Rhode Island High School Diploma System: Lessons Learned from Implementation

A Forum — March 10, 2006

Background: Reinventing the Culture of High School

Over the past decade, Rhode Island has emerged as a national leader in high school redesign and reform. Building on the findings from National Association of Secondary School Principals’ (NASSP) landmark 1996 report, Breaking Ranks: Changing an American Institution, Rhode Island is creating more personalized learning environments and raising expectations for all students, to ensure all students have the opportunity to be successful in and beyond high school.

As part of this effort, the state adopted the Rhode Island High School Diploma System in 2003 based on regulations that require high school graduates to demonstrate proficiency in standard-based content and applied learning skills through at least two performance assessments. Students can demonstrate applied learning through portfolios, exhibition/capstone, Certificate of Initial Mastery, or end-of-course assessments. Students still must take a state exam that is considered in graduation decisions, but the exam counts for no more than 10% in the process used to calculate graduation eligibility.  

This forum provided highlights of how the Rhode Island Diploma System is being implemented as part of the state’s broader effort to reinvent the culture of high school so that all students who graduate have a diploma that reflects knowledge of 21st Century skills.

The Road to Reform: Development and Implementation

Joe DiMartino, President of the Center for Secondary School Redesign, Inc., began by providing some context for how conversations about high school reform evolved in Rhode Island. A series of statewide summits brought together students, teachers, principals, community leaders and other stakeholders. These Summits resulted in a number of findings, including that:

• Rhode Island high school graduates lack the literacy skills necessary for post-secondary success.
• A Rhode Island high school diploma has been steadily devalued by rewarding seat time, not skills.
• Rhode Island high schools are not organized to provide students with the experiences and support appropriate for their educational needs.

The state Board of Regents held a series of public hearings over two years that looked at the implications of these findings and wrote new high school regulations that took effect January 1, 2003. Rhode Island obtained a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the following year to help develop graduation by proficiency, one area of the new high school regulations. The new high school regulations, DiMartino explained, require every high school student not reading at grade level to have a personal literacy plan; encourage greater personalization in schools by ensuring students have at least one adult advocate; and require all high school students to demonstrate proficiency of core content mastery and applied learning skills through two performance assessment measures. These include portfolios, exhibition/capstone, Certificate of Initial Mastery, or end-of-course exams. Unlike traditional accountability exams that measure students’ performance on a particular test, DiMartino said that these performance measures are intended to improve instruction in the classroom.

Andrea Castañeda, who is now a Development Officer with Providence Public Schools, worked with the Rhode Island Department of Education during the initial implementation of the regulations.Castañeda said that in Rhode Island, like nearly everywhere else in the country,  found that few principals or teachers actually read the state regulations. In addition to providing guidance on the implementation of the regulations, the state department of education realized it needed to provide living examples of what comprehensive high school reform looked liked in the classroom. To that end, pilot sites were identified so that principals and teachers could learn from schools that have had success implementing the new regulations.

Implications for the Classroom

Joe Maruszczak, Principal of Ponaganset High School, spoke about his regional high school in northwest Rhode Island becoming a pilot site and state leader in implementing performance assessments. The effort began in 2001 as the school responded to new accreditation standards from the New England Association of Schools & Colleges, the region’s major accreditation agency. These standards, he noted, were similar to recommendations found in the Breaking Ranks report. His school improvement team had conversations about strategies to implement an effective student-centered approach to applied learning and agreed on an electronic portfolio system that would capture student work in different academic areas.

Improving student personalization and teacher collaboration

Maruszczak described portfolios and senior projects as bringing a dramatic shift in how students and teachers think about learning and assessments. Each portfolio, which is password protected and has Web–based capacity, reflects students’ individual approaches to their learning over a period of time. During end-of-year portfolio reviews, students are expected to articulate work in both oral and written formats. Parents are invited to portfolio exhibitions, and last year 75% of the parents attended. Maruszczak has also observed teachers becoming more thoughtful about assessing students in authentic ways. Analyzing student work and creating common tasks, he said, has made professional development at the school more job-embedded for teachers. Providing common planning time for teachers has become a priority. Teachers across grades are now more aware of what is happening in different classrooms as a transparent and cohesive community of learning is developing.

Balancing State and Local Control

While every Rhode Island district has local autonomy under the diploma system, the state has developed a review system to ensure rigor across the districts. Maruszczak described how his school just recently concluded the first phase of a Peer Support and Review process in which the state requires schools to provide evidence that diplomas meet five core elements: Fairness; Standard Setting; Equity and Access; Sufficiency; and Alignment to Standards. In February, staff from Ponaganset High School met with peer group practitioners from different high schools across the state to prepare for their state review. In May or June, the high school will be reviewed by a team from the state commissioner of education’s office. Maruszczak described the process as an example of how the state has trusted practitioners in schools and created a collegial environment with educators in the field.

