Education
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…
At last night’s East Providence GOP event, I had the opportunity to talk with State Representative and House Finance Committee member Jack Savage (R-East Providence) and turn Anchor Rising’s attempt to read the tea leaves with regards to the state budget deficit into a few concrete questions… Anchor Rising: Some recent comments made by public…
RI Future contributor Te boldly comes out in favor of including cross-district choice in the discussion of how to improve primary and secondary education in Rhode Island…Reforms like the cross-district choice plan former Providence School Board Member Julia Steiny proposed in a Projo article last week deserve a closer look. The plan would tie funds…
I don’t see how the education funding report that Marc just noted fits with all that’s come before into a sustainable plan for the future. We know that officials from both urban and suburban communities seem to have convinced themselves that the purpose of new state education “funding formula” is to provide a bigger share…
Here are the highlights of the preliminary Statewide School-Financing plan as proposed by a special advisory group: [T]he 14-member group, which included state Commissioner of Education Peter McWalters, Timothy C. Duffy, president of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, and Will Van Horne of…
Woonsocket Mayor Susan Menard has submitted a city budget that assumes a slight decrease in state education aid compared to last year. From Kia Hall Hayes in Saturday’s Projo…Mayor Susan D. Menard submitted a $115.7-million budget yesterday that calls for a 3.85-percent tax rate increase — only the third tax hike in the mayor’s 12-year…
I was reading an article in the current issue of City Journal by Sol Stern about the state of Catholic Schools in general and of New York City’s Rice High School in particular when I came across these sentences that startled me a bit…When I went unannounced into classrooms [at Rice High School], I encountered…
From The Economist: Few ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains. Simple, perhaps, but it has…