Quick Read
Perhaps the key detail to be found in the report and interactive tools that the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) just released is to be found at the top of its associated infographic. As shown in the featured image of this post, although Rhode Island is the 18th state in the country for per…
Policy decisions can obviously increase or decrease the amount of poverty in a society. Socialism, for example, is absolutely devastating and has repeatedly proven to result in misery and starvation. That said, the following pair of tweets from Atlantic writer Clint Smith gets reality precisely backwards, and in a way that is important for everybody…
You know you’re dealing with greedy special interests most concerned with maintaining their own position when you read something like this, emphasis added: The plan has the support of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, the Rhode Island School Superintendents’ Association, the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Hassenfeld Institute for…
As in a horror story in which some trusted institution becomes possessed by an evil force, something has changed in youth culture and our schools. Youth media has long (always?) fostered doubt about whether parents could really understand what their children were going through (as opposed to glossy magazines, Hollywood, and pop stars). As the evil…
General Assembly politics are a mystery to most Rhode Islanders. They don’t really understand why anybody wants the job, figuring that some people are just into that sort of thing. Yes, some people are really, really into it. John G. Edwards, the Fourth, has been the Democrat representative from district 70 since 2008, having previously…
Some readers may take this as inflammatory while others may take it as conciliatory, but as Rhode Island enters into this odd, uncomfortable moment of different expectations around masks, an opportunity for cultural sympathy emerges. For context: I stopped in a mostly empty store to buy a household item after dropping off one of my…
Watchers of the mainstream narrative may be a little surprised that there hasn’t been much coverage of an incident on February 1 at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence during which a school resource officer (SRO) was caught on video being aggressive with a student. These incidents are difficult to judge from video clips, and…
The headline of this post is genuinely meant. I’m entirely withholding judgement and am mainly curious what now-candidate Fung is planning. You may have heard that Allan Fung has entered the race for Rhode Island’s second district seat in Congress with this tweet: It’s a great logo that will look cool on t-shirts and other…
COVID-19 can be a nasty disease, even when it’s not a killer, which it most definitely can be. The coronavirus is not, however, the only killer, and disease is not the only nasty thing that can happen to your life. As we look out across the landscape of continuing fear, ramped up to an irrational…
Judy Schwalbach makes that connection explicit in a report on school choice policies and history in Washington, D.C.: During the 20th century, federally sanctioned housing “redlining” influenced the composition of neighborhoods in large cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. The term “redlining” came from the color-coded maps developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation…