Providence will get its schools back from state control, Rhode Island’s education commissioner promised Thursday night. Just not right now.

Angélica Infante-Green, commissioner of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), supplied her as to whether the state takeover of Providence’s public schools, which started in November 2019, should continue, at a of the Rhode Island Council on Elementary and Secondary Education.

“RIDE does not intend — and I wanna repeat that — does not intend to keep the district forever,” Infante-Green told the council.

But the state does want to hold the district close a little longer: Infante-Green advised that the council extend the state intervention through Oct.15, 2027, and it was unanimously approved by the council.

Infante-Green indicated that there was also a chance local control could return before the end of the three year period, if there’s sufficient progress in student proficiency and other stakeholders’ willingness to work in tandem with RIDE. That didn’t mollify the Providence School Board, the mayor’s office or the City Council, all of whom noted their disappointment in statements following the meeting. 

A premature end to the takeover extension would require council approval, the council’s chair Patricia DiCenso confirmed to reporters after the meeting. But it would not necessitate that the district fulfills everything outlined in the state’s “turnaround action plan” — the guiding set of metrics used to evaluate the takeover’s success. 

During the meeting, a pair of old wooden chairs helped Infante-Green illustrate why the state takeover of Providence public schools isn’t ready to end. 

She motioned to the scratched, chipped and dented seats, which were staged against a wall in an education department conference room. The councilors spun around to look. The chairs once belonged to the auditorium in Providence’s , which first underwent state intervention back in the 2000s and initially saw gains in problem areas before within a few years.

The chairs are normally stationed outside the commissioner’s office — a reminder, she said, of the need to see things through for students.

“It reminds me that we cannot fail them yet again,” Infante-Green said. “The importance of the symbolism of Hope High School is the cautionary example of what happens when the state leaves too early.”

State control not unique

When Infante-Green , the day two progress reports on the takeover were released, she said that all three options — end, continue or revise the takeover — were “still on the table.” 

showed post-pandemic progress in Providence schools compared to similar districts in other New England states. But anyone who read , from education consulting firm SchoolWorks, might have surmised that the school system is nowhere near reaching its turnaround goals.

One example: In the 2022-2023 school year, eighth-graders’ math proficiency was at 6%, which was one percentage point lower than the pre-takeover baseline numbers from 2018. The turnaround action plan wanted 50% proficiency in math by 2026.

In five years, the Providence takeover has drawn much media and legislative attention — including a study commission led by Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat and education committee member who often reminisces fondly at state house meetings about his own time in Providence schools. The commission’s in May, concluded that a more lasting solution for the Providence takeover could derive inspiration from other states, like the in Massachusetts that nullified “the threat of an imminent state takeover” with new arrangements for collective bargaining and shared governance of schools.

As Zurier’s commission found, history indeed repeats, and the Providence takeover is . State control has been tested to varied results in school districts big and small. The state of Texas took over in 2023, a big experiment given that the district serves over 194,000 students, a lot more than Providence’s approximately 22,000 students. came under state control in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the city has since transitioned to a distinct model of charter-only education. Even in Rhode Island, Providence’s neighbor Central Falls has had its schools under state control for . The Providence Public Schools building on Westminster Street is where the Providence School Board meets. But the board’s powers have been delimited since the state takeover in 2019, rendering some of their actions — like an Aug. 21, 2024, resolution to end the takeover — statutorily toothless. (Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)

Underperformance and funding tend to underline the decision to seize control of a municipal school district. Subpar education in Providence was a salient argument in the that predated the takeover: “The great majority of students are not learning on, or even near, grade level,” the report stated.

Rhode Island’s annual proficiency assessments for third- and eighth-grade students will be released this fall, but the recent SchoolWorks data suggests that underperformance is still the norm. 

Tepid reception to takeover

Before the council voted on the commissioner’s recommendation, chair DiCenso pointed to funding as the foremost challenge.

“When this district went into control, they were listed as the worst in the country,” DiCenso said. “And I don’t think it was the families’ fault. I don’t think it was the children’s fault. I don’t think it was the teachers’ fault. I look back at 17 years, or at least 10-plus years, of level funding, no funding from this city to say ‘We believe in our schools.’”

“We just can’t pretend that it’s all about what’s happening at the building level and at the district level,” DiCenso said.

Michael Grey, who chairs the state Board of Education, seemed content with the turnaround plan’s potential for accountability.

“I also think that this is incumbent upon the commissioner, because the weight of this is on her, statutorily, and on us as advisers to be the one that makes the call,” Grey said.

That contrasted the opinion of the Providence School Board, who voted unanimously last Thursday to pass a resolution urging the commissioner to end the takeover — a motion as symbolic as the chairs outside Infante-Green’s office, given that the state takeover has stripped away most of the municipal body’s powers. 

“I have felt, and I think I can speak for some of my board members, completely powerless,” said board member Anjel Newmann last week. “And if we feel powerless, how do our students and families feel? … No shade to the commissioner [but] I want to see the district come back to a community, into a collective, and not be subject to one person’s veto power.”

