Rhode Island is trying a new approach to ensure that a high school diploma means something.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, October 31, 2004

BY LINDA BORG
Journal Staff Writer

Rhode Island is conducting a daring experiment in public education unlike any other in the nation. If it is successful, the traditional comprehensive high school, organized around 50-minute periods and a system of isolated departments, will be a thing of the past.

Beginning with this freshmen class, students will no longer be able to graduate from high school by punching the clock -- sitting through four years of classes and accumulating so many Carnegie units, or credits.

Instead, seniors must prove that they have mastered certain skills or competencies. Some will put together a portfolio of their best work: essays, projects and artwork. Others will complete a senior project that involves work experience and culminates in a public presentation. Still others will demonstrate their skills through end-of-course exams or problem-solving exercises performed in class.

This year, high schools must choose two out of four types of assessment to measure student proficiency. They might choose a portfolio and a senior project or end-of-course exams and a Certificate of Initial Mastery. (The certificate is a multiyear project that incorporates portfolios, testing and senior projects.) Then the schools must make sure that all their students have ample opportunity -- through internships, research projects or classroom assessments -- to prove their mastery in English, math, science, social studies, the arts and technology.

Rhode Island is clearly bucking the national trend. While about half of all states, including Massachusetts, require high school students to pass an exit exam to graduate, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters and the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education have decided to take the road less traveled. They think it is unreasonable and unfair to judge a student's entire career on the basis of one test -- a single moment in time.

Instead, they want students to show that they can solve problems and communicate effectively through a multitude of different measures.

"Rhode Island decided not to go to high-stakes testing because it doesn't measure whether kids have the skills they need to succeed in college or beyond," McWalters said. "You don't test a piano player by asking her to take a test. You test a piano player by asking her to perform a recital."

Make no mistake about it. This is a high-stakes system, McWalters said. If a student doesn't show that he has mastered certain skills, he won't graduate.

"Right now, everyone gets the same diploma but it doesn't always mean the same thing," said Colleen Callahan, who led the regents' high school reform effort. "Some kids take the most rigorous course available. Some don't have access to those courses. And some don't take them because they're either not ready or not interested."

MOST EXPERTS agree that the typical comprehensive high school is broken. As an institution, it looks the same as it did 100 years ago, when most Americans lived on farms.

And it has been stubbornly resistant to change. Students are expected to move in lockstep through a prescribed series of courses. Each department is an island, apart from the whole. Teachers of English rarely discuss curriculum with their colleagues in history or science.

"American education stops being good in fourth grade," McWalters said. "By 10th grade, American students lag far behind their international peers. The current education system only serves the top students."

In this factory-like setting, many students quickly become disenchanted. They act out and drop out in record numbers. According to 2001 statistics, 32 percent of freshmen nationwide who began high school did not complete it within four years.

And of the students who do graduate, many are not prepared for college-level work. Thirty percent of the freshmen enrolled in the Community College of Rhode Island in 2001 did not return the following year, according to a study by Jack Warner, the commissioner of higher education. And nearly 60 percent of that freshman class was forced to take two or more remedial courses.

"Every high school graduate should be able to write a persuasive essay," McWalters said. "Right now, that's not something we measure."

TO MAKE SURE that all students are taking courses that prepare them for college or the workplace, districts must now eliminate courses of study that are non-college preparatory. That means no more "shop" math. It means that all students will be taught geometry and algebra II.

The state Department of Education has also raised the number of Carnegie units needed to graduate from 16.5 to 20 credits. How those units are divvied up is left to the individual districts.

The department is discussing the skills needed to graduate and how those skills will be measured both inside and outside the classroom.

With $1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three networks of local experts are developing models that other schools can use to create portfolios of student work, common assessments and exhibitions.

"If this is going to work, it's not because we broke the teachers," McWalters said. "Our strategy is to go into the field and ask teachers to show us your best work, then invite other districts to own it."

McWalters acknowledges that this is hard work. It challenges traditional departmental fiefdoms and forces departments to collaborate with one another. It requires teachers to be mentors as well as instructors. And it demands that students be active rather than passive learners.

CONTRACT negotiations have already delayed the implementation of some of these reforms. East Greenwich decided to postpone the introduction of a senior project until the 2005-06 school year. Warwick won't launch several of its high school reforms until the teacher contract is settled. And South Kingstown will put off creating student advisories until a new labor agreement is reached.

"For districts that have not begun to engage in this work," Callahan said, "this will hit them like a ton of bricks."

The biggest challenges are making sure that these measures of proficiency are academically rigorous and that they are consistently tough from one district to another.

"How do you move to an approach that recognizes individual achievement while still having a common standard?" said Jack Jennings, director of the Center for Education Policy, in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan advocacy group for public schools. "A student may shine with personal characteristics but he may not be able to read or write."

Jennings said schools will have to make sure that each student knows certain tenets of knowledge: "It can't just be, 'Johnny is a nice kid.' "

According to McWalters, two tests -- the statewide assessments in English and math as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- will help the state measure whether districts are teaching students how to read and write.

As a further quality check, the department might send teams of teachers from other districts into a high school to verify that their senior projects meet high academic standards.

According to Elliot Krieger, the Education Department's spokesman, this aspect of high school reform is very much a work in progress.

Several questions remain unanswered: Must a student demonstrate mastery in all six subject areas to graduate? Does proficiency mean meeting the standard on the state assessments? What happens if a student challenges his "grade" on a final exhibition or some other subjective measure of performance?

McWalters acknowledges that Rhode Island is going where no state has gone before. He said this is an experiment whose results will take years to assess. But McWalters did say that keeping a student from getting his diploma because he did poorly on one test isn't right.

"The herd mentality is testing and more testing," said Jennings. "It's wonderful that you're trying something different."

Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a national education research organization in Washington, D.C., said Rhode Island's approach is consistent with many of the big ideas driving high school reform: that students must be more involved in their learning and that they should learn real-life skills that will help them succeed in the workplace.

"I think there is more than one way to measure student achievement," Cohen said. "This is a time when we ought to be encouraging states to try different approaches."