City Can’t Award Regents’ Diplomas

By Linda Borg; Journal Staff Writer

Providence seniors will still get the regular high school diplomas, even though the new graduation requirements haven’t been approved by the state.

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PROVIDENCE – The state Department of Education has withheld preliminary approval of the district’s new graduation requirements, but that will not prevent high schools from awarding diplomas this spring.

MacKay Miller, the School Department’s facilitator of district reform, made the announcement yesterday at a meeting of the high school steering committee, a group of school and community leaders who are studying how to improve high schools.

According to Miller, Providence was one of eight or nine districts that didn’t receive preliminary approval from the state. Elliot Krieger, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, said letters will be sent to the districts later this week and next notifying them of their status.

Under the proposed high school regulations, districts now have until 2010 to comply with the new performance-based graduation requirements. Those districts that are not in compliance by then will not be able to issue a regents’ approved diploma; they will be allowed to award regular high school diplomas.

By 2012, however, no high school will be allowed to grant diplomas unless they have implemented the new high school regulations, which require that students demonstrate proficiency through a combination of end-of-course exams, senior projects and portfolios of their work.

The graduation requirements are not new. The Rhode Island Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education announced them four years ago and state education officials have been training district leaders ever since. The regulations were supposed to take effect with this year’s senior class, but the regents decided to extend the deadline when it became clear that some districts needed more time.

One of the state’s top concerns is that Providence lacks a consistent curriculum across its 11 high schools.

“We have 11 different graduation requirements,” said Sharon Contreras, the district’s chief of academics. “We can’t assure that there are uniformly high requirements across the board. There are too many different systems within the system.”

According to Supt. Donnie Evans, the new graduation requirements call for a “fundamental change in culture.”

“For years, high schools have done their own thing,” he said. “We’re trying to change that. I’ve told principals that we have to change this.”

Right now, the district doesn’t have a consistent curriculum, school officials said. In other words, Algebra I at one high school might look completely different at another high school, and an A in one senior English class is not the same as an A in another one, even in the same school.

To make matters worse, high schools don’t use the same textbooks for core subjects.

The Department of Education is telling Providence to develop uniform graduation requirements across high schools to ensure that every graduate is getting the same quality of education.

The problem is that principals have been doing their own thing for years and some resent the shift to a more centralized system.

A couple of years ago, principals were told that they could develop their own graduation requirements. Nine of the district’s 11 high schools chose to develop portfolios, an exhaustive compilation of student work over four years of high school. Two schools, Classical High School and Providence Academy of International Studies, chose a culminating project to be done in the student’s junior or senior year.

Now, however, Contreras and others are saying that high schools don’t have the capacity to amass portfolios of student work, in part because students are too mobile. She said transfer students have been turned away from certain high schools because those students have not been part of the new school’s portfolio system.

“I understand the concerns of principals and teachers,” Contreras said. “They have put a lot of time into this work. But we have to have a system that [supports] equity and uniformity.”

Instead, students will have to complete a capstone or culminating project, a research project that involves a public presentation upon completion. (This regulation won’t take effect until the graduating class of 2010).

“The senior project is much easier,” Miller said. “It’s much more understandable to parents than compiling 64 separate pieces of student work. A portfolio must move with the student from school to school. It penalizes the kid for being mobile.”

Miller also acknowledged that the district doesn’t have the capacity to put portfolios of student work online, where they could be readily accessible.

Seniors will now have to complete the following requirements: 24 credits (currently the district requires 20 credits), end-of-course exams, a capstone project and the New England Common Assessment Program, a statewide test in math and English. Students, however, don’t have to pass the NECAP; they simply have to take it.

The biggest unanswered question is what this shift toward a more centralized system will do to small, theme-based high schools such as the Health & Science and Technology Academy.

Evans, in yesterday’s meeting, said that the latest research has challenged the effectiveness of small, site-based schools in high- poverty urban districts with a lot of student mobility. (Site-based schools are typically allowed to develop their own curriculum and hire their own staff).

“There is a place for them,” he said. “But first you have to have a comprehensive core. We are rethinking site-based schools in Providence.”

This represents a 180-degree turn from the work of two former superintendents, Diana Lam and Melody Johnson, who put great faith in the premise that small, innovative high schools were the future of secondary education in Providence.

lborg@projo.com / (401) 277-7823

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