Education
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,…
Linda Borg’s Sunday Projo article, “In Providence, more collaboration than conflict,” weaves a tale of cooperation between the the city’s schools superintendent and its teachers’ union leadership: Call it a tale of two cities. While the superintendent and union president have been going at it in Central Falls, Brady and Smith have worked together on…
Cranston’s recent proposal to merge school sports is currently being weighed by the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. John Gilooly explains why allowing such a merger would set a bad precedent: The problem I see is that as an association of individual high schools, if the Principals Committee allows two high schools from the same city…
So how is the high-school in your community doing in general? To help you find the answer that question, I have created an index in the form of yet another two-dimensional plot. The x-axis represents information about improvements in reading proficiency, the y-axis information about declines in mathematics proficiency. The closer a district is to…
In a recent column, Julia Steiny ran through various ways in which fathers are, in general, distinguishable from mothers. Here’s a sample: … dads bring other huge contributions. For one thing, they play. That fatherly roughhousing that most kids love actually aids brain development. Play has been proven to enhance learning, and dads usually play…