In June 2019 — two and a half years ago, when Rhode Island students now in their senior years were finishing their freshman years — the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins School of Education published a ground-shaking report on systemic failure in the Providence public school system. The first “challenge” the authors emphasized was this:
There is an exceptionally low bar for instruction and low expectations for students. Very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited – most especially in the middle and high schools. Multiple stakeholders emphasized that the state, district, and business community have very low expectations for student learning. Many district team members and community partners broke down in tears when describing this reality, which classroom observations verified
Since that time (with officials quick to blame COVID-19 and the shutdowns and restrictions that they instituted), the percentage of students scoring “proficient” on the state’s standardized test (with results released last Thursday) dropped in Providence from 17.2 to 14.1 in English and from 11.9 to 6.8 in math.
Math SAT results suggesting preparedness for college dropped from 14.8% to 13.4%. Intriguingly, however, English proficiency increased from 25.5% to 29.7%, suggesting that closing schools and imposing restrictions when they’re not closed might actually improve students’ learning in this area… at least when the results are as abysmal as they are in Providence.
Given these facts, one might expect the head of the city’s teachers union to be circumspect about trying to make the feelings of adult employees an area of focus. Anybody expecting that, however, doesn’t know Maribeth Calabro. Thursday night, she took to Twitter to do the opposite:
“Living in fear” “Intimidation”, “Retaliation”, “Abuse”, “Toxic”, “Poison”, “Lies”, “Bullying”- just some quotes from Ts during two school visits this week. 1st year Ts looking to get out two months into school. I have NEVER in my tenure heard it so bad-
In fairness to people who are newly entering into this corner of public debate, one could wonder whether Calabro’s complaint is meant to help explain the results that the district is seeing, but this is standard union rhetoric, and it’s always been like this. Notice Tiverton teacher union leader Amy Mullen chiming in that things are “Not much different in my district. Just awful.”
Calabro’s statement is not a call for cooperation in the spirit of “we’ve got to fix this.” It’s merely an exercise in blame shifting as the union seeks to protect (and profit from) the rigid approach to contracting that has produced poor results in Providence and across the state, as well as the deep involvement of the unions in Rhode Island politics, which makes any sort of reform or improvement absolutely impossible.
For more indication that perspectives are skewed, scroll down the thread. One high school teacher expresses gratitude that her school administration maintains a lower stress level, to which Central High School Literacy Coach James Scott responds:
It is hard to achieve peak performance when stressed out. This applies to students and teachers. This is why we work to create a positive environment for all stakeholders
After some respectful back and forth with Mr. Scott, I don’t doubt that he’s doing his best, and all things considered, a positive work environment is preferable, but only 12% of SAT-taking students in his school are prepared for college English, and the math scores are so low that that the state will only report proficiency as “<5%.” If this is “peak performance,” maybe some stress is justified.
Scott makes the reasonable observation that other factors come into play, but maybe Rhode Island and (especially) Providence are past the point that complaints and finger-pointing should be acceptable. Fundamentally, schools don’t exist to provide careers for adults. They exist to educate children, and if they’re failing (utterly failing), then those adults have to take responsibility or acknowledge that the system of which they’re a part cannot do the job and let the funding go elsewhere.
[Open full post]
Are we even allowed to express such opinions? It seems more common for even conservatives to verbalize disclaimers like, “it was a horrible thing that happened and people should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” and so on.
[Open full post]Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all. …
On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power.
In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax. The story of that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration.
Weird. The attacker doesn’t look like a suburban parent upset about critical race theory and transgender ideology in the schools. Presumably this is the next step from lawyers throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars phase.
[Open full post]
For weeks, John DePetro and I have been discussing Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s response (or lack thereof) to the protesters upset that they’ve lost their jobs based on a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 that he implemented, and they had their closest interaction yet over the weekend.
What strikes me, in this incident and generally, is the governor’s lack of acknowledgement or compassion for the effects of his order. Even if one considers it justified, it ought to have been a difficult decision, which ought to inspire a level of sympathy. Otherwise, the impression is that the governor’s attitude is that people who lose their jobs because they have qualms about a still-new medicine and doubts about the benefits of their getting it deserve whatever they get — as if the emergence of COVID and our government’s reaction thereto (whether appropriate or overdone) aren’t tragic on every level. Maybe that’s an acceptable attitude for a wag on Twitter, but from the governor?
