PROVIDENCE — Students in the Providence public schools aren’t learning much, bullying and fighting are rampant, bad teachers are nearly impossible to fire, and a thicket of bureaucracy makes it difficult to know who is in charge.

Those are some findings of a scathing review of the city's public schools released Tuesday afternoon.

Angélica Infante-Green, the state’s newly arrived education commissioner, said the city schools are so dysfunctional that she will not send her own two children there. She said she doesn’t know where she will enroll them.

The report is the result of a deep dive into the state's largest school district ordered by Gov. Gina Raimondo and Mayor Jorge Elorza in the spring after students scored alarmingly low on the state’s newest standardized test.

Almost two dozen educators spent several weeks visiting 12 schools and conducting dozens of interviews. Their findings, included in a 93-page report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, conclude that everyone — from the school district to the teachers union to the state Department of Education — is failing the city’s students.

“I wasn’t surprised,” said Infante-Green. “But I didn’t know that it was this bad. It is heartbreaking to see how dysfunctional this school system is.”

Not only were teachers in tears over what they saw in the classroom, but two members of the Johns Hopkins team broke down — something David Steiner, executive director of the institute, said he has never seen before.

“This was not a gotcha mission,” Steiner said. “No one felt there was any doubts about the findings. We heard a deep frustration with the status quo. You have an almost universal sense that this isn’t working.”

Even those responsible for the schools recognized things are broken. Asked to rate the schools on a 1-5 scale with 5 being the highest, the Providence School Board gave the schools a 2.

Elorza said his grade for the school system would be a C.

It’s no wonder. In the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System administered for the first time last year, 90 percent of Providence students were not proficient in math and 80 percent were not proficient in English.

Johns Hopkins found that Providence eighth-graders tested as poorly as their peers in Baltimore, one of the nation's most distressed school districts.

Providence students were also found to have performed much more poorly than those in two comparable districts, Worcester, Massachusetts and Newark, New Jersey, the authors said.

Providence's students scored lower than Newark’s in every grade tested except for grade 10. In 2016-17, the gap between Providence and Newark in grade 8 was more than 22 percentage points.

The team of educators found that, in Providence, expectations of students are low, curriculum is fragmented and student engagement is weak.

In one school, according to the report, some teachers placed non-engaged students in desks facing the wall, while a small number of engaged students were allowed to be closer to the teacher.

“Many classes this team attempted to visit were staffed by subs, aides, other teachers in the department, or had been disbanded for the day, with students sent to other rooms to wait out the class period,” the authors wrote.

About a third to a half of students in classrooms were off task and teachers made no attempt to reach out to them.

None of the schools visited were identified in the report.

The district’s much-ballyhooed online learning platform, Summit Learning, came under heavy criticism. Instead of using the software to do school work, students were using it to watch YouTube videos, listen to playlists, or work on assignments from other classes.

“Students almost universally disliked the Summit program,” the authors wrote. “They told the team that they were burned-out through over-use of screen time and bored.”

Because of the way Summit is set up, one student missed about half of the school year and still earned a B.

In one school, the team agreed that the majority of teachers and students appeared to have given up on education.

“We saw students sitting at their desks, with their headphones in their ears, scrolling on their phones. They did not respond to teachers and teachers rarely attempted to engage them beyond yelling at them periodically.”

In this school, some rooms were “utterly chaotic and unsafe,” with students “laughing, screaming, moving around the room, physically harassing one another, climbing up bookshelves.”

The teachers’ contract was seen as a big impediment to change. Administrators said it is next to impossible to remove bad teachers. The contract provides for only one day of professional development a year; by contrast, Achievement First charter school has 25 days.

Jeremy Senser, vice-president of the Providence Teachers Union, pushed back, saying that "those who work with students are rarely heard or valued."

"It's like we are being punished for following directions from above ... " he wrote. "On the labor side, PTU has consistently come to the table collaboratively and with innovative ideas... The bottom line is we need to do better for our children and our families. I'm sure this is going to be the challenge of a lifetime but we have the people to do it."

The hiring process is byzantine.

Teacher morale is terrible.

In an interview with 15 teachers, some were in tears as they described what they had to deal with: no backup for discipline issues, a constant churning in curriculum, tests and standards, frequent principal turnover and little time to collaborate.

In one school, teachers said they have third-graders who have already checked out.

Teachers said pressure from the district and the state Department of Education to reduce suspensions has resulted in an explosion of discipline problems. Students are passed from one school to another and some schools have become “dumping grounds” for kids.

“One of our teachers was choked by a student in front of the whole class. Everybody was traumatized but nothing happened,” one teacher said.

One district leader said, “The students run the buildings.”

“My best teacher’s desk was urinated on and nothing happened,” said another educator.

Everyone agrees that the school system has a problem with micromanagement, but there isn’t consensus on who is at fault.

Union President Maribeth Calabro accuses Elorza of overstepping his role, including interviewing all nonunion employees. Elorza agrees that there are “too many cooks in the kitchen,” but doesn’t see himself as the problem.

“This report paints a grim, concerning picture of our school district," Elorza said. "The truth is that most, if not all, of the issues that were observed are challenges that we, too, have identified and experienced as barriers to progress. This report makes clear that the status quo is failing our kids and we know that nipping at the margins will not be enough. We need wholesale, transformational change and I look forward to working with state partners, teachers, parents and students to accomplish it."

Outgoing Schools Supt. Christopher N. Maher said the superintendent's office is “often viewed as a department of the mayor,” and said, “I often don’t feel I have the authority” to make decisions.

Throughout his interview with the team, Maher expressed his frustration with “the need for micromanagement of every initiative through endless layers, players and budget limits.”

Tuesday, in a statement, Maher said, "The RIDE report creates a much-needed sense of urgency around the educational needs of Providence public school children and the system that strives to support them. My hope is that this sense of urgency translates into concrete actions that improve outcomes for our young people."

After a decade of wholesale school reforms, a revolving door of school leaders and millions of dollars spent on consultants, the School Board acknowledged that what the district has done so far has amounted to “tinkering around the margins.”

The report's authors stayed away from making any recommendations. But Infante-Green promised there will be "massive changes."

“This is heartbreaking,” Infante-Green said. “We are all to blame. And we all have to move forward."

5 things to know about the scathing report on Providence schools

Superintendent Maher said in a letter Tuesday evening that "The RIDE report creates a much-needed sense of urgency around the educational needs of Providence public school children and the system that strives to support them. My hope is that this sense of urgency translates into concrete actions that improve outcomes for our young people.

Just as Rhode Island is mirroring the Massachusetts approach to standardized testing, I hope that we will also attempt to explore Massachusetts’ latest school improvement plans which its commissioner recently previewed. These align well with the Providence School Board’s insightful and ambitious five-year strategic plan, Empowering Students and Schools (www.providenceschools.org/strategicplan).

I am very hopeful that the collaborative effort between RIDE, the City of Providence, our School Board, and our community will yield favorable results for our students."