School board President Erlin Rogel reaffirmed that viewpoint in an email Thursday after the council vote, and called the continued takeover “disappointing” — a sentiment shared by Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and City Council President Rachel Miller.

“We have also heard from families, teachers and our own city departments that there is still a lot of room for improvement in fostering a climate of collaboration and community that is required to move the district forward on a timeline that our students deserve,” Smiley and Miller offered in a joint statement Thursday, and added that they were “disappointed by the recommendation.”

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Infante-Green characterized her decision as a positive one for Providence students and families.

“This is about supporting the district in a way that could not happen,” she said. “That is the bottom line. I think we all know that mayor after mayor after mayor has tried. I think this mayor’s putting some processes in place, but there’s a lot of work that still needs to happen.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

By the time Providence public school students go back to class on Sept. 3, Rhode Island’s education commissioner may have chosen whether to end, continue, or reconfigure the state takeover of their schools five years ago.

A from consulting firm SchoolWorks on the 2019 action that handed control of the capital city’s underperforming schools over to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) could help guide Commissioner of Education Angélica Infante-Green in making her decision.

“I have not ruled out any options,” Infante-Green said Friday morning. “I’m letting the process play out.”

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Infante-Green shared and summarized the findings in a letter to the Providence Public Schools District (PPSD) community before taking questions from reporters at RIDE’s main offices in downtown Providence.

“This is about 30, 35, years of struggle for this district, and it’s not going to be fixed overnight,” Infante-Green told reporters. “We talk about it as a big ship with a little rudder … in a hurricane. That’s how it was happening during the pandemic.”

Math and English test scores from the 2022-2023 school year show just how far the district has to go to achieve the academic goals prescribed in its “.” For example, among eighth-graders, only 6% were at grade level in math, and 15% were proficient in English Language Arts (ELA).

Compared to the 2018, pre-takeover baseline, eighth-graders’ math proficiency dropped one percentage point. The turnaround action plan called for 50% proficiency in math and 63% in ELA for eighth-graders by the 2026 school year.

Victor Morente, a RIDE spokesperson, told reporters the commissioned report — with its $120,600 sticker price — is a statutory of the takeover process. The Crowley Act, codified in state law in 1997, allowed state education officials to exercise administrative powers over Providence’s underperforming schools.

“There has been progress in the hurricane, in the pandemic,” Infante-Green said.

SchoolWorks students, families, teachers and leadership across schools, the district, Mayor Brett Smiley’s office and Providence City Councilors about how well the plan has fared. The research team also visited schools and reviewed documents from some of the many stakeholders involved: RIDE, Providence Public Schools Department, the city and its school board.

“City Council members, School Committee members, and community members reported a need for improved collaboration, communication, and transparency between municipal entities including RIDE, the School Committee, and PPSD,” the report reads.

Absent from that list is the state’s Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, to whom Infante-Green could supply her decision at their next meeting on Aug. 29. The commissioner is also set to attend the Providence school board’s .

Another report released Friday from Harvard Graduate School for Education’s Center for Education Policy Research didn’t cost the state anything, but is part of a series of assessments being done for various school districts on the impacts of pandemic learning loss. The report compares the state’s recent school reforms to similar districts in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

“Although the results suggest Providence is moving in the right direction, especially in ELA [English Language Arts], it is too early to draw conclusions about the efficacy of the Providence reform efforts,” the Harvard report noted. “The pandemic disrupted schooling in the Spring of 2020, just months after the state take-over. We only have two years of reliable student assessments post-pandemic (and a single year change in annual scores) by which to judge.”

‘A lot of material’

The plight of Providence schools has been on people’s minds, with a recent legislative study commission led by Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat, attempting to suss out what can be done about the at-times awkward coupling of municipal and state-level leadership.

Asked to comment on the pair of reports Friday afternoon, Zurier told Rhode Island Current that they contain “a lot of material,” and he’d be reviewing them over the weekend.

Zurier’s reticence to comment too quickly is understandable: At a combined 89 letter-sized pages, the two reports are not light reading. Even the authors of the Harvard University report concluded that they were working with data perhaps that lacks definite shape.

Erlin Rogel, president of the Providence School Board, didn’t need as much time to assess the new report.

“RIDE commissioning a progress report is like a student filling in their own report card,” Rogel wrote in an emailed statement sent to news outlets, claiming the agency has “roundly rejected” the school board’s attempts to be included in the decision-making process.

Rogel also argued that the report’s assertion that the school board does not act cohesively, and even lacks a “shared vision for governance,” echoes “RIDE’s belief that the Board exists to silently rubber stamp their agenda.”

“I am no longer surprised by RIDE’s rejection of attempts to hold the agency accountable to the people, but I am deeply concerned by their lack of self awareness,” wrote Rogel, who did not immediately reply Friday afternoon to a request to answer follow-up questions.

