History
The high school reform project currently unfolding in Rhode Island has grown out of a grassroots initiative beginning in 2000 with the first High School Summit, which was co-sponsored by the Rhode Island Department of Education and The Education Alliance at Brown University. This groundbreaking summit, along with its 2002 follow-up, called together hundreds of educational stakeholders to discuss the state of secondary education in Rhode Island and culminated with the identification of eight areas of high school in critical need of reform.
The governing body for education in Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Board of Regents, responded to the call that came forth from the Summits. In 2003, after nearly a year of intensive meetings, studies and public forums, The Regents passed regulations requiring secondary reform in three areas: literacy, personalization, and graduation by proficiency. Rhode Island's progress – and prescience – has been impressive. In the five years since the initial Summit, the educational landscape of the nation has swung towards accountability through multiple measures of student achievement. Rhode Island has spent the last five years intensively redesigning the entire secondary system and is well situated to meet the high stakes challenge.
One area of the Regents' Regulations, graduation by proficiency, requires every high school graduate to successfully demonstrate mastery of academic content and ability to apply knowledge and skills in a real world setting. The multiple measures that will comprise a school's diploma system and provide students multiple opportunities to demonstrate proficiency include course work, state assessments, and local school-wide assessments such as exhibitions, portfolios, or Certificates of Initial Mastery. Though these school-wide assessments differ dramatically in form, they have some important commonalties: they offer students the opportunity to identify and apply knowledge and skills in an area of personal interest and pursue it over the course of an extended period, and present their work for evaluation. This area of regulation infuses an essential – though often absent – dimension into students' high school experience: personal relevance.
In 2004, the Rhode Island Department of Education and The Education Alliance at Brown University again struck a partnership and secured funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of a system infrastructure to support graduation by proficiency. Over the course of 14 months, the Graduation by Proficiency Project called together nearly 60 teachers and administrators to help develop comprehensive guidance to help districts and schools design, implement, and maintain exhibition and/or graduation portfolio systems. This toolkit is one of the culminating products of those efforts.
Today, Rhode Island high schools are beginning to pilot their exhibition, graduation portfolio, and Certificate of Initial Mastery systems. They are designing, implementing, and refining the many components that must be in place to support, instruct, and prepare the Class of 2008 for graduation under the new Rhode Island Diploma System.