Education

Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Peter McWalters is the keynote speaker at an international education conference being held in the United Arab Emirates this week…The first-of-its-kind School Reform conference being organised by The College of Education at the United Arab Emirates University in cooperation with Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award for…

Meaghan Wims of the Newport Daily News has the details of the Portsmouth’s school committee’s budget proposal for next year…The School Department is proposing a $33.4 million budget for the 2008 fiscal year, which begins July 1. The tight spending plan represents a $1.3 million increase over current-year spending and falls within the state’s 5.25…

Fellow Cranstonian Kiersten Marek of Kmareka offers some poignant commentary on Mayor Michael Napolitano’s proposal to raise taxes in Cranston by 5.25% while giving the school department a 0% increase…This act has marked you, Mayor Napolitano. In my mind, it has marked you as someone who deliberately does unreasonable things in order to provoke a…

Has Lawrence E. Purtill, president of the National Education Association’s Rhode Island chapter, figured out a magical way to increase government spending without increasing taxes? The text of his letter to the editor in Monday’s Projo certainly implies that he has…If The Journal wants to take bold action [on improving educaton], it should join with…

Not being as well educated on matters of taxation and school financing as Andrew, what strikes me about proposals that include school busing is the way in which progressive strategies wind up harming those whom they are ostensibly (cynically?) promoted as helping. In constructing a society — an environment — in which individuals, families, and…

Over at RI Future, State Representative David Segal (D-Providence) endorses Stephen Alves-style school regionalization, which goes beyond consolidating administration, and could involve sending students from schools in currently high-performing districts to schools in lower performing ones…Pick up a few more tens-of-millions by consolidating the schools, with the added benefit of increasing equity and socioeconomic diversity,…

Did you know that Rhode Island spends more than twice as much per pupil on special education students than on non-special education students? From Jennifer Jordan in today’ Projo… It costs about $22,893 a year to educate a special-education student in Rhode Island compared with $9,269 a year for a regular-education student.Yet despite the fact…

Over at RI Future, Matt Jerzyk equates improving education in Rhode Island to increasing the amount spent on education in Rhode Island…In an article about how a Rhode Island tech company was just bought by Microsoft, it is asserted that we need greater school spending not tax cuts to grow and attract business. After all,…

In response to my post on RI’s education problems, Klaus makes the following request and commentary: … could you please explain to me again how eliminating the teachers’ unions would improve education? I mean, I’m just a stupid socialist (according to a lot of commenters here), so could you big, bright conservatives please enlighten me?…

Every time I come across such news as this, I wonder what it’s going to take to get people incensed: … a new report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called “Leaders and Laggards,” analyz[es] the performance of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report found that four New England states —…