Eva-Marie Mancuso, chair of Rhode Island’s state education board, passionately defends the status quo.
Over the protests of parents, students, and teachers, Mancuso supports high-stakes testing. Despite overwhelming evidence from researchers that evaluating teachers by test scores is inaccurate, unstable, and demoralizing, Mancuso wants more. Despite the protests of student leaders across the state, Mancuso insists that standardized tests–the NECAP–should be a graduation requirement.
A recent poll of teachers found that 85% oppose a new contract for the state superintendent Debirah Gist. Mancuso doesn’t care. Gist is a member of Jeb Bush’s hard rightwing Chiefs for Change, which includes the most conservative, test-loving, privatizing superintendents in the nation.
Gist was the superintendent who wanted to fire every teacher and staff member at Central Falls High School in 2010 because test scores were low. No teacher or staff member had been evaluated.
Mancuso is prepared to stand and fight for the status quo.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Eva Mancuso is spouting the “standard” corporate dogma. For anyone who objectively looks at the NECAP (RI’s current state assessment, soon to be switched over to the PARCC), it was clearly not designed for high-stakes decisions about individual students, and certainly not for special needs students and English language learners. As a retired teacher from the RI School for the Deaf (designated by Commissioner Gist and the RI Dept. of Ed. as a Persistently Lowest Achieving School) and a member of the Coalition to Defend Public Education, Providence, RI, I urge you to sign our petition, and please read the comments!
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/board-of-education-dump
The newly consolidated RI Board of Education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) with Eva Mancuso at the head will discuss the renewal of Deborah Gist’s contract this Thursday, May 23. The outcome will be significant, one way or the other.
Who is supplying his offshore account?
Just as a point of clarification: the superintendent of Central Falls High School in 2010 was Frances Gallo. Gist was the education commissioner who backed her up when she fired the whole staff. (I believe most or all of the teachers all got their jobs back eventually; it was a hardball anti-negotiating tactic.)
Jim,
Gist won national acclaim for supporting Gallo.
And, again as I asked this a few weeks ago, exactly how are things going at Central Falls High School?
Has it become one of the top schools in Rhode Island under the tutelage of Ms. Gallo and Ms. Gist?
I teach in a district adjacent to Central Falls. CFHS has always been a school with excellent teachers trying their best to help an economically underpriviledged ELL population of students to do their best. What Gist and Gallo did to those educators and their students is a travesty that will never be forgotten or forgiven in Rhode Island.
CFHS’s test scores are always at or near the bottom of NECAP rankings. Most of the kids there are poor, many miss a great deal of school travelling back and forth between Rhode Island and other places such as Puerto Rico and Columbia, and speak English as a second language.
The NECAP school rankings in RI mirror socio-economic rank almost perfectly, with Central Falls, the two Pawtucket high schools and the three non-magnet Providence high schools always at the bottom. The wealthy communities of Barrington and East Greenwich, and the Providence magnet school Classical–and the newspapers never bother to explain that Classical is a selective magnet school–are always at the top. To be a good teacher in RI, according to the powers that be, is to be hired by a wealthy district.
I’m not sure how CFHS is doing. I hope students and teachers there are recovering from the damage inflicted on them in the name of politics.
And thanks Jim Morgan for your thoughtful response.
Thank you for this explanation. I teach in one of those 3 “non magnet” schools in Providence. Thank you for such a supportive post. Morale is an all time low. It’s great to know others know what is happening!
Do the wealthy districts in Rhode Island hire teachers from the less wealthy districts? If they do, is it random?
@teachingeconomist: Sometimes maybe, not typically. I’m sure the wealthier districts have a much wider application pool to hire from.
Thanks edharris, for asking the relevant question (to which, I’m sure, you already knew the answer).
Yes, sadly, I knew the answer.
Maybe Jay Mathews can report on Central Falls.
Is there another way to avoid high stakes testing? Is there a way to at least get an opt-out option on a ballot and work from there?
When are people who defend this nonsense going to realize that the game is up. It is the beginning of the end for the testing movement. People have had enough.