BUILDING OUR FUTURE


About the Task Force

Governor Donald L. Carcieri formed the Rhode Island Urban Education Task Force in 2008 and charged it with developing specific recommendations for consideration by the Governor and the General Assembly on ways to strengthen and transform urban education in the Ocean State. The Task Force first met in January 2008 and met as a plenary group nine times over the next eighteen months.

The figure below illustrates how the Task Force’s recommendation areas fit together to create a comprehensive agenda for urban education in Rhode Island. The pre-kindergarten, early literacy and multiple pathways recommendations attend to the specific learning needs of our state’s children. The expanded learning time and educator quality recommendations are focused on helping to improve learning supports and provide additional learning opportunities. The innovation and collaboration recommendations (which encompass the research component) address key infrastructure needs and the new ways of working that will foster continuous improvement in our urban districts and the state as a whole.

Shared Challenges and Solutions
Rhode Island urban communities share many of the same issues and, in many cases, the same students. The solutions to these challenges are also be similar.

Collaboration
Working together is more efficient than having each community tackle the problems alone. Collaboration across these cities, with support from state leaders, draws on greater expertise and generates better and more shared solutions.

Leveraging Community Assets
To prepare all the state’s young people for their futures, education must go beyond the school building. A statewide approach to urban education helps to draw on the rich and diverse set of community and governmental assets to support the growth and development of our youth.


Research Collaborative

The Annenberg Institute convened a statewide collaborative of local organizations to provide research, technical assistance, and analytic support to the work of the Task Force. Current members are Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, the Annenberg Institute and the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University, the Providence Plan, the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, and the Regional Educational Lab Northeast and Islands, with data support from RIDE and funding from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Rhode Island Foundation. The collaborative’s work has included data analysis, strategy briefs, documentation, synopses of expert testimony and community input, preliminary and final reports, and a two-volume Resource Guide.

District leaders have indicated that they would welcome the continuation of the research collaborative, due to the limited research resources of our small local education agencies and the need to sometimes have a neutral third party conduct studies. The collaborative could also build capacity to use data and serve as a training ground for the next generation of education policy analysts.


Members, Participants and Advisors

The Task Force chaired by Warren Simmons involved 37 local leaders representing the five urban core communities, the state government and legislature, higher education and other key stakeholders. The Task Force was supported by a collaborative of research organizations, led by Brown University and involving local organizations, as well as a National Advisory Panel.



Background

Rhode Island is a small and densely populated state. Perhaps even more than in other areas of our country, the future of the state is linked to the health of its core cities: Providence, Central Falls, Newport, Pawtucket and Woonsocket. And no factor is more important to the health of these cities, and hence the state, than education.

As noted in the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council publication Cities Count, “by 2020, one in five members of the state’s workforce will have come from the State’s urban core school systems.” Currently, outcomes for students in those cities are improving, but remain unacceptably low.

Only about half of elementary and middle school students from these communities achieved proficiency in the 2007-2008 assessment in English language arts, compared with about 77 percent in the rest of the state. Math achievement in these urban districts also lags behind the rest of the state, with only three or four in ten students reaching proficiency in the urban areas, compared with about seven in ten students in the rest of the state.

Despite making up just under a third of the state’s public school population, students in the core districts make up a large majority of the students who are characterized as English language learners and as low income. The core districts also have a high rate of student mobility — 44 percent in 2007-2008, compared with 14 percent for the rest of the state — and contain more than two-thirds of students in the state who qualify for the reduced-price or free lunch program.

Our current system of urban public education is not a worthy vessel for children and youth in our urban core, nor for the many dedicated educators who work with them. Redesigning the current system to fit the needs of the twenty-first century will require vision, bold action, and an approach that harnesses the state’s political, educational, social, and civic resources. It will require a technical blueprint, but one that also recognizes that reform requires concerted political, social, and cultural change.


District Profiles

Comparative Data on the Urban Core Districts


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