Jenna Bard, a teacher at Northern Lincoln Elementary School, asks a question of Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist on Friday during a visit to the school. Gist wants to make it more difficult to become a teacher in Rhode Island.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

It’s going to get harder to become a teacher in Rhode Island.

Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who has made teacher quality the cornerstone of her three-month-old administration, is raising the score that aspiring teachers must achieve on a basic skills test required for admission to all of the state’s teacher training programs.

Currently, Rhode Island’s “cut score” ranks among the lowest in the nation, alongside Mississippi and Guam. Gist wants to raise it to the highest.

“Teacher quality is the single most important factor for student success in school,” Gist said. “This is a first step in raising our expectations across the board for our educators and our system.”

Gist says she intends to transform “the entire career span of a teacher,” including who is allowed to train to become a teacher, the rigor of the programs, mentoring of new teachers, support and training for veteran teachers, and the reward of higher pay for high performance.

“We need to look at how we improve at every point along the span,” Gist said. “Looking at teacher cut scores before they ever get accepted to a preparation program is a way to safeguard the early gate.”

Gist and her staff reviewed other states’ cut scores and found Virginia’s to be the highest in reading, math and writing. Gist set Rhode Island’s score one point higher than Virginia’s in each subject, saying she wants to make Rhode Island’s education system the envy of the nation.

“I have the utmost confidence that Rhode Island’s future teachers are capable of this kind of performance,” she said.

The colleges and universities that train new teachers have balked at raising the scores that high. Instead, they are proposing they raise the scores by a few points for next September, and phase in additional increases over time.

“It will disenfranchise too many students,” said Roger G. Eldridge Jr., dean of the School of Education at Rhode Island College, who estimates that 85 percent of RIC’s education students would be unable to reach the higher score and would therefore be barred from the program if it were required next year.

RIC has 1,500 to 1,800 students in various education programs and graduates 350 to 400 new teachers each year, said Eldridge. The majority of Rhode Island’s 12,000 public school teachers received their degree from RIC.

“If we’re looking at quality teaching, this [the basic skills test] has no bearing on whether someone will be a good teacher,” Eldridge said. “It’s the performance of a teacher in the classroom, and that’s hard to test for. Student teaching and mentoring are the areas we should be looking at in terms of improving teacher quality.”

But Gist and the National Council on Teacher Quality say standards must be raised to ensure a highly skilled and effective teaching force. The nonprofit council also supports raising cut scores for teacher exams.

Several of the highest achieving countries, including Finland, South Korea and Singapore, set high bars for who gets into teaching programs and then who makes it into a classroom, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the organization.

“Research shows that as far as school-based factors go, teacher quality is the most important variable,” Jacobs said. Communication skills, compassion and sensitivity are equally important and cannot be quantified as easily as basic literacy and math skills, she said.

“But we have to separate the state role and the district role,” she said. “The state’s role is to license teachers and they have to base that on what is measurable — content knowledge and skill. It’s then up to the district to determine if they want to hire the person and they will look at a lot of factors that you can’t test for to make that decision.”

Gist is proposing raising the score of the Praxis I exam, also called the PPST or the pre-professional skills test, from 170 in reading, math and writing to 179 in each subject.

ETS, the company that develops the test, says it is difficult to relate the scores to grade level competency.

Instead, teacher training programs describe the scores by how many people fail the test. With cut scores set at 170, about 30 percent of the students in Rhode Island who take the test fail. When the scores are raised to 179, 54 percent of test takers are expected to fail, Eldridge said.

If a student’s combined SAT score is 1,100 or higher in math and English, they are exempt from taking the Praxis I exam.

Several colleges have proposed raising the cut score to 174 next year, and then phasing in increases over the next few years to reach 179, said Steven J. Maurano, acting higher education commissioner. Gist said Tuesday she would be willing to discuss this concept.Eldridge estimates that about 80 percent of RIC’s students would reach the 174 score.

