Since the Rhode Island Department of Education released its school accountability and performance results in December, Lisa Schultz has spent quite a bit of time analyzing the Warwick School Department’s state-issued report card.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” said Schultz, the city’s Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. “We have several schools which performed very well, and several more that showed substantial progress. We also identified a few weak spots that need to be addressed.”

The report card for the 2021-22 school year indicates that 31.4% of Warwick students are meeting or exceeding expectations in English/Language Arts. An additional 46.5% are “partially” meeting expectations, while the remaining fifth of the roughly 4,200 students assessed are below expectations for English.

As has been the case in previous assessments, students exhibited somewhat more difficulty with math and science assessments than language arts: 29% of students met or exceeded expectations in science, while only 22.3% of students performed at the expected level in mathematics. Nearly a quarter of those taking tests failed to meet expectations in math.

Although these numbers may seem low, it is important to consider them in light of the unprecedented interruption to education caused by the pandemic. National surveys indicate that student performance remains below pre-Covid levels throughout the country, and Rhode Island’s Covid learning loss does not appear out of step with nationwide trends.

In fact, a recent study released by Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project suggests that Rhode Island schools have actually suffered less of a setback than our nearest neighbors: the average Covid learning loss for math in Rhode Island was estimated to be the equivalent of half a school year, compared to 75% in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In reading, local students are estimated to have lost 0.27 grade levels, while Massachusetts and Connecticut students are an average of 0.41 and 0.52 grade levels behind expectations, respectively.

Within Rhode Island, the pandemic appeared to hit certain school systems harder than others, with Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls each reporting a substantial loss of progress. Warwick appeared roughly in the middle of the pack, with similar scores to Cranston, Johnston, and Burrilville.

This is the first year since 2019 that the reports have been issued: the federal government waived the requirement for statewide testing in 2020 due to the pandemic, and RIDE received permission to extend that break by an additional year. The report cards are calculated by cross-referencing a wide variety of data and assessments, the most important of which is the RICAS (Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System). The standardized test is used to assess reading and math in grades 3-8; each test-taker’s score is compared to their results the previous year in order to measure not only educational attainment, but individual student progress.

Other information which appears on the report card includes rates of teacher and student absenteeism, suspensions, and the number of student subcategories (such as racial, linguistic, and economic groups) judged to be underperforming. It also considers graduation rates for high schools. Together with the testing scores, this data is used to develop a “star” ranking for individual schools.

“They can give a school one to five stars, just like a hotel,” explains Warwick’s Director of Elementary Education, Patricia Cousineau. The rating system is a requirement of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

No 5 star Warwick schools

Warwick Public Schools did not include any of the state’s 14 5-star schools, but did have one school which received a four star rating: Harold F Scott Elementary School on Centreville Road. The lowest performing school in the district was Oakland Beach Elementary, which was the city’s only one-star school. Assessment data indicates that only 14% of Oakland Beach students are proficient in English, with 13% proficiency in math; in terms of growth, 40% of students were judged as making little progress in either discipline. The school received two stars prior to Covid.

"All of our principals have identified the weakest points of the reports to tackle head-on," said Schultz. "One of the key problems across the board has been a lack of exposure to the material. We're trying to make sure that teachers present all of the material before testing, just to make sure students have been exposed to it."

The majority of the city’s schools received a three-star rating, with six institutions receiving two stars: Lippitt and Norwood Elementary Schools, Winman and Warwick Veterans Middle Schools, and Toll Gate and Pilgrim High Schools.

“The score is determined based on the lowest score that school received in any one category – so if you have a school that earned five stars in everything except for a three-star rating in absenteeism, for instance, their score would still be three stars,” Cousineau explained.

This can lead to a range of variation within a given star ranking, with the school department referring to some institutions as being a “high 3” or a “low 3.”

"Both of our high schools were 'high 2's'," Schultz said, adding that a two star rating had been the most common score for local high schools. "We have a lot of 'high three's', as well as success stories in specific areas - Robertson Elementary School, for instance, had very high stats for their multiple language learners."

Scores for local schools can be found below, with an asterix to indicate schools which Warwick Public Schools has identified as being "high" within their score bracket.