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In the last days of the legislative session, the General Assembly authorized the Department of Motor Vehicles to issue specialty “Choose Life” license plates.

The ACLU today joined with other education and civil rights advocates, parents and a former employee of Rhode Island Department of Education’s (RIDE) testing office to call attention to the dangerously low NECAP scores released by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) earlier this month. The statewide scores for the NECAP, a test that this year will become the determining factor for high school graduation for the class of 2014 and those to follow, showed 4,200, or two in five, Rhode Island 11th graders, are in jeopardy of not graduating from high school next year. These numbers include almost two in five students in the middle-class community of Warwick, providing evidence of the detrimental impact this poor public policy will have on all Rhode Island communities whether upper, middle or lower income.

Below is a statement issued today by Common Cause/RI and the ACLU of Rhode Island regarding the controversy over the Governor’s refusal to publicly release a report he commissioned on Medicaid and food stamp fraud:

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In court papers filed today, the ACLU has asked for a prompt hearing on its request for a preliminary injunction against the R.I. Board of Education for violating open government laws in dealing with the its controversial “high stakes testing” mandate. The ACLU’s motion asks the Court to order the Board to reconsider in open session a secret discussion and vote it took two weeks ago, rejecting, by a vote of 6-5, a petition filed in June by seventeen organizations seeking a public hearing on repealing the Board’s “high stakes testing” graduation requirement.