BY JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — He’s still settling in to his new job as Superintendent of Schools, but that isn’t keeping Robert J. Gerardi Jr. from speaking his mind on the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

In a report to the School Committee this week, Gerardi, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the state’s use of assessment data to improve middle schools, cautioned the panel from judging local schools solely on the results of the federal No Child Left Behind Act mandated assessment system.
The state Department of Education has used the results of its student assessment program under No Child Left Behind to rank school performance on an annual basis, but Gerardi disagrees with that application of the findings.
Rather than a tool to rank schools, Gerardi sees the testing as a better gauge of how individual students are performing at the point at which the testing is given.
It is when those results are then gathered and applied to the performance of a school overall that problems crop up, according to Gerardi.
The differences are most clear when the results from urban school districts such as Woonsocket and Pawtucket are compared to their suburban counterparts.
A suburban district such as Barrington or North Smithfield may be required to meet 10 or 11 performance targets based on the make up their student populations under the state’s ranking system, whereas a district like Woonsocket was required to meet 31 targets under its ranking.
The middle school met 30 of that 31 but was still listed as making insufficient progress under the rankings.
There are statistical flaws in the way that system of assessment is being applied to unlike districts and as a result, Gerardi said school officials and the community should be cautious in using the information to judge schools.
“I recommend that you do not get too excited or upset with the classification system that is in place,” Gerardi told the committee.
The fact that the middle school has met 30 of 31 targets is an achievement in the right direction, he offered.
The school had met 27 of the 31 targets in the last round of testing, he noted, and the current round of testing shows “we are seeing improvement,” he said.
Gerardi believes the structure of the No Child Left Behind Act itself has created the inequitable assessment system even as states have no choice but to apply it if they wish to continue receiving federal education funding.
Congress has yet to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and it is possible that a change is coming for a new education act based on the theory “All Children Can Learn,” he said.
Gerardi said the problems with the current system can be found in the various testing systems states have adopted to meet No Child Left Behind’s assessment requirements. Rhode Island has joined Vermont and New Hampshire in basing their assessments on rigorous grade level requirements for learning, but other states have adopted less stringent standards thereby allowing their schools to rank higher in meeting those standards, he explained.
Gerardi said he agrees with the move to higher standards and commends the state for its work in setting the learning goals it has, but he still sees the assessment program as a better tool to assist students than one to rank their schools.
“A more realistic accountability system would follow the growth of the child as opposed to comparing different cohorts of children,” he said.
The testing can show educators what needs to be done to help an individual student improve and that information is being used for that purpose now, he said. But the current system also evaluates students as they arrive with specific needs and adds those results to the performance of district as a whole. In the case of a student coming in with limited English proficiency, their results typically never show the improvement they achieve as they continue on in school, he noted.
 “You never see the success of those students in the results because you are always measuring a new group of students coming in that also don’t do well,” he said.
 It is much better for a district like Woonsocket to use the results coming back from the testing program to “help us pinpoint the individual student’s needs and tailor their education program to meet them,” he said.