News & Commentary

A coalition of 12 organizations representing youth, parents, the disability community, and civil rights activists today filed a formal petition with the state Council on Elementary and Secondary Education to initiate a public rule-making process to bar school districts from using high-stakes testing as a graduation requirement or grading tool before 2020.

UPDATE 6/10/2015: Call the leaders of the House and Senate and the chairs of the Judiciary committees to ask them to support legislation banning life without parole sentences for children in Rhode Island. 

The ACLU of Rhode Island and 13 other organizations are urging school districts not to use PARCC as a graduation requirement before the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education's recommended start date of 2020 after some districts requested permission to use the PARCC test as a graduation requirement before the 2020 date.

Racial disparities in suspensions at Rhode Island’s schools reached their highest rates in a decade last year, according to a new report issued today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island. The report, “Blacklisted: 2013-2014,” found that while white students experienced a ten-year low in suspensions during the 2013-2014 school year, the combined suspension rate for Hispanic, black and Native American students was at its highest level.

It is heartening to see a robust discussion on the use of the PARCC test in Rhode Island’s public schools, but the state Department of Education seems to have made up its mind: before the test was even off the ground it was already actively encouraging school districts to use the PARCC to penalize students as early as next year.

Over the past few months, we've shared quite a bit of data about the school-to-prison pipeline and its disproportionate impact on Rhode Island's communities of color. We recently sat down with Jordan Seaberry, of the Univocal Legislative Minority Advisory Committee and Jim Vincent, president of the NAACP-Providence Branch to discuss the far reaching impact of these racial disparities and how the state must act to improve the lives of all Rhode Islanders.

Despite decades of progress toward gender equality, in Rhode Island today gender-exclusive student events that are specifically held for girls or boys with the active support of elementary schools help to perpetuate blatant gender stereotypes. Almost invariably, the girls’ events, organized by parent-teacher groups and publicized by the schools, are dances, with another gender-stereotyped event, like a pajama party, occasionally taking their place. By contrast, and just as invariably, the events arranged for boys involve almost anything but dancing, are wide-ranging, and focus on purportedly male-friendly activities like sports and arcade games.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today issued a report calling on state and municipal leaders to examine policies, practices and procedures that lead to discriminatory treatment of black Rhode Islanders, from elementary school through adulthood. The ACLU report, titled “The School-to-Prison Pipeline in Black and White,” offers a brief but systematic examination of racial disparities in Rhode Island, and how those interconnected disparities can lead to a lifetime of unequal treatment. The report, presented in a series of twelve charts, comes as the nation celebrates Black History Month, and grapples with recent events that have pushed racial disparity issues back into the forefront.