there should be disagreement. But Rhode Island’s leaders are not even giving a chance for that productive disagreement to occur. In an “I know what’s best” approach that exemplifies what is wrong with Ocean State government, the Assembly pushed through unproven, poorly vetted legislation, throwing the state’s educational administration into turmoil. Pieces of legislation like the merger, among many other examples, demonstrate that shoot-from-the-hip ideas seldom work well.
There is no good reason why the Ocean State can’t have a top-notch education system. Yet it must remember that silver bullets, such as the combined education board, rarely work as they’re intended to. Rhode Island may be the smallest state, but it should not be the one struggling to avoid last place.
Art by Olivia Watson