Student performance can now be compared to Massachusetts now that Rhode Island has adopted the MCAS, a highly-regarded standardized test the Bay State adopted 20 years ago in its drive for more demanding academic standards. There are yawning gaps between the two.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Rhode Island's school districts performed so poorly on a new standardized test that students in neighboring Seekonk outpaced them in nearly every district.

For the first time, student performance can be compared to Massachusetts now that Rhode Island has adopted the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS, a highly-regarded standardized test that the Bay State adopted 20 years ago in its drive for more demanding academic standards.

Both tests measure students in grades 3 through 8.

State education Commissioner Ken Wagner said the results aren't surprising because the MCAS is a much more difficult test. Still, there are yawning gaps between students in the two states.

On average, Rhode Island students scored 17 percentage points lower than Massachusetts in English and 20 points lower in math.

If Rhode Island were a single school district in Massachusetts, it would fall within the bottom 10 percent of Massachusetts districts.

Comparing districts with similar demographics, Springfield's students outperform their Providence peers by 16 percentage points in English language arts. In Lawrence, students outperform their peers in Central Falls by 22 percentage points on the English test.

"This is our truth-telling moment," Wagner said Tuesday. "There's no surprise we have tons of work to do. Massachusetts students aren't smarter than ours. They've just been doing the work for the past 25 years. We've been doing pieces of it, but we haven't stuck with it. We haven't all been on the same page like Massachusetts has."

This isn't about poor school districts failing. It's about the middle-class districts, too. Again, comparing similar communities, Longmeadow, Mass., outperforms East Greenwich, one of Rhode Island's top districts, by 16 points in math.

"Every single community in Rhode Island needs to do better," Wagner said. "This is about all of us."

Rhode Island decided to scrap the deeply unpopular Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to allow the Ocean State to compare its student performance to Massachusetts, consistently ranked the highest-performing state in the nation.

Massachusetts has long been recognized as the national leader in school reform, with test scores that compete with places like Singapore, one of the highest-performing education systems in the world. But the so-called Massachusetts Miracle didn't happen overnight. While Rhode Island kept changing its mind about testing, standards, even teacher evaluations, Massachusetts stayed its course.

After a 1993 lawsuit challenged the way schools were funded, Massachusetts established high standards, developed tests to measure whether students were meeting those standards, tied high school graduation to a test, and set a higher bar for teachers.

Despite vehement opposition to the test, Massachusetts didn't blink.

Rhode Island, faced with similar protestations by parents and educators, waffled, postponing its test-based graduation requirement from 2014 to 2017, and then again, to 2020. Then-Commissioner Deborah Gist, a hard-charging education reformer who was hired in 2009 to shake things up, was so discouraged she decamped for her native Oklahoma.

Still, Rhode Island has been committed to school reform for almost 10 years. So why are some students still mired in chronically low-performing schools?

Wagner said it's because reform was imposed from the top down.

"There was a reform agenda designed in somebody's Washington D.C. office," he said. "They said, If you do these reforms, you'll get all of this money."

But, he said, there was little support from people on the ground: the teachers, principals, even the superintendents.

"We don't hold the system accountable for failing students," said Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees. "We don't mandate you have pass a test to graduate. In Massachusetts, all but the highest-performing teachers are evaluated on an annual basis. That's not the case here. Our system allows everybody to kick the can down the road."

Central Falls has been funded by the state and governed by a state-appointed school committee for years, yet only 6.9 percent of its students in grades 3 through 8 are proficient or above in math and only 9.6 percent are proficient in English.

When asked if it was time to intervene in chronically low-performing districts, Wagner said, "A state takeover doesn't work. We're never going to get better school districts by micromanaging people at the districts and the schools. The real answer is high standards, clear assessments, investing in a high-quality curriculum, leadership. Repeat. Year after year after year. We've never done that as a consistent package."

Wagner said deep and lasting improvement calls for giving principals and teachers more control over what happens in classrooms. It calls for training principals to be leaders, not disciplinarians. It calls for curricula that are both challenging and engaging. It calls for more training that treats teachers as professionals.

"How do we remove the obstacles classrooms are experiencing year after year?" he asked. "In some cases, it's the bureaucracy. Teachers can't get supplies. In some cases, the principal can't get the teachers he or she needs. Sometimes the conditions are citywide -- an over-intrusive city council or school committee. We have to make sure nobody gets in the way of classroom instruction getting better."

Rhode Island has embarked on some of that work, investing in universal pre-kindergarten, helping districts adopt rigorous curricula, offering advanced coursework to high school students, and committing $250 million to improving the state's woefully inadequate school buildings.

But it will take time for these changes to take hold.

Wagner also identified a larger, cultural problem: Rhode Islanders collectively settle for lower expectations.

"We don't believe our kids can do what they can do," he said. "We think if we push students too hard, we'll lose them or hurt them. But it's just the opposite, we have to have the highest expectations for kids. The way to do that is to have this truth-telling moment with Massachusetts."

INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL DO?

The Rhode Island Department of Education has made public the scores earned by districts and schools on the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System, the same test used in Massachusetts.

The test was administered in English language arts, ELA, and math.

Figures below show the percent of students that met or exceeded expectations, abbreviated "pass" here, and the average score, which is measured on a scale from 440 to 560.

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-lborg@providencejournal.com

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