Education
As it happened, the Monday following a weekend during which my interest was piqued by a study making claims about, as the title states, “Explaining Recent Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States: The Contribution of Abstinence and Improved Contraceptive Use,” Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters announced that a particular abstinence-only curriculum had…
Heritage of Rhode Island has overcome intitial objections put forward by the RI Dep’t of Education and has received approval to implement it’s “Right Time, Right Place” abstinence education program in RI’s schools. The key concession seems to be that the “only” of the heretofore proposed “Abstinence-only” program has been dropped. “Heritage’s ‘Right-Time, Right-Place’ curriculum…
I post to defend the honor of Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association’s Executive Director Robert Walsh. This is the headline of his op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s Projo…Robert A. Walsh Jr.: Straight-party option serves R.I.Yet beneath the headline, the op-ed makes no claim of the sort…Second, [Edward Achorn] implied that public-employee unions…
I found this line, from Ethan Wingfield, particularly interesting: Brown is one of the most relaxed institutions there is. Students can drop out of a course on the last day of the semester and get the class erased from their records. Perhaps the key would have been to pitch a grade-inflation angle to keeping the…
Part I in this series discussed how there is an important distinction between “tolerance” and “freedom.” Justin, in a subsequent email to me, described it this way: Tolerance asserts authority; freedom implies autonomy, perhaps even precedence. Part II in this series noted how both the role of religion in the public square of our society…
In a comment to the Part I posting, Joe Mahn writes: …From my simple perspective and I think in the context of the actual events of the time religious freedom meant that no State in the Union under the Constitution could force, by law, any citizen to participate in, confess, or otherwise practice any particular…
Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of our Western Civilization tradition? Or, has the relativism of multiculturalism dumbed it all down to where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith?…
Do you remember how the teachers’ unions whined when the latest Education Partnership report came out? As they did with last year’s report, union officials called the study “an attack on teacher unions” and “an attempt to gut collective bargaining in Rhode Island.” Union officials also questioned why The Education Partnership did not include them…
Within the past week, my wife had to drop my niece off at Tiverton High School (of which town both we and my brother-in-law are relatively new residents), and she returned with this commentary: “That school is a dump. I hope they improve it before our children have to go there.” It is with that…
Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo reports on yet another study showing Rhode Island not doing so well, the College Board’s yearly analysis of SAT Scores. Here are the New England states ranked by math scores… Massachusetts 524 New Hampshire 524Vermont 519National Average 518Connecticut 516Rhode Island 502 Maine 501…and by reading scores…New Hampshire 520Massachusetts 513…