The best thing about Rhode Island’s rigorous new diploma system is its child-friendly spirit. Not that everyone feels that spirit. A newly organized group of parents sees the system becoming outright oppressive to kids, but more on those parents in a moment.

In the past, complaisant high schools had gotten in the habit of handing diplomas to any kid who had stuck around for four years. Business and higher education complained long and loudly about the woeful skills of entry-level workers and students. Eventually every state started creating systems to ensure that diplomas actually guarantee that the graduate has at least a certain level of skills. Twenty-six states now use “high-stakes” exit exams that students must pass to receive a diploma. Unfortunately, those states withhold diplomas from poor test takers as well as real slackers. Rhode Island, on the other hand, uses a mix of different ways of measuring kids’ skills, to create more than one pathway to earning a meaningful diploma.

The problem with beefing up the value of a high school diploma is balancing accountability — objective proof of a kid’s competence — against demoralizing students and schools. States with “high-stakes” tests saw their dropout rates go up. More kids left school in earlier grades, and teachers felt so driven by the need to produce test results they felt forced to squeeze all joy of learning out the curriculum. Diploma systems are a mess, and no state has the balance exactly right. The national dropout rate is holding at about 30 percent.

Rhode Island decided to take a three-pronged approach that limits the amount that state tests can count toward graduation so poor test-takers need not despair. The system relies on the student’s course work, but most importantly on her demonstrations of proficiency, which is to say her exhibition of a big project, which proves to a group of local judges that she can apply her academic skills to a real-world problem. Educators and parents protested when the exhibition requirement took hold, but these projects are now taken for granted, in most places.

Recently a hue and cry rose up against the Regents’ decision to increase how much state tests count toward graduation — from 10 percent to one-third. To some parents — and to me — 10 percent seemed so scant that the schools surely have a hard time getting the kids to take the tests seriously.

But the level of trust in Rhode Island’s educational bureaucracy is now so low that a large group of parents from across several districts have gathered to fight the change. I spoke with several of them, and they are furious. They recited the problems of high-stakes testing and are sure that the Regents’ push from 10 percent to 33 percent will not stop until it reaches 100 percent. They believe the state will reduce learning to a tedium that produces positive statistics, but not well-educated, enthused students.

In short, they have no faith that the Regents’ changes reflect anything like a supportive, helpful, child-friendly spirit.

So I sat down with the chairman of the Board of Regents, former Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Robert Flanders, to hear the intentions of the Regents from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

He said, “It’s not our intention to go to 100 percent high-stakes testing. We do think that statewide testing should be a part of the analysis, but not the exclusive analysis.” He adds that exit-exam states have “gone overboard. We are not going down that road.”

He sighed with some frustration, insisting that the Regents had been clear about their good intentions in the many public hearings held on the subject. In fact, after those hearings, the Regents decided to stick to their guns and raise the weight of the tests, but to lower the passing rate from “proficient” — a rigorous standard — to “partially proficient.” In the end, the change seems like a wash.

Still, Flanders notes, “There’s a tremendous fear that children are not going to pass muster and be tossed onto the garbage heap of society. No. We want the kids and schools to buckle down to the work to be partially proficient at a 10th-grade level. Even so, we consciously left wriggle-room for the districts to deal with close cases where judgment calls need to be made. There’s a whole special-education population whom we don’t want to saddle with low expectations, but who need accommodations and alternatives. And then there are children who had a bad day or who just don’t test well. We didn’t want a hard tripwire that cuts people off at the knees. We want it to be a hurdle, but not a hit or miss.”

“Wriggle-room” is when a school gives diplomas to a few kids who failed the tests, but who otherwise did good work. But the state and public need to know when a school is handing out A’s and B’s and glowing reports on student exhibitions, but the kids are bombing the tests. That school is committing feel-good malpractice.

Flanders says, “We discovered, on the first go-round with the math test, that at least half of the schools had not aligned their curricula to the standards. We hope that the new requirements will spur laggard districts to get their act together. And if they don’t, there ought to be more choice for students and parents so they can go elsewhere when their districts aren’t performing. The commissioner and all of us are reluctant to take drastic steps. But after years and years of failure, it’s time to look at more options, like giving parents more choice.”

Flanders is all for busting schools out of their academic doldrums when they’re not serving the kids.

He says, “Now kids are coming into high school unable to read. We need to get in early and have the patience to work with them, longer in some cases. Unfortunately, RIDE and the state don’t have the horsepower to bring in remedial SWAT teams. Districts will have to do it. Districts will have to go through the same wrenching redeployment [of resources and money] process that the state is going through. They need to put student performance on the priority list and put other things below. Because a diploma ought to mean something.”

From the beginning, the commissioner, RIDE and the Regents have been navigating the shoals between gotcha accountability and overly lax accommodations. This messy, thankless work is worth it. Rhode Island’s proficiency-based diploma system is mercifully sensitive to a broad range of kids, personalities and abilities. And the outgoing commissioner, Peter McWalters, deserves particular praise as the system’s principal architect and champion.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.