Maurano met Monday with the colleges and universities that train teachers: Brown, Johnson & Wales, Providence College, RIC, Rhode Island School of Design, Roger Williams University, Salve Regina University and the University of Rhode Island (The national New Teacher Project also provides training in Rhode Island to about 25 mid-career professionals a year who want to become teachers.)

“Everybody understands what Commissioner Gist wants to do and I think her goals are laudable,” Maurano said. “We absolutely want to work with her to do whatever we can to improve the quality of teachers in Rhode Island Schools. The concern that the institutions have is that if you raise the score for the Praxis I too high in one fell swoop, we will deny a significant number of students the opportunity to get into teacher prep programs.”

David Byrd, director of the School of Education at URI, estimates the university would lose 30 to 60 percent of its education students next year if the cut score were set at 179.

URI trains about 1,000 students in 26 education programs each year, graduating about 250, Byrd said, and the university already requires higher Praxis I scores than the state requirement: 172 in reading, 171 in math, 171 in writing.

“I would be comfortable with raising the scores to a range of 172 to 176,” said Byrd. “We are trying to set a level that does give the assurance that the students come in with a tool kit. But eliminating people when the test does not seem to predict good teaching seems unfair to the individual.”The six private colleges graduated 1,587 education students in 2008-2009, including master’s and doctoral students, said Daniel P. Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities of Rhode Island, about 15 to 20 percent of whom identify themselves as Rhode Islanders likely to try to get jobs in the state. Egan said the private institutions estimate that 20 percent of their students would be unable to pass the test with a score of 179.

Teacher training programs argue that there are several other safeguards before a student graduates, including requiring that students pass a series of exit exams in specific subjects toward the end of their program, called Praxis II, and perform student teaching for a semester.

Rhode Island requires high cut scores for these exit exams and they are a better indicator of the kind of educator a new teacher will become, say Byrd and Eldridge.

Education officials say they are also concerned that raising the Praxis I scores will eliminate minority teachers, despite the fact that Gist has said she wants a more diverse teaching force.

“We understand that the students most likely to get shut out are minority,” Maurano said.

Gist said the department will work with minority students as well as aspiring teachers with learning disabilities to ensure that does not happen, without lowering standards across the board.

“We’ve got to recruit high quality people of color into the teaching profession,” Gist said.

Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, said teacher unions do not necessarily oppose tougher requirements to enter training programs, but they question what data the changes are based on.

“I understand the Department of Education is trying to send a message with this particular move,” Walsh said, “but the best way to improve teacher quality is to restore the funds [$5.7 million] for professional development that were cut from the budget.”Sample questions

Here are sample test questions from the Praxis Pre-Professional Skills Test. The answers appear below the questions.

Reading

“Lyndon Johnson’s father once told him that he did not belong in politics unless he could walk into a roomful of people and tell immediately who was for him and who was against him. In fact, even the shrewd Johnson had not quite such occult power, but his liking for this story tells us something useful about him: He set much store by instinct. . . . ”

Which of the following words, if substituted for the word “occult,” would introduce the LEAST change in the meaning of the sentence:

legendary

subtle

invisible

persuasive

supernatural

Answer: The “occult” power described in the first sentence is clearly not a power that people ordinarily have. It could, therefore, best be described as “supernatural.”

Mathematics

If P [divided by] 5 = Q, then P [divided by] 10 =

10Q

2Q

Q [divided by] 2

Q [divided by] 10

Q [divided by] 20

Answer: There are several ways to solve this problem, but the answer is Q [divided by] 2.

Writing/Sentence Correction

In the following sentence some part of the sentence or the entire sentence is italicized. Beneath each sentence you will find five ways of writing the italicized part. The first of these repeats the original, but the other four are different. If you think the original sentence is better than any of the suggested changes, you should choose the first answer choice; otherwise you should select the best answer from one of the other choices.

“Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out passionately for the poor of all races.”

spoke out passionately

spoke out passionate

did spoke out passionately

has spoke out passionately

had spoken out passionate

Answer: This sentence presents no problem of structure or logic. The verb tense is correct and the use of the adverb “passionately” is also correct in this context. . . . thus, the best answer is the first option.