Learning From Being Passed Through

Among the issues rumbling across the towns of Tiverton and Little Compton, this year, is the decennial question of whether teenagers from the latter will continue to drive right through the former to attend public high school on Aquidneck Island, as they have for the past 36 years or so. Little Compton's ten-year contract with Portsmouth is expiring for the 2012-2013 school year, and Tiverton, Portsmouth, and Middletown for the boost of more than one-hundred paying customers per year. 

For the 2010-2011 school year, that equates almost to $900,000 in additional revenue. By the time a new contract is in effect, the annual bill is likely to be well above a million dollars (far above what the town stands to lose in state aid according to the new state funding formula). Tiverton should have long ago taken that reward as incentive for town-initiated educational reform and should begin doing so, now.

To residents who've moved to one of the two state-border towns since the era of President Nixon, Vietnam, and Led Zeppelin, the students' commute along Main Road and over the bridge has been a puzzle with dark insinuations. In the absence of a bridge or ferry across the southern stretch of the Sakonnet River, the effective regionalization of seems so obvious a solution that alternative arrangements can only raise questions. 

What feud precipitated the break between the towns? And what suspicions have kept Little Compton parents disenchanted with a school that's nearly as close for them as for some among the population that it currently serves? No doubt, inquiry at local haunts and church halls could rustle up vivid tales of personalities who've long since retired from the public view, but the comparisons that parents are currently considering probably provide sufficient explanation.

In his presentation to the Little Compton School Committee, available on his district's Web page, Tiverton Superintendent William Rearick made the case that Tiverton has the excess capacity to accommodate its neighbors. He noted that the high school is in compliance with state requirements. And he pointed out that Tiverton's students outperform the state average on all four of the New England Common Assessments Program (NECAP) tests - albeit, just barely in math and science.

Tiverton's advanced placement course and SAT data, Rearick presented without comparison, leaving no context by which to understand whether the results are admirable or unimpressive. The absence of competitive spirit only highlights the presentation's avoidance of the choice that Little Compton actually faces.

The first figure associated with this column illustrates the reason: Portsmouth outperforms Tiverton on every NECAP test, and in the cases of math and science the difference is huge, with student proficiency of 58 percent versus 31 percent in math and 52 percent versus 21 percent in science. When it comes to the SATs (shown in the second figure), Tiverton lags Portsmouth by 90 points and Middletown by 61. Considering that the point scale goes to 2400, that may not seem like much, but it's the difference between trailing the national average and surpassing it.

At the high end of achievement, 64 percent of the Advanced Placement exams taken during the 2008-2009 school year in Tiverton scored at "college-level mastery."  That percentage is within range of Portsmouth's 70 percent, and it far exceeds the 33 percent result in Middletown. However, only about 8 percent of Tiverton students took at least one test, while about 12 percent and 18 percent of students gave them a shot in Portsmouth and Middletown, respectively. That is, the difference in Middletown can be explained by participation, not competence. On the other end of the academic spectrum, Tiverton's drop-out rate was more than double Portsmouth's in 2009 and 150 percent of Middletown's.

The point, here, isn't to disparage Tiverton High School; it's to provide residents of both towns east of the Sakonnet with actual data that should bear on their decisions in the years and decades ahead. By no academic measure does Tiverton outperform Portsmouth, which operates at a lower cost per student and a slightly higher teacher-student ratio. From the point of view of parents, it's the difference between a school that's slightly above the state average and one of the best public high schools in Rhode Island.

Residents of Tiverton - especially those in young families - should take the comparison as a call to action. Their children have well above state-average potential, and it ought to disturb them that Little Compton, with its opportunity for communitywide school choice, has every reason to pass on through. A school district that could change those parents' minds might also bring home local private-school students who opt out of public education altogether, and its chief executive wouldn't have to shy away from direct comparisons.