The Roosevelt Society 10/2/2013 with Deborah Gist

Last evening, the Roosevelt Society (not named after any specific person, but to provoke discussion) hosted a forum with Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist. Commissioner Gist gave some short introductory remarks, and then spent the bulk of an hour answering questions from the audience.

Here are eight takeaways from the dialogue…

1. Commissioner Gist began by listing the five priorities in her office’s strategic plan: 1) Assuring educator excellence, i.e. making sure we have a great teacher in every classroom, a great leader in every school and that they have support throughout their career; 2) Accelerating all schools towards greatness, i.e. making sure we have schools that aren’t persistently failing our students and turning those schools around, including various innovations, including school choice and public charter schools; 3) Establishing world class standards of assessment; 4) Creating user-friendly data systems, making sure that educators have data about students and their performance and 5) Using our resources wisely (this includes the statewide funding formula).

2. After listing the five priorities, Commissioner Gist immediately addressed the issue of the common core. The Commissioner said that the common core reduces the volume of material that a teacher has to cover in a given school year, by treating subjects in a more organized way and with more depth early on, instead of scattering their presentation through multiple grades. This approach has been shown to work in countries with high-performing education systems. Common core is also about raising expectations for students, though Rhode Island’s official standards were already pretty high to begin with. She also emphasized that Race-to-the-Top did not depend on adopting the Common Core, and that it does not standardize teaching practices.

3. Given the structure of public education for let’s say the last century or so, perhaps the most radical idea put forth by the commissioner was her suggestion that if some students can learn required material in 2 or 3 months, there’s no reason to make them sit through a whole year of it. “There couldn’t be anything worse we could do, for those children and our state, then to hold them back from being able to excel at their greatest ability”.

4. Commissioner Gist defended the NECAP (and RI’s new assessment plans in general), saying that one reason Rhode Island students struggle with the NECAP is because it is an excellent assessment, with a math section that involves critical thinking and problem solving, and “teaching practices haven’t always caught up with that”. “We’re asking students to be partially proficient on material they should be learning in 9th and 10th grade by their senior year”. If partial proficiency cannot be demonstrated on the NECAP, there’s a list of 10 other assessments that can be used as alternatives, including the SAT, the ACT, AP, the test for getting into the military, and the test used to determine if remedial courses are required at our community colleges. A student who cannot pass one of these is virtually guaranteed to have to pay for remedial courses in order to go to community college, so the bar is not set unreasonably high.

Also, the Commissioner mentioned that Rhode Island’s change to the Partnership for Readiness, Colleges and Careers (PARCC) assessment is not occurring because there is anything inherently wrong with NECAP, but because PARCC is better aligned with the new common core standards, and also mentioned that the use of PARCC allows testing to occur in the spring, with results returned by the end of the school year.

5. On teacher evaluation, Commissioner Gist offered that most RI districts have not, in the past, had a robust system for evaluation, and evaluator bias is less of a problem when evaluations require more detail, though no system can be fully evaluator-proofed without becoming too rigid. The Department of Education has told school committees that a minimum expectation is that someone ineffective for two years should no longer be in the classroom, but school committees have to negotiate the process. The Commissioner added that she is uncomfortable that this can result in students being left with a teacher who has been evaluated as ineffective; “You have to balance giving people time to get better with the impacts on the kids who have to experience that…we’ve got to act more quickly than we’re acting now, to help people get better, or to help them find another career”.

6. Commissioner Gist defended school choice in terms of the diversity of education environments it can be used to create, allowing families to choose the right environments for their children, and educators to find the right environments as professionals for themselves.  Schools based on project-based learning and traditional college-prep can both work, but what is ultimately most important is that you have common expectations of what students should know and what they are able to do.  The Commissioner also said directly that school choice is not a silver bullet that can fix everything, but is important for demonstrating what’s possible. What schools like Blackstone Prep do in successfully exceeding expectations should be identified and shared with others. Commissioner Gist would like to see more ability for students to move within a district and even between districts (providing some interesting and possibly constructive overlap with RI NEA Executive Director Robert Walsh’s Roosevelt Society appearance from last week).

7. Commissioner Gist noted that while it is a fact that Rhode Island teachers do spend a whole lot of their own money on their classrooms, it is also true that our system uses more money than virtually every state in the country, about $15,000 per student, placing RI in the top-10 or top-5 in terms of education spending depending upon how the analysis is done. She added that the recently implemented uniform chart of accounts system can be used to help people analyze resource use and where the money is going.

8. Finally, Commissioner Gist offered that students don’t necessarily like an easy teacher, despite what the conventional wisdom might be. Instead, they like teachers that are challenging and interesting at the same time. What makes students crazy is when there’s not something interesting going on in the classroom.

(Image: stock photo)

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