Providence Public Schools: The State Takeover 

by Karly Eberly 

“Am I stupid?” he asks, his brown eyes blinking as his little body stills. “Of course not,” I say, gesturing back towards the sheet of homework. “You can do this.” Ollie looks back at the paper. A wiggle takes hold of him and he sways from head to toe and bursts into laughter. He can barely read the instructions. 

Ollie is in the third grade yet he is unable to do basic addition or subtraction. His homework consists of long division, a concept he lacks the foundational knowledge to understand. Ollie lives with his family in a homeless shelter in downtown Providence. While his situation may seem extreme, it is common, say teachers and volunteers working in the Providence School District, where 86% of students are eligible for the state's subsidized lunch program and 31% are multilingual learners. 

In June 2019 the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy found Providence Public Schools to be among the worst in the nation. This prompted the state of Rhode Island to take over operation of Providence Public Schools. The takeover was led by Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green. But according to critics among educators and state officials, the commissioner’s “Turnaround Action Plan,” announced in early 2020, has had little effect. 

Maribeth Calabro, president of the Providence Teachers Union and educator at Nathanael Greene Middle School, believes the 37 schools comprising the district will be given back to the city to run. She cites the closing of schools without community input, curriculum choices, excessive amounts of testing, and inadequate communication as factors in the takeover's failure. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) is closing three schools in Providence: two elementary schools and one middle school. According to Calabro, the closing of Alan Shawn Feinstein (ASF) Elementary at Broad Street is the most significant, as Feinstein is the only elementary school on that side of the city. Calabro spoke of the closing of ASF Broad Street as a tragic loss to the community: "it's one of those schools where kids' parents went there, their grandparents went there... that’s how much this school has impacted this neighborhood," Calabro says.

In January of 2023, protesters attended a RIDE meeting to denounce the closure of ASF Broad Street. According to Amy Russo, who reports on schools for the Providence Journal, in the middle of the meeting the crowd began to chant "Keep our schools open!"

Democratic Senator Sam Bell, asked how Providence Public schools are fairing following the state takeover,  says “horrendously." Bell maintains that the Department of Education is not sensitive to the realities of Providence students and like Calabro, Bell cites the move towards a set curriculum as a concerning trend in Education.

Veteran teacher Catharine Sully, who has more than eighteen years of experience teaching physics at Hope High School, says that the day she teaches a set curriculum is the day she stops teaching. Whereas math and English teachers have already adopted these set curriculums, science teachers have historically been given more flexibility. Sully, who served on a panel to explore science curriculums, says that by requirement the district can receive funding only if they choose from a short list of RIDE-approved curriculums– curriculums that Sully described as "inaccessible" for students. Teachers are exasperated, she says. "This already happened in math and we lost our whole math department as a result." 

Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green declined to comment. 

Czenilriene Santander, a Brown University student and site-leader through Brown Elementary After School Mentors (BEAM), says her after-school program was interrupted for months following the state takeover.  The state enforced a complex background check policy for volunteers that significantly limited the number of students who could participate, despite BEAM having successfully worked with William D'Bate Elementary School for years. Santander says BEAM volunteers collaborated closely with the William D'Bate Administration to reverse the change. 

 Catherine Sullivan, a physics teacher at 360 High School, says she feels that interventions by the state are "performative." As a teacher without ESL certification, she was required to meet with an outside consultant. “The consultant was from Texas; she didn't know our students at all, Sullivan says. "It felt like a show.” Sullivan signed a paper affirming that she had completed her mandatory fifteen hours of coaching. That piece of paper was all she says she got out of the experience. 

According to Sully, the Hope High School veteran teacher, many educators feel that the policies enacted by RIDE are so "counter-intuitive" that they actually want the district to fail.

Maribeth Calabro echoes this sentiment, saying "I don’t believe that anyone could have predicted that we would have been worse off almost three years into the takeover than where we were before we started."

Like Calabro, Sully says she believes that many of the issues faced by the District are a consequence of over-testing. According to Sully, ESL students are often pulled out of classes to take exams and nothing is done with the data. 

Sullivan believes the system could work if schools with higher-need populations were able to have smaller classes. Currently, however, Sullivan says that teachers at 360, in order to do their jobs well, need to “wear many different hats.” Sullivan finds herself playing the role of social worker, therapist, friend, and physics teacher all in a single day. She says that if her high school had full-time social workers and ESL teachers in each classroom, teachers and students could give more time to learning material.

Sullivan, who regularly purchases class materials out of her own salary, takes pride in the fact that her school has higher student safety and well-being scores than other schools in Providence. She describes 360 High School as a caring, kind, and positive commmunity with an excellent principal and vice principal. "They know every student," Sullivan says. "They call home and and invite family members to school." 

Despite individuals familiar with the matter arguing that the state takeover has not had a positive impact, Providence teachers do express optimism for the future. They have their own ideas for how to improve the District. "As hard as it is, I always talk about how much I love my job,” Sullivan says. She says she is amazed by her students. Despite all that is stacked against them, she says, they are kind, respectful, and hard-working.