A Clean Slate for Local Education

Illustration: Emily Rietzel and IStock/Getty Image Plus

The school year was winding down to its last, and a mixture of languor and excitement suffused the halls of Central Falls High School. The seniors were mustered outside of the auditorium door awaiting graduation practice, while the first period lessons proceeded quietly. Assistant Principal and Director of Career and Technical Education Cristina Sanchez nudged the drifters along.

“Señores! Let’s go. Morning, morning!” she sang out.

In March, nearly a century after the opening of the city’s original high school building, the community moved to a new, state-of-the-art facility.

“There’s a different energy,” Sanchez says. “It’s more positive, more together.”

Engineering and biology teacher Lucas Perez agrees.

“Having a new space that is up to date helps the students feel like the work they’re doing is important and allows them to invest in it a little more,” he says.

The building might be seen as the symbolic capstone of a commitment the Rhode Island Department of Education made thirty-five years ago to invest in Central Falls Schools. In 1991, the district was bankrupt, and the city became the first in the nation to seek a state rescue. In June, RIDE handed the district back. It was the longest state takeover in United States history.

“It’s really game-changing to have people who are deeply connected to this community and really know what’s going on day-to-day to actually have the power to make decisions based on that information,” says Sarah Friedman, the city’s chief of education strategy.

States have been taking over public schools since 1989, when New Jersey and Kentucky became the first to do so. Since then, at least 140 school boards nationwide have been relieved of their command, and researchers say the trend is accelerating — despite academic studies questioning their effect on educational and fiscal outcomes.

“The research on this is pretty clear that some school districts make some academic gains, but then they level off over time, and then start to decrease,” says Domingo Morel, a New York University political scientist and the author of Takeover: Race, Education and American Democracy. “If the goal is to strip away political and economic power from local communities, neutralize the power of teachers’ unions and create charter schools, then [takeovers] are highly effective.”

The majority of state interventions ostensibly have been initiated to salvage district finances, and a 2024 analysis of 104 takeovers that occurred between 1990 and 2019 found that increases in per-pupil spending were unevenly distributed. On average, a takeover raised per pupil spending by $2,000 in the ensuing five years, with the money mostly expended on salaries and benefits and retiring debt, says study co-author and public policy researcher Melissa Arnold Lyon, of the University at Albany, SUNY. But that boost diminished if the district had a Black student majority.

“Takeover districts are much more likely to be majority Black,” she says. “And when states are taking over districts with more Black students, they are less likely to provide those additional state revenues, and we’re not seeing the same improvements in fiscal health.”

Rhode Island expropriated Central Falls, and later, Providence Public Schools, under different commissioners, for different reasons. But the districts shared the same challenges: a significant population of low-income, multilanguage learners, educated in crumbling schools, with low standardized test scores.

In a surprise move this past spring, RIDE Commissioner Angélica Infante- Green announced the state would also relinquish its oversight of the Providence Public School District on June 30. The state took the reins in November 2019 on the heels of a grim assessment of the system that she had commissioned with the support of then-Governor Gina Raimondo and then-Mayor Jorge Elorza. The Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy report described a complete operational breakdown of dangerously deteriorated buildings, staff morale, parent engagement, achievement levels and classroom safety. Visits to the facilities moved some members of the review team to tears.

Infante-Green says in the last seven years, Providence has made great strides against the stiff headwinds of a contentious start, leadership scandals and the COVID-19 pandemic: stronger academic outcomes with assessment scores exceeding prepandemic levels, record-high graduation rates, a $1 billion facilities plan to replace or remake schools, increased school funding, a major reduction in chronic absenteeism, expanded access to career and technical programs and Advanced Placement courses, a modernized front office and performance-based accountability systemwide, including vendors.

“There’s real momentum and progress,” she says. “One of the most important things is that they continue the things that have already been put in place.”

Mayor Brett Smiley acknowledged that RIDE had done “an excellent job of dramatically expanding the number of teachers who are certified in MLL [multilingual learner education], and expanding and creating new high school pathways for certifications to align skills with high-wage jobs and to provide credentials to students beyond just their diploma,” he says. “But the state takeover has accomplished all it can, so it’s time to return to local control.”

The Providence Teachers Union did not respond to requests for comment, but Maribeth Calabro, who spent thirty years in Providence classrooms and headed the PTU during five years of the takeover, also recognized the progress made, but says the experience disempowered teachers to the detriment of learning. Teachers were required to follow the highly prescriptive, state-purchased curriculum products with mandated pacing and lesson plans that were not appropriate for all learners and curtailed teachers’ ability to tailor instruction, she says.

“Conversations that I continue to have with colleagues in Providence is that they feel like the takeover didn’t allow them to teach. Basically, it was an ongoing exercise in compliance,” says Calabro, now president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals.

Nonetheless, the Providence School Board is ready, says President Ty’Relle Stephens. It has been preparing for two years to provide strong governance, developing a comprehensive transition plan and participating in “intensive professional development. We’re anxious for students and families to have a more direct voice in their education,” he says.

