Education
It looks like the effort has begun, in earnest, to invalidate pending graduation requirements, rather than acknowledge that Rhode Island’s current way of doing elementary and secondary education isn’t working: Thousands of incoming high school juniors may be unable to graduate in June 2012 because of tougher graduation requirements, and state education officials are beginning…
One wonders how the side of the culture war that proclaims itself “pro-science” will adjust its thinking in response to this finding (emphasis added): The participants’ mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI],…
Last night Monique and Tony Cornetta talked, on the Matt Allen Show, about Iran, teachers’ unions, and partisan ethics. Stream by clicking here, or download it.
Faced with an insurmountable $13 million cut in state and local funding, the Warwick School Committee voted to freeze pay and impose a 20% health care co-pay for all of its employees last night. Before the vote, School Committee Chairman Chris Friel stressed that these are not actions the district wants to take but it…
To be honest, I don’t follow help wanted ads for teaching positions closely enough to know whether this is really unique, but something about the wording of this one, printed in last Sunday’s Providence Journal, caught my eye: RI Certified Teachers, to Substitute per diem for growing K-9 public charter school. The idea of advertising…
It may be that I’m just more cynical than Marc, but with respect to Race to the Top, I can’t help but muse that government reforms always sound good — otherwise, politicians wouldn’t try to sell them. Suppose that the goal of education policy, at the national level, is to increase the federal government’s role…
Marc and Matt discussed (independently) immigration and education on last night’s Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.
So, in the Race to the Top sweepstakes (Round 2), Rhode Island has made the final 19, which is sorta like making the NHL or NBA playoffs where about half of the “regular season” competitors qualify. Some of the key components included in RI’s application include recent reforms like the passage of a school funding…
Each year, Newsweek publishes a list of “America’s Best High Schools.” Their criterion is rather limited, having to do with the number of students at public schools who take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or Cambridge (AICE) tests, but it is a reasonable snapshot of the emphasis that a school places on excelling. The baseline for…
Her column is cast in terms of preventing summer “learning loss” among students, but Julia Steiny’s subject is really the degree to which schools have conflated “schooling” and “learning” — making children with an aversion to the former avoid activities that are explicitly the latter, whether during the summer or school-year off hours. … institutions…