One Veteran Teacher Tells Her Story 

by Karly Eberly 

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND--Large windows filled the space with light, illuminating the faces of a group of high schoolers, their chairs tilted towards one another in easy conversation. Spanish, Arabic, and notes of English floated around the room, discordant and melodic, as the boys and one girl of the class began to take out their notebooks. They taught one another swear words in different languages, smiling sheepishly at their teacher as she set up her materials for the day. 

“This particular class, I didn’t know why, but I felt so bonded to them,” teacher Catherine Sully recalls. They often won best class for attendance, behavior, or some other reason, and Sully would bake them brownies as reward.  She remembers how happy they would get with something as simple as brownies. “It was such a wonderful feeling,” she says. 

It wasn’t until after the semester ended that Sully realized that not a single student in that class had a mother in the United States. 

“Imagine being in high school in a foreign country and not even having your mom there,” Sully says. 

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 to take over operation of the Providence Public School District, a change that, according to people familiar with the matter, has had little effect. Sully has spent eighteen years teaching physics at Hope High School. More than 200 educators have left the District this year alone, but Catherine Sully has stayed. 

Sully graduated college with a physics degree and no teaching background, originally thinking she wanted to be a public defender. She knew she was interested in working in an urban setting, and joined an AmeriCorps Program, teaching for three and a half years in a large public school in Philadelphia. She had fallen in love with education, she says, and returned to her home state of Rhode Island to continue her career. 

A few years after Sully joined Hope High School, a second physics teacher joined the department. She was two years younger than Sully--a sort of mirror, Sully says. “She was as crazy as I am, loved the kids as much as I do, brought in all kinds of labs like I did, worked like an animal." 

"We were in the trenches together but, deep down, we knew we loved it,” Sully says. Despite not being super-social, Sully was relieved and invigorated by their "dynamic duo" and the physics department became its own universe. 

More than eighteen years later, Sully is in the same physics classroom. She has outlasted five administrations at Hope High School. 

Following the state takeover, however, Sully has noticed a significant change. She describes the Providence School District as "the wild west." She finds herself surrounded by fresh-faced Teach For America volunteers who, she says, have nothing to compare the current situation to. Around forty staff left Hope High School in the past year alone. Sometimes, for months, there will be no teachers for certain subjects, leaving gaps in students' schedules. “The kids I get in 11th grade this year know less math than I have ever seen,” Sully says. 

According to Sully, a few well-intentioned policies have had disastrous effects. Two years ago, 56% of the population going to school in Providence was considered chronically absent. While there used to be truancy courts, the Rhode Island Department of Education’s push towards being non-punitive has created an absence of accountability, Sully says. “I have students I haven’t met yet and it's April… and they have a 50,” says Sully. “This wouldn’t happen in a place where you actually care.” Students have cursed at teachers in the hallway and faced no consequences, creating an uncomfortable atmosphere for students and teachers alike. 

“I don’t fault the kids for it,” Sully says. “Kids are like water going through a wall…my own son wouldn’t do work that he didn’t need to do.” Hope High School uses a system called Skyward: A student's lowest grade automatically defaults to a 50, a passing grade. While teachers can go in and manually override the system for individual assignments, final grades will still appear as 50s, making it difficult to know who is failing unless someone goes through records individually. 

Sully describes Skyward as forcing everyone to be lazy. The kids know this, she says. “I’m shocked when I get 100% attendance in a given class.” Sully says, “How many of us would go to work if you knew you would get paid regardless?”

Administrative evaluations are tied to metrics like suspension and graduation rates, creating an environment in which administrators have an incentive to graduate everyone, in which no one is suspended, and appearances are prioritized over real results. Sully recalled that an administrator recently approached her about offering an AP Physics class. 

“Show me the ten students who can take AP Physics,” Sully says. “It’s all smoke and mirrors.” 

Given the district's enormous uncertainty, Sully had thought this year might be her last. But she says that every time she has this thought, a student tells her that the only reason they came to school that day was for her class. “For some people I’ve continued to make a difference despite many challenges. That tethers me to this place,” Sully says. 

In a perfect world, with her many years of experience teaching in Providence, Sully says she would make three main changes to the policies of the Providence Public School District. The first would be data-based rostering, “that’s what I name it in my head,” Sully says, her voice changing pitch to excitement. Data-based rostering would use data to place students in classes that allow them to be challenged at an appropriate level. She would revise absenteeism policies. And third, she would return integrity to grading, evaluating student progress in a positive, realistic, and supportive way.