Volunteers at St. Teresa Church in Providence hand out more than a thousand backpacks Saturday as part of the Back to School celebration. Volunteer Eddy Lantigua assists with the distribution.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE — Although Providence continues to be a low-performing school district, Peter McWalters, state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, is confident that the new superintendent has the management skills needed to turn around the school system.

“This man is a manager,” McWalters said of Supt. Tom Brady, who arrived last month. “He is going to address the human relations department. He is going to get books into the classrooms. He’s going to hire strong leaders.”

McWalters expressed “great hope” that all of the Providence players –– the City Council, the School Department and Mayor David N. Ciclline — are on the same page.

To avoid last year’s standoff, McWalters said, he met personally with the council’s Finance Committee this summer and explained why certain top school positions are crucial to boosting student achievement. Last year, the council delayed passing the school budget and refused to hire several administrators in what became part of a lingering feud between them and then-Supt. Donnie Evans.

This summer, the council not only passed the school budget without a fight, but also approved several new school positions and Brady has hinted that he will return with additional requests to beef up the central office, which a recent audit said was understaffed.

In a news conference at the State House yesterday, Governor Carcieri released the latest school rankings, which show whether schools are hitting academic targets or failing to make sufficient progress. The rankings are required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

In Providence, 16 schools hit all of their targets, down from 17 last year. According to McWalters, the fact that Providence lost little ground is significant because the state raised the achievement requirements this year. Under No Child Left Behind, schools have until 2014 to bring all students to 100 percent proficiency on the state assessments. Rhode Island raises the bar every three years.

Yet, the reason why schools have improved has little to do with academic bells and whistles. In Providence, successful elementary schools have focused on the same things: teachers are analyzing test data, sharing what works best in the classroom and zeroing in on the specific needs of each child.

“We were very focused at looking at the data,” said Nathanael Greene Middle School Principal Nicole Thomas. “Teachers homed in on areas of weakness. They looked at the state and interim tests and figured out which grade-level expectations students had the most problems with.”

The district also took advantage of help from the state in the form of middle-school intervention experts, consultants who helped the schools look at the data and tweak instruction to address weaknesses in the curriculum.

Thomas also carved out time every week for teachers to share their most effective teaching practices. And Thomas didn’t tap her best teachers; she asked every teacher to present their teaching strategies before their peers.

Dorothy Smith, principal of Laurel Hill Elementary School, said that the district has “gotten a lot smarter.” At Laurel Hill, teachers meet by grade level and look at student work.

“Teachers can share resources and ideas,” Smith said. “They can say, ‘I have someone struggling with phonemic awareness.’ ”

Laurel Hill also benefited from math and reading specialists who helped teachers make sense of the data and align the instruction to address gaps in knowledge.

Smith praised Evans for his efforts to make the schools safe, friendly and more welcoming to parents. She also credited Evans with creating a summer institute that offers teacher training in one intensive block rather than piecemeal throughout the school year.

Still, more than three-fourths of the district’s 47 schools are failing to meet all of their targets.

Under NCLB, schools must meet as many as 37 targets, which include academic goals as well as test participation rates, and, in the case of high schools, graduation rates. Not only must the school as a whole meet those goals, but smaller subgroups (black students, Asians, Hispanics, low-income students and others) must hit their marks.

A school could miss one target –– special education, for example –– and still be classified as not making adequate yearly progress. Six schools, E{+3} Academy, Flynn Elementary School, Perry Middle School, Roger Williams Middle School, Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy and Cooley Health & Science Technology Academy, missed making adequate yearly progress by one target.

The bad news is that Providence as a district continues to be classified in need of corrective action, which means that a majority of schools remain chronically under-performing. In fact, the district is in its seventh year of corrective action, which makes the district eligible for a variety of interventions, including a takeover by the state. (Nine other districts, including a couple of “urban ring” districts like Cranston and North Providence, are in so-called intervention status).

But McWalters made it clear that the state Department of Education has neither the inclination, nor the capacity to take over the district’s struggling schools.

“The state’s role is to position the district to do what it does,” he said. “The real issue is: Can the state build leadership capacity at the district level? Every time we’ve identified issues in Providence, they’ve moved those indicators. Once they get leadership at the school level, then they can move things.”

Although a number of elementary schools are making dramatic progress, Vartan Gregorian Elementary School is now classified as making insufficient progress, which means that it hasn’t hit all of its targets.

It was only six years ago that Gregorian was hailed as an urban success story by Carcieri and others, who held their annual school rankings news conference at the Fox Point school. In 2002, Vartan Gregorian was the only school in the state to reach every one of its English and math targets for two consecutive years.

So what happened?

According to the test data, Gregorian missed four academic targets: three subgroups — Hispanic students, special education students and low-income students — in English language arts, and the entire school population missed its target.

Brady said there are no silver bullets that will magically turn around a low-performing district, just as is there is no one person who can make that kind of transformation happen.

“Let’s look at the practical things,” he said. “Professional development for teachers, putting additional textbooks in key areas and getting teachers to buy into a new curriculum. Maybe the district has been failing for seven years. Now we are looking at the beginning of a solid road forward.”

lborg@projo.com