Education
Columnist Mark Patinkin has been focusing on the teacher dispute in Central Falls for weeks, now, but an essay on teachers who (quietly) disagree with the union’s activities brings to the fore a central reason that many of us have a constitutional aversion to unions: “As a C.F. High School teacher I agree with you,”…
In a column devoted to a preemptive strike against the guidelines being floated by the impending Common Core State Standard Initiative, Cato’s Andrew Coulson points in a different direction. The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of…
On last night’s Matt Allen Show, Andrew described his series of recent posts tracing standardized test scores across Rhode Island. Stream by clicking here, or download it.
The same method that was applied to the changes between 8th an 11th grade NECAP results, to try to get a measure of the performance of Rhode Island’s high-school systems taking into account the initial proficiency-level of the students, can also be applied to changes occurring between other grades. The chart below is a 2D-index…
Coming out of last Thursday’s State Board of Regents for Education meeting at the West Warwick High School Auditorium, if I had to place a bet, I would have to put my money down in favor of a “funding formula” for distributing state education aid being passed this session, probably a plan that is very…
Reviewing The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand (subscription required), James Piereson raises a number of interesting concepts related to higher education, but this is perhaps the most fundamental: The liberal arts at their best, he says, disseminate “knowledge that exposes the contingency of present arrangements,” a surprising formulation coming from an author who takes…
Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds all right-wing conservative to say, but it’s difficult not to fear for the future of our country with this sort of thing in the news: Students and activists have staged demonstrations in recent months at public colleges across California to protest deep budget cuts that have led to steep…
It seems there is some confusion over the latest page in the Central Falls High School story. The ProJo headline reads, “School chief, teachers agree to resume talks.” There is mention of both “sides” returning to “the table,” which is some of the common parlance used when it comes to contract negotiations. In the ProJo…
Cumberland has approved a plan designed to entice top step teachers into retirement for the purpose of saving cash. If [20] teachers at the 10th salary step took retirement, it would save nearly $500,000, according to the board’s estimate….The idea is for teachers at the first salary step to take the place of those at…
It’s interesting to see the political shifts of Catholic college students assessed on a scale of agreement with Catholic doctrine: On pro-life issues, the results indicated a “mixed pattern,” it said. A majority of Catholic students leave college disagreeing that abortion should be legal but they number fewer than those who entered with that opinion,…