McKee won’t stay silent on education reform
While many saw flat progress in student achievement on the latest round of Rhode Island Common Assessment System scores, Lt. Gov. Daniel McKee had a notably different reaction.
A pioneer of the mayoral academy movement, the former Cumberland mayor saw validation for his personal mission to create a broader role for municipal leaders in the sphere of education. He saw it in the top-tier test scores for Cumberland public schools, and he saw it in the comparative rankings for RISE Prep Mayoral Academy in Woonsocket, which finished tops in the state in English Language Arts, while the city’s public school district finished near the bottom.
“It should send a signal to everyone,” McKee says. “Our kids can learn at a certain level. We just have to figure out how to do it.”
McKee is proud to take some credit for the gains the public school district has made in Cumberland, as well as those of the charter schools and mayoral academies he first championed as the town’s mayor, a position he held from 20002012. During his time at Town Hall, McKee invented the state’s first municipal Office of Children, Youth and Learning, a town-funded learning program, autonomous from the public school district, that helped change school culture and shore up lagging performance in public schools.
Education reform is still one of McKee’s most passionate concerns, but as lieutenant governor he has limited authority to steer policy. In the coming weeks, however, McKee aims to talk up a few ideas he’s convinced can foster further gains in public school achievement – while hoping the Rhode Island Department of Education puts them into action.
At the top of his list is something McKee calls a “school performance card,” a tool of sorts for
“Our kids can learn at a certain level. We just have TO FIGURE OUT how to do it.” —Lt. Gov. Daniel McKee
providing parents with a complete and “honest” picture of how their children are performing in school.
The way public education works, a traditional report card is generally the leading instrument that parents have for evaluating their children’s performance in English, math and other critical subjects.
But McKee says it’s not enough.
Moreover, a mere report card, he says, is invariably misleading. In and of itself, a traditional report card supplies parents with a snapshot of their child’s performance without context. And grades are often weighted for attitude, behavior, effort and other factors.
Sometimes, individual grades are calculated on a bell curve that’s keyed to the relative performance of a group of students whose results are measured on one test or another. This makes it possible, McKee says, for a low-performing school where report cards are built on a bell curve, to have the highest-performing students producing test results on par with the lowest-performing students in another school.
What’s needed, he argues, is a compulsory system in which schools are required to release individual report cards in tandem with the school’s rank against performance expectations on state tests, like RICAS.
In order to work, McKee says the delivery of such information must be done at least partly in public, and parental participation must be 100 percent, even if it means providing the information to parents electronically and having them return some type of acknowledgment that they’ve received it.
The idea of school performance cards is to provide parents with the tools they need to make an informed judgment about their children’s academic performance and, theoretically, provide them with an incentive to become more involved catalysts for positive change in the school system.
“It’s not meant to be a punitive activity,” McKee says. “It’s meant to be a constructive strategy.”
Despite the great disparities in school-to-school performance pointed up by RICAS and other standardized tests, McKee says the overwhelming majority of parents are confident that their children are doing work at or above their grade level in reading and math – and most of them are plain wrong.
Citing research by the Washington, D.C.-based HCM Strategists, an educational consulting group, McKee says that 90 percent of all parents, regardless of ethnic, income or educational demographics, believe their children are performing at grade level, if not better. Nationally, though, the data suggests that’s the case for 40 percent or less of fourth graders on math and reading skills.
The number of parents who believe their children’s schools are doing a good job is also inordinately high, according to McKee – about 84 percent.
HCM Strategists found that when parents were given three sets of data – a B in math for example, alongside the state standard, and the school’s comparative ranking on state tests, more than a third changed their minds about their child’s overall performance.
Five states – Massachusetts, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana – have embraced some form of school performance cards that are designed to give parents a more complete perspective on their child’s progress – and McKee thinks Rhode Island should, too.
“We have to be more honest with the families,” he says.
McKee says he’ll be promoting the concept of school performance cards in guest editorials offered to the media and briefings with other communities who’ve invited him to talk about some of the reforms he led as mayor of Cumberland in response to poor student performance. Officials in North Providence, Coventry and Middletown have expressed an interest, McKee says, in modeling Cumberland’s reform-minded behavior, including the OCYL.
Funded through the municipal budget, the OCYL ran bona fide classes out of the town library for any student who sought help in academic subjects. McKee says those platforms were far superior than what often passes for after-school enrichment programs.
Under McKee’s leadership, the town also adopted a “declaration of education” – a kind of affirmative statement of the town’s commitment to providing children with excellent schooling. McKee also led the charge for the creation of mayoral academies, a type of charter school with a mayor or town manager serving as head of the governing body. The network of Blackstone Valley Prep schools, RISE Prep in Woonsocket and others owe a debt of lineage to McKee’s efforts.
McKee says there was plenty of resistance from educators who looked upon Town Hall’s independent investment in education as an unnecessary incursion into an area that’s usually reserved for academic professionals. And now, as then, he expects similar blowback from critics who will say there’s already enough information in the public domain about school performance. He disagrees.
“It’s not an accident that Cumberland is doing so well – it had a lot to do with the work I did through the municipal office of education,” says McKee. “But we have not yet scratched the surface of where we could go.”