But the SchoolWorks report does voice some of the board’s concerns: “School committee members also stated that they are not consistently engaged by the Superintendent or senior leaders from PPSD regarding programmatic changes, nor are they engaged in an advisory capacity regarding analysis of student outcomes.”

The report does not evaluate individual job performances or personnel — like that of Infante-Green, or of Providence Superintendent Javier Moñtanez, who recently signed a three-year contract extension with the district. A copy of the contract was not immediately available Friday afternoon.

“The report is evaluating the system,” Infante-Green told reporters, pointing to the report’s drill down into metrics and standards as markers of the superintendent’s work.

According to the , the firm has worked with education officials in Colorado, Chicago, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Kim Perron, president of Schoolworks, said in an email that the company would not be providing any comments, and directed questions to RIDE.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

Gov. Daniel McKee’s commitment to community partnerships to improve outcomes for children started during his 12-year tenure as mayor of Cumberland, Rhode Island. Education remained a priority when he became governor in 2021, and when McKee realized that absenteeism had become a significant barrier to achieving the state’s education goals, he sought to create a statewide sense of urgency that matched his own. Last summer, he asked state Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Angelica Infante-Green if her team could create a public, online portal showing every school’s up-to-date absenteeism data.

The result was Rhode Island’s unique Student Attendance Leaderboard. It displays the percentage of chronically absent students in every public school in the state, with data updated every night — something no other state does. Principals began checking the dashboard every morning to see how their school compared — and using its built-in tools to monitor individual students’ attendance and communicate with families. With one click of a button, a principal can send a text message to a parent or caregiver, or have a letter printed to go home in a student’s backpack. With another click, a principal can see a student’s attendance history and find the answers to questions such as: Has she been chronically absent every year since kindergarten? Is this a new pattern of behavior?

The data spurred school leaders to think differently about how they work with students and families. Principal Jackson Reilly at Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence told me that while attendance has always been one of their biggest challenges, “this is the first time it’s truly been a data-driven approach.” In summer 2023, Reilly and his team met with families whose children missed more than 18 days the previous year, asking them to sign an attendance contract. Every administrator is responsible for five to 10 students, making calls, conducting home visits and working with families to overcome transportation hurdles. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, Nathanael Greene had a chronic absenteeism rate of 30%, less than 1 point away from its pre-COVID rate of 29.2. At the height of the pandemic, in 2020-21, it hit 54.2%.

Rhode Island’s approach also involves stakeholders outside of education. McKee recruited 38 of 39 mayors to sign his LEARN365 compact, an education policy blueprint that prioritizes attendance along with higher test scores and increased federal financial aid application rates. McKee believes that as each town and region across the state studies its absenteeism trends, understands where chronically absent students live and attend school, and responds to their challenges, communities will achieve stronger attendance. “What we can do,” says McKee, “is change the culture of a family’s decisionmaking. Schools can’t do that in the same way that mayors and municipal leaders can.”

Hasbro Children’s Hospital has begun showing parents videos on the importance of school attendance when their children are discharged, and business leaders are adding financial resources to the mix. The Partnership for Rhode Island, a nonprofit funded by Bank of America, CVS and other businesses, funded 25 public-service messages for a campaign called AttendanceMattersRI airing on local television and shared through municipal and other websites. Each video features a Rhode Island leader delivering a lighthearted but clear message about the importance of showing up for school every day. Participants include McKee and Infante-Green, as well as congressional representatives, a well-loved sports reporter, a respected pastor and the head of the Rhode Island teachers union. Audio versions play on the radio, and large billboards touting “Attendance Matters” line state highways. 

McKee’s staff reports that the governor checks the state attendance leaderboard multiple times a day — it’s the default website on his computer — and he routinely begins meetings asking if those around the table know what the current chronic absenteeism rates are for schools in their communities. His mantra has become “every home, every day, learning matters” — and taking the fight against chronic absenteeism outside traditional agency boundaries has changed its very nature.

“When [the governor] started saying that this is not just the responsibility of the schools, that changed everything,” says Infante-Green, noting that cross-sector and cross-agency collaboration is rare in state and local government.

In the initiative’s first year, chronic absenteeism dropped from 28.9% to 24.7% and the gap between low-income and more affluent students decreased from 27 to 18 percentage points. And the number of parents who believe chronic absenteeism is a problem is increasing. In early 2023, just 55% of families responding to the state’s annual of public school parents believed that missing at least two days of school a month — the threshold for chronic absenteeism — reduced a student’s chance of graduating high school. By early 2024, the number was 57%. Now, McKee and Infante-Greene are waiting for the results of the state’s 2024 standardized tests to learn whether this increased attendance has translated into higher achievement.

The governor’s willingness to invest political capital to address chronic absenteeism, enlist a range of stakeholders in the work and create a widely publicized statewide attendance scoreboard demonstrates the often-untapped power of state leadership to galvanize school reform. It also highlights the fact that many school issues are best addressed by communities working across traditional agency boundaries — an often underappreciated concept in education policy circles.