PROVIDENCE – Angélica Infante-Green is expected to remain the state’s education commissioner for the next three years.
The R.I. Council on Elementary and Secondary Education on Wednesday unanimously approved to reappoint Infante-Green as commissioner for another three-year term through 2027, R.I. Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente confirmed to Providence Business News on Thursday. The council also voted to authorize chairperson Patricia DiCenso to negotiate and finalize the execution of Infante-Green’s new contract, which is “subject to the advice and consent” of the full R.I. Board of Education.
Specifics, including salary, on Infante-Green’s new contract were not yet available and is unclear when the full education board will meet next to approve or reject it. They last met in May for their quarterly meeting.
Infante-Green's salary has increased annually since becoming commissioner, from $231,726 in 2019 through $296,175 in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the state's transparency portal.
Infante-Green has served as Rhode Island’s education commissioner since 2019, succeeding Ken Wagner after he departed to at the time join the Annenberg Institute at Brown University as a senior fellow of education policy and practice. Not long into her job, Infante-Green has overseen both the state intervention of the Providence Public School District, and also navigating school districts across Rhode Island through and help recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, students in grades 3 through 8 throughout Rhode Island
showed year-to-year improvement on the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System exam. But Infante-Green felt at the time that more work is needed to achieve high academic performances across all schools in the Ocean State.
RIDE also
celebrated last month that there were 244,375 fewer absences across Rhode Island’s public schools during the 2023-24 school year, representing a 4.2 percentage point decrease, after the pandemic impacted school attendance. The department estimated that’s equivalent to about 1.3 million hours of learning time.
However, building back up the state’s largest school district is a significant challenge for both RIDE and Infante-Green. Late last month, the council voted unanimously to
have the state continue its takeover of PPSD for no longer than the next three years – a similar timeframe as Infante-Green’s new contract.
Infante-Green’s recommendation to continue the state intervention was based on two independent reports from SchoolWorks LLC and Harvard Graduate School for Education’s Center for Education Policy Research on how PPSD has performed since RIDE assumed control of the district in 2019. The reports stated that while PPSD did better than neighboring states on mitigating learning loss and learning recover from the pandemic, concerns about the district’s fiscal health, the impact of recent layoffs and uncertain futures for support positions on PPSD’s improvement efforts remain.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on X at @James_Bessette.