In an awkward moment, McKee asks organizer Paul Rianna whether he is a nurse and has no response when Rianna says a CNA (certified nursing assistant). Why ask the question if he had no follow-up? It is as if McKee was hoping the answer would be, “no,” so he could snidely dismiss Rianna as simply a political activist.
This attitude of dismissiveness and condescension continues when the governor walks away and Sgt. Pete Philomena of the state police steps in to quiet an Unmask Our Children protester. Coalition Radio captured the interaction in this video:
Philomena looks like the person who was instrumental in initiating the conflict that resulted in the arrest of two protesters outside McKee’s home in early October. Notably, one of the arrested men in that incident stated multiple times that the officer did not identify himself, and in this video Philomena makes a point of saying, “I’m identifying myself.”
In communicating the need for the protesters to be respectful and orderly, Philomena is only doing his job, but he conveys a level of disrespect that we would never see if, say, the protesters were from Black Lives Matter. Picking up on this attitude, Rianna comments to another officer after Philomena says “I’m done” and walks away, “I’m not entitled to be dismissed. I’m a grown adult.”
That’s exactly the point. For our ruling elite, particularly in the Democrat Party and the news media, there is a class of people who simply don’t count. Perhaps those of us in that class have to be tolerated (for now) and permitted to sit quietly in the corner with our little signs, but we’re on a hair-trigger to be arrested and silenced, as indicated by Sgt. Philomena’s lecture in this video as well as the social media giants’ speed to censor and deplatform us and the attorney general of the United States’ likening parents protesting school committee decisions as “domestic terrorists.”
Featured image by Coalition Radio on YouTube.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- North Kingstown’s open secret behind closed doors
- McKee’s blindspot with mandate protests
- Does anybody care about test scores?
Featured image by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
I don’t travel much, particularly by airplane, but when I do, I’ve usually used Southwest Airlines. That habit developed for a number of reasons, with a key one being that unassigned seating seemed to me a touch of randomness that would dissuade would-be terrorists. (Granted, this felt like a more-pressing consideration some years ago.)
Now I’ve got another reason:
“We’re heading east at about seven or eight miles per hour,” the pilot stated. “Clear visibility, mostly clear skies, about 77 degrees. Thanks for coming out and flying Southwest Airlines, welcome aboard, and remember, ‘let’s go, Brandon.’”
Of course, an AP reporter on the flight reported on the incident and outrage mobs kicked into gear, so Southwest may very well ruin the good vibe, but for the moment, a Brandonophile can still hope.
[Open full post]
There are two ways a contractor who’s trying to get a job with a public school district can respond when she hears that the school committee did not approve a proposal to hire her. She can decline to comment and then seek to address the concerns of the hesitant school committee members, both in private and in public. Or she can do what Simona Simpson-Thomas did when members of the Bristol Warren School Committee expressed concern that she might not be a fit for the role they were trying to fill. From Ethan Hartley’s report from the front page of the Bristol Phoenix:
Before responding to this newspaper, she watched an online recording of the Oct. 25 meeting, where two Bristol Warren Regional School Committee members — Sheila Ellsworth and Tara Thibaudeau — said they were not voting in opposition to the concept of project-based learning, but out of concern for Simpson-Thomas being the vendor.
Once she had seen the meeting, Simpson-Thomas, who wears her outward appearance to the world as a black woman with “a badge of honor,” had plenty to say.
“Absolutely, it was racism,” she said, stating that she was not invited to speak before the committee during the meeting, nor was she contacted ahead of time to address any questions regarding her qualifications or how the professional development work would be conducted.
Hartley doesn’t mention whether Simpson-Thomas could easily have known her proposal would be on the committee’s agenda, but it is, in fact, there: “Requisition to spend over $5000 at the Mt Hope High School for a Project Based Learning Program.”
A contractor hoping to collect $7,000 for 10 professional development sessions over a school year should probably be expected to know when the critical vote is happening and to be present for the discussion. Alternately, if she is somehow surprised, one might expect her to request the opportunity to make the case for her services, rather than using the news media in other people’s community to call them racists.
