Coming Up in Committee, Wednesday, February 26: Several Education Bills of Importance

1. All of the following are being heard by the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee, on Wednesday, February 26:

Opponents of standardized testing have two bills being heard…

  • H7095: The bulk of this bill sets up a 21-member commission “to study and evaluate the department of education’s standardized testing based on common core curriculum”; the final section of the bill then states that the Department of Education is prohibited from administering the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) test or any similar assessment, which is supposed to replace the NECAP, until the commission issues its report.
  • H7256: Prohibits standardized testing from being used as a graduation requirement until July 1, 2019.

This one seems idiosyncratic, but the Speaker of the House is the primary sponsor…

  • H7201: Establishes a pilot program, at one or more of Rhode Island’s public higher education institutions beginning in 2015, to replace annual tuition payments for college with “binding contracts to pay to the state of Rhode Island or the institution a certain percentage of the student’s annual adjusted gross income upon graduation from the institution for a specified number of years”.

Read this bill on teacher-evaluations carefully (see note below)…

  • H7096: Teachers who receive a “highly effective” evaluation “shall, subsequent to such evaluation, be evaluated not more than once every four years thereafter”; teachers who receive an “effective” evaluation “shall, subsequent to such evaluation, be evaluated not more than once every three (3) years thereafter”. This language in this bill could be interpreted as meaning that once a teacher receives a highly-effective evaluation one time, that teacher can only be evaluated once every four years for the rest of his or her career regardless of any future evaluation. Is that the intent?

Is this bill being proposed as an alternative to standardized testing graduation requirements?

  • H7255: Requires public school students to have “a minimum cumulative grade point average of at least seventy (70) out of one hundred (100) points for all years the student attend (sic) public high school, in order to graduate from high school”.

One other bill is intended to delay using standardized testing for anything substantive, but it is less specific than the others and has only a single sponsor…

  • H7146: Calls for a state assessments program to be implemented over a ten-year period, but prohibits it from being used as part of teacher over the ten-year implementation period, and from being used as a promotion or graduation requirement ever.

Finally, there’s one bill orthogonal to all the others, intended to address special education costs in Rhode Island…

  • H7144: Establishes “a minimum attendance requirement of one hundred fifty-five school days within a school year in order for a student to be certified, recertified, identified, or otherwise documented as a child with a disability by a public school or public school district in Rhode Island”.

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