Carroll Andrew Morse
The Associated Press is reporting that the state Board of Regents has approved a new evaluation system for RI public elementary and secondary school teachers… Rhode Island teachers who receive poor evaluations for five consecutive years will lose their certification under new rules adopted by state education officials. Teachers will receive 1 of 4 ratings…
Rhode Island junior Senator Sheldon Whitehouse thinks the First Amendment of the United States Constitution goes too far. He has used his Senate seat, from the state that traces its lineage to early freedom-of-speech advocate Roger Williams, to introduce a Constitutional Amendment that would carve out a First Amendment exception allowing the government to restrict…
I attended the final few hours of last night’s House/Senate pension reform public testimony session. While I was there, the great bulk of the testimony was from public union members and officials, repeating variations on the theme of yeah it’s a mess, but the young folks have plenty of time to figure out how to…
You could pick almost any combination of paragraphs from today’s post by Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest and come up with an insightful excerpt that describes Rhode Island’s problems. Here are the 3 1/2 I will choose…Because Rhode Island listened to timeserving blue politicians too long, and union leaders and public sector workers…
It seems that no plan for fiscal reform in Rhode Island is considered complete until it eviscerates democracy in some way. The pension reform plan submitted to the General Assembly yesterday by Governor Lincoln Chafee and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo is no exception. The offending section is 36-10.2-7 which creates procedures that both municipalities and…
Michael Morgenstern, a Brown University graduate and blogger sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, does an excellent job of summing up OWS’ political and organizational let’s-call-them-challenges-for-now with this short passage…Anarchy doesn’t work. Income disparity will always exist to some extent. Destroying a system rather than working with it (at least to some extent) is…
Here is a compilation of various media reports on the flurry of activity related to the pension reform legislation which followed from the leak of the basic outline to Katherine Gregg of the Projo. ( Summaries from David Klepper and Scott MacKay). 0. Ted Nesi had this to say after his review of the leaked…
Not to be too much of a stereotypical conservative, but I’m not 100% convinced that there’s actually any such thing as modernity. By this, I mean that I think there’s a good case to be made that the social forces and pressures experienced by the average schlub trying to live his or her life are…
Fresh from the taping of this week’s Newsmakers program for WPRI-TV (CBS 12), host Tim White tweets… Chafee says he may resurrect his controversial sales tax plan next year. Newsmakers (with myself, Ted Nesi and Ian Donnis) will be online soon.