Education

State Rep. Paul Crowley of Newport commends the special commission that has recommended a new school-funding formula, but has some questions: Does it make sense to invest millions of additional dollars in a system that has remained structurally unchanged? Do we need, and can we afford, more than 35 school districts to educate about 120,000…

I’m not 100% sure what to make of this just yet, but according to the specific numbers in the House budget plan (H5300, Article 21, substitute A), many Rhode Island communities will get less education aid, in terms of absolute dollars, than they did last year. Here are exact numbers from the text of the…

From Andrea Panciera of the Projo’s 7-to-7 newsblog…The head of the House Finance Committee early this afternoon revealed some of the panel’s proposals to deal with the state’s budget crunch. Among them are… “Level funding” the total amount of education aid to cities and towns, which means eliminating the 3 percent education-aid increase across the…

I’m not just being a contrarian when I say that I have concerns about this legislation: The Rhode Island Senate has approved legislation creating the “Lindsay Ann Burke Act,” an effort to protect those most vulnerable to dating violence by calling on schools to provide dating violence education for middle school and high school students.…

Chariho school board member (and Rhode Island College iconoclast) Bill Felkner has an interesting op-ed in today’s Projo expressing concern that some of the information being produced to meet No-Child-Left-Behind requirements isn’t reliable…The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) uses the Teacher Certification System to tabulate the types and numbers of employees at every Rhode…

The title above is not snarky or ironic. At least as far away as Detroit, Rhode Island is famous for its charter schools, according to nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce… In 1999, Doug Ross and his colleagues made an outrageous “90-90” promise. In 2007, they would graduate at least 90 percent of ninth-graders going through…

According to the testing results provided by the Rhode Island Department of Education, two of Providence’s top three middle schools (out of nine total) are charter schools, the Times2 Academy, and the Paul Cuffee school. Times2 and Paul Cuffee both have over half of their students proficient in reading and over one-third proficient in math.…

State assessments of all Rhode Island public elementary and middle schools are available today from the Rhode Island Department of Education website. The final summary classifies each school as “high performing”, “moderately performing”, or as making “insufficient progress”, but the intermediate data presented suggests that the final classifications have more to do with some obscure…