Compared to RIDE’s sustained push to transform Providence schools, the Central Falls experience “was stretches of neglect punctuated by random exercises of authority by the state, which was highly disruptive and took away a sense of agency for this community over their own schools,” says Friedman, the city’s chief of education strategy.

Rhode Island’s smallest city was carved out of Lincoln by the General Assembly in 1895. The village was then an industrial powerhouse, with workers crowding into tenements to keep the mills and factories running. Rural landowners, wary of Central Falls’ demands for municipal services — and half the village — backed the divorce. The city’s economy peaked in the 1920s, and then declined as the textile industry moved south. Nonetheless, in 1950, Central Falls was the state’s fifth wealthiest municipality in terms of property tax dollars per school student, according to a study done by Tom Sgouros at the Rhode Island Policy Reporter.

By April 1991, when Mayor Thomas Lazieh implored the state to step in, Central Falls was the state’s poorest municipality with one of the highest tax rates. The state was already funding 86 percent of the school budget, but the district blew through its $11 million appropriation two-thirds of the way through the fiscal year and without an intervention, would not have been able to pay its teachers.

Over the next three and a half decades, the state education funding mechanism changed radically. Rhode Island shed its status as the only state without an equitable and transparent school funding formula, enacting legislation in 2010 that allocated state aid on a per-pupil basis, balanced against a community’s capacity to generate tax revenue and the needs of its students. The state also created a special stabilization fund for Central Falls to cover expenses beyond state aid to education, such as building maintenance, food service and transportation.

The district was governed by a seven-member board of trustees, which functioned like a traditional school committee, approving budgets and hiring the superintendent. But its members were appointed by the commissioner, and their decisions were subject to state authority. This model kept the district financially afloat and semi-self-governed, but it did not result in adequately resourced or truly locally led schools, say city officials. In early 2023, five of the trustees resigned en masse, citing RIDE’s continued disinterest. And it was a far cry from RIDE’s original intent. In a 1991 Education Week news story, State Commissioner J. Troy Earhart imagined the takeover as an opportunity to turn Central Falls schools into “demonstration” projects.

David Upegui was a sophomore at Central Falls High School when the state took over; he returned in 2010 to teach science and just left to become an assistant professor of education at Brown University. The only thing the state most consistently demonstrated over the last thirty-five years was its indifference, he says. The first thing it did, he says, was cut the school budget.

A high school wrestler, Upegui remembers a match at Barrington High School where he marveled at the bubblers.

“Oh my God, they actually have water fountains that work. As little as that seems, it was huge. They had music programs. There were very clear distinctions between the experience I was having versus anywhere else,” he says. “At any given point for the last thirty-plus years [RIDE] could have decided we’re going to make Central Falls into the hub of innovative education in Rhode Island. We’re going to invest in their teachers, in the classrooms, in the students. Instead, they considered us the ugly stepchildren.”

Infante-Green countered that Central Falls has been responsible for what happens within its district.

“They have had a functioning school board. They have selected their superintendent. They select their policy. They negotiate contracts. They do all of that,” she says. “And any time that there have been requests for supports, we put in those supports. We have gone above and beyond for them.”

For example, RIDE was the main driver of the effort to secure financing for the new high school, she says.

In 2024, Central Falls published “My Heart is Here,” its own community-based assessment of the district after thirty-three years of state control. If not as dramatic as the Johns Hopkins report, “My Heart is Here” painted its own bleak portrait of a system under considerable stress. A partial list included classrooms that reached blast-furnace temperatures, an elementary school play space that consisted of a dirt yard with caution tape around the slide, social studies textbooks so old they did not include the Obama presidency and constant administrative turnover. Some teachers reported
spending up to $5,000 a year of their own money to kit out their classrooms. Everything from student electives, to paper, to planning time, to nurses were scarce.

The report became the foundation for the creation of a community advisory board empowered to design a new school governance model, which the voters approved as a hybrid of elected and appointed school board members drawn from the community, the student body and RIDE, seated in November. In June, the General Assembly included a measure in the state budget creating a new Central Falls stabilization fund, covering the tuition for special education out-of-district placements and slowly increasing the city’s share of the school budget.

Senator Jonathon Acosta, (D-Dist. 16 – Central Falls, Pawtucket) the bill’s primary sponsor, says he doesn’t think Central Falls should pay anything at all.

“During the pandemic, when most of the people with white-collar jobs were jumping on Zoom, it was the workforce from places like Central Falls that was working at the grocery store and as CNAs in the senior centers, keeping your grandparents alive. There’s a cost. And that cost in our social contract is for us to pay for the education of their children so that they may have an opportunity to experience class mobility.”

With local control comes local accountability, and Central Falls understands the enormity of the task ahead.

“In terms of proficiency levels, this is still the lowest performing school district in the state, with the lowest graduation rate,” says Mayor Maria Rivera. “It’s been thirty-something years of the same thing, so we’re not going to undo it in a year. But we have to start somewhere.”

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than four decades.