Mayor Smiley: It will take at least a year for Providence to be ready to run schools again
PROVIDENCE − Mayor Brett Smiley says the city would need a year to prepare before it resumed running its own schools even if the state Department of Education threw him the keys today.
Speaking Wednesday morning on WPRO radio, Smiley said the state’s five-year-old takeover of the city’s failing school system could not simply revert to school department control without a planned transition period.
“If the governor called me into his office today and said it’s time, I’d say, ‘Great, next summer. We need a year.’”
The state took over running the city school system in 2019 after a damning report by a team of educators from Johns Hopkins University that found the Providence school system one of the worst performing in the country.
What kind of difference has the state takeover made?
State education officials say there have been tangible improvements since, such as new schools, more teachers and curriculum programs. But the jury remains out on what impact, if any, the state’s intervention has had on boosting learning.
Standardized test scores remain abysmal, and Smiley said “it is very difficult to untangle how much of the test score problem is COVID [related] and how much of it is the takeover has not worked. And so that's a really difficult thing to try to sort out.”
How has the state measured success?
To help answer that question, a team of consultants from Massachusetts-based School Works earlier this month began interviewing state, city and school officials about what learning improvements, if any, have happened since the takeover and what should happen next.
Should the state continue overseeing the education of some 19,400 students in 37 schools or return that responsibility to Providence?
Their report is due in August.
In the meantime, Smiley on Tuesday announced the city was progressing with developing its own transitional plan for when the day arrives for the city to resume management of its schools.
Last October he appointed 14 city leaders to a group he called the Return to Local Control Cabinet.
The cabinet selected eight educational metrics as benchmarks to gauge learning improvement. Most pertained to students meeting or exceeding math and English expectations and increasing school attendance and graduation rates.
As part of that plan, the city is also launching a citywide community survey for families, educators, students and advocates to share their thoughts about the schools returning to city management.
The results of that survey will be shared at the end of the year at a public meeting and incorporated into the city's school transition plan by next April.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Mayor says Providence needs a year to prepare to run schools again
