Education
Look, higher education is important to the state of Rhode Island, and it would be even more so if the state were institutionally capable of creating an environment that created jobs that would attract our highly educated temporary visitors to stay in the state. But colleges and universities should start considering how their mixed message…
I recently found a Web site of teacher salaries by state, alongside other statistics. The Web site provides charts comparing teacher salaries to such things as median house price, median household income, and cents of benefit per dollar of salary, but expanding the data set a bit to include a representative standardized test result led…
So, test scores for the science NECAPs are out, and the main topics of conversation have been: That Portsmouth leads the pack, with 51.7% proficiency in grade 11, after having rearranged its science curriculum dramatically. That demographic gaps in scores have increased. That scores overall have nudged up. Of course, by nudging, I mean about…
One begins to feel that those testing merit pay for teachers are deliberately missing the point — at least by the time their findings filter down through the mainstream media. Here’s the latest: Offering big bonuses to teachers failed to raise students’ test scores in a three-year study released Sept. 21 that calls into question…
Two articles in last Sunday’s Providence Journal — here and here — describe circumstances with which my family is very familiar. With the exception of math and science, teaching jobs are difficult to come by in Rhode Island, yet institutions of higher education continue to churn out graduates. The initial problem, in my estimation, is…
The bottom line of Race To The Top, as was No Child Left Behind (‘fess up, leftie friends who oppose NCLB, that program name is you and you’d have supported NCLB if it hadn’t been proposed by a Republican president) is an effort to increase academic achievement in this state. Whether, as Marc wonders, the…
“I’m wary of Race to the Top.” So says Lincoln Chafee, as he vaguely expresses concern over the long term state and municipal obligations that he implies could be generated by federal Race to the Top money. Except there really aren’t any because the goal of Race to the Top is to accelerate current (ie;…
… though in the case of the Wellesley Middle School, the field trip in question inexplicably included student observation (which turned into something more for some of the boy students; thus, generating keen attention from outside of the school district to this field trip and an apology [PDF] from the superintendent) of the service of…
While we all follow the horse races of election season, it’s worth turning our eyes now and then to the issues that our elected representatives will decide. Toward that end, consider Bill Costello’s argument against the government monopoly of education: The current public education system is not preparing Americans to succeed in the increasingly competitive…
According to Providence Business News’s Alyssa Foley, Rhode Island is precisely the middle of the country when it comes to student performance, and its reform efforts don’t encourage those who grade such things: Rhode Island came in at No. 25 in student performance in a ranking of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.…