Four Rhode Island school districts — Coventry, East Providence, Providence and Woonsocket — were flagged for suspicious test scores between 2008 and 2011 in a recent study of standardized testing by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The results have prompted debate on the need for high-stakes testing to evaluate teacher effectiveness and student proficiency.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated 196 school districts nationwide and “flagged” those districts where more than 10 percent of classes — which are composed of all students enrolled in the same grade at the same school — demonstrated unusually high or low performance compared to the norm.
In Coventry, 14.29 percent of classes were flagged for abnormal performance in 2009, but this number dropped to below 4 percent in 2011, the study showed. In 2009, 12.5 percent of classes in East Providence scored unusually high or low. Nearly 30 percent of classes in the Woonsocket district demonstrated a large number of scores outside the norm in 2008, a rate more than double that of any other Rhode Island school district that year. Providence classes were flagged at rates of 13.27 percent in 2008 and 11.21 percent in 2011, but abnormal score levels fell below 10 percent in the years between.