The release of the 2023 Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) scores saw improvements for Cranston to the tune of a 4.1% improvement in math and a .5% improvement in English Language Arts (ELA) scores district-wide.

Overall, Cranston students are 25.8% proficient in math and 32.5% proficient in ELA. These number, combined, give Cranston an approximate placement of 27th among combined test scores in the state, though they may be up or down from this number when including charter and private schools.

Both the overall math and ELA scores have yet to catch up to 2019’s scores, when Cranston had 27.9% math proficiency and 41.4% ELA proficiency throughout the district.

“Although we realize that standardized testing is just one piece of our assessment puzzle, we do study our data, and we were happy to see that as a district, all of our proficiency scores were up from last year, and we are moving in the right direction,” said the Cranston School Department in a statement about the scores. “We had several schools who made significant leaps, and we are approaching pre-pandemic levels. We realize that it takes 3-5 years to reach those levels, so we were especially pleased to see several of our schools surpass their pre-pandemic scores from 2019.”

Among schools with increased proficiency in math, Garden City School boasted the highest percentage of proficiency, with a 7.3% increase in proficiency over the last year to 52.7%, and also boasted an increase in ELA proficiency of 2.6% from last year. The biggest gains in ELA were had by Orchard Farms Elementary, which improved from 45.3% proficient to 51.8%, an increase of 6.3%.

“Additionally, Cranston High School West not only surpassed their pre-pandemic scores in ELA, but also surpassed the state average in both ELA and Math, and their science scores rose by 10 points from 34.4% pre-pandemic to 44.1% this year,” the department said. “We are confident that our new, highly-rated curriculum programs are helping our students to succeed, but we know that more importantly, students who do not come to school consistently will struggle with standardized tests and may not do as well as their peers who have good attendance, no matter how highly rated a curriculum program is.”

While not every school’s numbers went up, such as Daniel D. Waterman dropping 16.9% in ELA and 18.2% in math from last year or Park View dropping 8.3% in ELA, though rising 6.5% in math, the overall numbers from the RICAS tests in Cranston do show upward momentum.

This may be due to the outstanding numbers of participation in the test across the district. Participation in the assessments came to an average of just over 98%. However, the 2023 statewide data from the RI Department of Education below shows that chronically absent students, on average, performed lower than their not chronically absent peers.

On the RICAS alone there was an 18.8% performance gap for ELA and a 30% performance gap for math.

“We strongly encourage families to focus on attendance in school on time, all day, every day that their children are well, and to emphasize the importance of these tests with their children,” the Cranston School Department stressed. “Although they are only one piece of the puzzle, they do matter.”