Indeed, her reaction to the news does much to affirm the concerns that Ellsworth and Thibaudeau expressed about Simpson-Thomas’s website. In his article, Hartley characterizes Freedom Dreams as “an advocacy organization founded and led by Simpson-Thomas,” as if it is a side project of hers, but she does not appear to have any other website for contracting, and her LinkedIn page does not mention any occupation outside of her advocacy organization.
Similarly, Hartley quotes the organization’s mission of “realizing the dream of freedom by building intentional, innovative and sustainable systems designed to empower Black and Brown excellence,” without noting that programs designed for “all students” are nowhere mentioned. He certainly doesn’t report on Freedom Dreams’ vision of “a new liberatarian education system where marginalized youth are empowered to disrupt the same systems that have failed them.”
To be sure, many of us agree that Rhode Island’s school system could use a little disruption, but such language might alert Bristol Phoenix readers to the possibility that there’s something more intended, here, than non-ideological best practices for teachers.
We can (and should) debate whether Simpson-Thomas’s area of emphasis ought to be a priority for the limited time of teachers in a school with 87% white student enrollment, but the demand is for much more than that. We’re being asked to ignore what is plainly before our eyes and to believe that the desires of “the community” are not expressed by a majority of people they’ve elected to sit on their school committee, but rather by whoever it was behind the scenes that let Simpson-Thomas think the vote of elected officials was a mere formality.
[Open full post]
This whiteboard video describing Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s explanation of how stupidity was to blame for the rise of Nazis in Germany seems highly relevant to our current experience.
[Open full post]
Sometimes RI’s most essential problem (the failure of its insider class to recognize reality) comes at us from all directions. One example is the call from Joseph Paolino to use the feds COVID gift to Rhode Island government “to change our economy.” How?
Let’s look at what our state really needs and invest in them — things like high-speed rail, like they have in Europe and Asia, that will get us to Boston in 20 minutes and New York in 90 minutes and reduce emissions. This is a real possibility that we’ve talked about for decades and now have the opportunity to make it a reality. Let’s invest in green energy, life sciences, education, affordable housing, and big community projects like expanding access to sewers and municipal drinking water in more rural areas like Jamestown, Scituate and Burrillville, to name a few.
The wish list grows from there: an aquarium in Providence, doubling the number of union teachers in the state. The state’s $1.2 billion windfall is a lot of money, but it’s not enough to everything Paolino lists.
Just catch up on basic infrastructure without raising new revenue. It’s that simple. Unfortunately, our insider class wants to be able to play with its big ideas at our expense.
[Open full post]
Mike Stanton is a former Providence Journal reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Connecticut. He’s also something of a case study in how Twitter has exposed the ideological nature and lack of objective intellectual rigor in journalism these days.
This time, the evidence he provides for this proposition has to do with one of Rhode Island’s more-famous residents:
Explosive new allegations against Michael Flynn, who continues to be an embarrassment to Rhode Island. When does @universityofri revoke his honorary degree?
Somehow it still surprises me that a journalism professor would demand concrete consequences in response to “explosive allegations.” When I expressed that opinion to Stanton, he replied:
The body of his work before these allegations seems sufficient, and URI has already weighed it. He was also on tape the other day comparing Dr. Fauci to Dr. Mengele.
Note how, in Stanton’s mind, insulting Anthony Fauci (probably related to the now-infamous puppy experiments) belongs with accusations of corruption as reasons for a public university to seek to embarrass somebody by revoking an honorary degree. When I suggested to Stanton that he’s putting his political opinion above principles of evidence and skepticism, he responded as follows and ceased conversing:
Spare me your faux outrage. What doesn’t outrage you reveals your true principles.
I asked him to show me where he expressed outrage about evidence that Hunter Biden has made money selling access to his father, and he did not respond. More broadly, readers should note that Stanton was the one in the outraged position. I was offering a critique of his “faux outrage.”
Stanton started out by promoting what he himself termed as “explosive allegations” as if allegations are sufficient to justify a call for action from a public institution of higher education, and he ended up asserting that anybody who doesn’t share his condemnatory approach — which, I contend, should be the position of every journalist — is himself or herself morally questionable.
That is the attitude of a town gossip, not a journalism professor at a major university. Unfortunately, the weight of the evidence seems increasingly to suggest that Stanton is nothing if not representative of his profession.
[Open full post]