Lessons and Challenges

DiMartino said that while there is pressure from some community members for a traditional high-stakes exam to determine whether students graduate, principals and policymakers are showing initial support for the diploma system as a nuanced and equitable approach to evaluating student competency. Overall, he believes an exemplary culture is growing in Rhode Island that is respectful of what educators are doing in schools. However, DiMartino said that during a time of limited fiscal resources in which varied programs are lobbying for scarce budget allocations, the next challenge is to effectively articulate why this particular approach to comprehensive high school reform is worth the investment.

Castañeda explained that while Rhode Island lacks a specific evaluative instrument to measure how effective the new high school regulations are in practice, reports of teachers using more creative instructional techniques and authentic assessments demonstrate the state is moving in the right direction. Emerging research has also shown that a project-based curriculum and varied performance assessments have had some success in keeping students most at-risk for dropping out more engaged in school. While portfolios and exhibitions are not good instruments for No Child Left Behind data collection, Castañeda said they have tremendous added value by improving what happens in the classroom each day in ways that standardized assessments sometimes fail to do. If educators agree that differentiated instruction is good for all students, she argued, it stands to reason that differentiated assessment should be effective as well. 

Resources

Detailed guidance and a virtual toolkit for designing and implementing Rhode Island’s Diploma System can be found at www.ride.ri.gov/highschoolreform/dslat

Presenters

Joe DiMartino is President of the Center for Secondary School Redesign, Inc.  Until recently, he served for nine years as Director of the Secondary School Redesign program of the Education Alliance at Brown University.  In that capacity, he was instrumental in maintaining Brown University’s leadership role in the national conversation regarding the redesign of high schools.  His efforts at supporting policy reforms that can be instrumental in leading to redesigning high school include support for Rhode Island’s statewide high school reform efforts.  This work includes the creation of a statewide vision of a 21st Century high school and the development of both an assessment system and the provision of technical supports to districts implementing the newly mandated graduation requirements.  He also supported statewide high school reform efforts in Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire. He also provided leadership and research support to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ Commission on Public Secondary Schools in the development of standards for high school accreditation of nearly 700 high schools throughout the region.

Since 2002, Mr. DiMartino has served as chair of the steering committee of the National High School Alliance.  He served as co-chair of the National Task Force on the High School and the Breaking Ranks 2 Commission of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.  In this role, Mr. DiMartino directed the creation of Breaking Ranks 2: Strategies for Leading High School Reform.  He is currently serving on both the National Urban Task Force and the Breaking Ranks in the Middle Commission of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and on the strategic advisory board of the.News at MacNeil/Lehrer Productions.  

At Brown, Mr. DiMartino oversaw the design, development and implementation of numerous research and technical assistance projects promoting high school redesign. Much of his effort has gone into the development of the Breaking Ranks Process of comprehensive high school reform, which has been implemented in over 40 schools across the country. Additional work of the Secondary School Redesign program of the Education Alliance included the implementation of a research, development and technical assistance project that promotes content area adolescent literacy initiatives in rural high schools and the provision of technical assistance to all of the federal Smaller Learning Communities grantees in the Northeast in collaboration with the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

Joe is first and foremost a parent.  He has often stated that he has learned much more from his children, including the four that were adopted from outside the United States, than he could ever hope to teach them. His children are a diverse bunch including two biological children, two Asians, and two Latin Americans.  Three of the adoptees joined the DiMartino family when they were between six and twelve years of age. It is through the lens of their experiences that Joe is devoted to working with and advocating for the educational opportunities afforded diverse adolescents in a variety of settings.   Whether on a playing field, classroom, or vocational placement, Joe has always strove to insure that individual youth have a voice in their education.  He has utilized his role as parent, coach, mentor, and advocate to get to know hundreds of adolescents and his passion for connecting with them continues.

Andrea Castañeda, Development Officer at Providence Public Schools, has been working in educational reform for six years, during which she has focused on comprehensive high school reform, accountability, and educational access for special populations. Most recently, she helped coordinate Rhode Island's comprehensive high school reform initiative that included sweeping changes to the system of assessment, credit-awarding, and graduation. Andrea currently works at the Providence School Department where sheparticipates in cross-office collaborations around resource management, professional development, and high school reform. Andrea graduated with honors from Brown University's Department of Education.

Joe Maruszczak has been the Principal of Ponaganset High School, a regional high school in northwest Rhode Island with approximately 1000 students, since 2001. Since that time, the school community has made significant progress in establishing school-wide learning goals and implementing an electronic portfolio system to measure student proficiency in attaining them. The school has been recognized by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and the Rhode Island Department of Education as being among the forefront in developing and implementing performance-based assessment systems. Much of the work was guided by the Standards for Accreditation of the Commission on Public Secondary Schools (CPSS) of the New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC), the region's major accreditation agency. Joe has served as a Commissioner for NEASC since 2000 and is passionately committed to the implementing substantive reform as detailed in the NEASC Standards and NASSP's Breaking Ranks.

Joe holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and a Master's degree in Secondary Administration from Providence College. He is married and the proud father of two daughters.

 

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