Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is making a big bet on his Learn365RI initiative, a state program that funds out-of-school learning opportunities for students to complement their traditional schooling. McKee is hoping it can help him at the polls next year in what is shaping up to be a competitive gubernatorial race.
Two years into the program, what do the early returns look like? Morning Host Luis Hernandez posed that question to Patrick Anderson, reporter for the Providence Journal.
Interview highlights
On why Gov. McKee supports out-of-school learning programs
Patrick Anderson: Well, the governor has always been a very big believer in out-of-school learning. It comes from his background. It’s just something that is very personal to him, and so he has put money and some political capital behind expanding out-of-school learning programs and trying to incorporate academics and curriculum in some of the summer programs and afterschool programs that already exist.
It goes back to both his time as mayor of Cumberland, his father’s co-founding the Boys and Girls Clubs in Cumberland, and his coaching youth basketball. It’s just been a big part of his life and he believes both that getting young people involved in extracurricular activities is essential to helping them learn and making them good people.
On whether out-of-school learning programs are effective
Anderson: It’s always going be tough to tease out what the specific impact of this program is versus the much larger time spent and the much larger resources spent in the regular schools… [McKee] is really looking at the big, all-encompassing headlines; standardized tests in the schools that we look at every fall, the RICAS tests. He believes that this will translate into success in those regular traditional tests.
There are studies that have been positive on the impacts of expanding the school day and then out-of-school learning – having children do educational activities outside of just regular school – that are fairly positive. I mean, you hear a lot about summer learning loss, and that’s a big part of this — that it is better to have kids in some kind of structured environment learning something in the summer rather than disappearing in June and we don’t know where they are. They might be just on TikTok all the time or something.
On why Johnston is the only Rhode Island town not to accept funding for out-of-school programs
Anderson: Mayor (Joe) Polisena is the only mayor so far that is totally out on this entire thing. He doesn’t want to commit local money to staffing these either community learning centers or the programs and Learn 365. He doesn’t want to have to have that line item in his budget. He doesn’t want to have to raise property taxes. He wants to focus on the traditional public schools.
On how the Learn365RI initiative could impact the 2026 governor’s race
Anderson: I think it only plays well if the standardized test scores that come out in the fall are good. If those are really, really good, [McKee] can use this to take credit for them and say, “Look, I did this.” If they’re not good, I don’t really think it is going to be that much of a political advantage because it’s going to be very hard to point to what it actually accomplished.
So again, it’s putting a lot of stakes and a lot of weight on test scores that were taken in the spring, and there will be a lot of debate about when they come out and that sort of thing. That’s really going to be the big political question: what the test scores are.
