Burnt out teachers coddled by their union. Bored, trouble-making students. Crumbling buildings. Clotted bureaucracy, lousy test scores, scant parent involvement. Neglect of minority students. Political interference in educational decisions. It was a withering report on the state of Providence schools.
You may think I’m talking about the Johns Hopkins University study issued last month that painted a bleak portrait of public schools in Rhode Island’s largest city. Think again. The report I’m referring to was done more than a quarter of a century ago, in 1993.
That study was called the Providence Blueprint for Education. It was led by Dr. Ted Eddy, a president of the University of Rhode Island. It was forged by a diverse commission that included educators and Rhode Island’s top business and community leaders. After the report came out, there were rounds of hand-wringing and the cries from the politicians and school hierarchy to take immediate action and fix things.
“This isn’t going to be a case of just presenting our findings and then walking away,” said Eddy, at the time. “We’re going to follow up and hold people accountable.”
That never happened. A member of that probe, Rabbi Leslie Gutterman of Temple Beth-El, said in an interview last week that Eddy did a fine job steering the study. But he acknowledged that nothing ever came of it.
“It seems that the governor and the legislature just shelved it,” Gutterman said.
If the Providence School District was a shelf, it would be groaning under the weight of all the studies, curriculum changes and so-called reforms proposed over many years.
Looking back, 1993 was thick with irony. That was the year Massachusetts –with the state’s top court as a prod—began a public school overhaul that has resulted in the best schools in America. By contrast, a school funding legal challenge by urban districts at that time in Rhode Island took a different route. The Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled that state courts did not have a role in pushing education equity. That was the responsibility, the court said, of the General Assembly.
Now comes another scathing report on schools in the state’s capital. The politicians are at it again. Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, reacted to the latest study, saying “This is total system breakdown. It’s worse than I thought.”
Was the governor living underground during her first term? The federal Department of Justice found almost two years ago that Providence schools were shortchanging English learning students in a district where more than 60 percent of students come from homes where English is not the primary language.
Last year, running for re-election, Raimondo refused to make public the latest round of awful test scores for Providence and other districts. The scores came after the election.
Then there is the silly statement by Rhode Island’s new education commissioner, Angelica Infante-Green, a former New York education bureaucrat who hasn’t been in the Ocean State long enough to sample coffee milk. She told the Boston Globe she wouldn’t send her children to any Providence school.
So here’s a lesson for the new commish. Classical High School, which attracts the top students, was founded before the Civil War. It’s been a fulcrum of upward mobility for generations of hard-working students from modest backgrounds. A century ago, a poor Italian-American son of immigrants graduated from Classical. He got into Brown University but never enrolled; he couldn’t afford the tuition. Later, John Pastore would become the first Italian-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
The roster of prominent Classical graduates is too long to list. It includes top business, medical and political leaders well as luminaries in many fields. To name a few, the writer John Barry, humorist S. J. Perelman, scholar Stanley Fish, writer Joe Nocera and New York Times cultural critic A.O. Scott. The last two Providence mayors, Angel Taveras and Jorge Elorza, were educated at Classical. As was Cranston Mayor Alan Fung.
Classical’s student body is 76 percent minority. It was rated the best high school in Rhode Island by U.S. News and World Report this year. Classical regularly sends students to the best colleges in America, including many to Brown.
Our new education commissioner should be proud of that, hoping that one day her children might even qualify for Classical.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.
