Education
I was a few minutes late to tonight’s Tiverton School Committee meeting, and it was already underway. The high school library is pretty well filled, which means probably about 30-40 people, an apparent mix of students, teachers, and residents. The topic: closing the high school. Of course, when the union is looking for a juicy…
Monique and Matt talked Central Falls and Chafee on last night’s Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.
The raging blame debate, when it comes to public-school students’ performance, made an appearance in RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist’s online chat for the Providence Journal: Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You…
A look at the papers today gives quite a little snapshot of the sorry state of education in Rhode Island. Central Falls is firing it’s high school teachers as a way to deal with a chronically under-performing school (with the blessing of the State Education Commissioner Gist and U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan) because…
Reading a couple different articles (and the comments) prompted me to go looking for the Rhode Island statute that required teacher steps. Here it is (16-7-29): § 16-7-29 Minimum salary schedule established by community. – (a) Every community shall establish and put into full effect by appropriate action of its school committee a salary schedule…
The district-by-district count data, presented in yesterday’s post, on changes between the 8th and 11th grades in the numbers of students proficient in reading and math needs to be compared to a measure of opportunities for change, in order to be useful for purposes of analysis and accountability. Depending on whether a change in number…
Every working Rhode Islander, and all of those looking for work, can see the disconnection of Central Falls union rhetoric: “We still hold that this termination of the entire faculty is a violation of the contract and contrary to state law and federal law as well,” [teachers union President Jane] Sessums said. “This is a…
As circumstances deteriorate, it’s instructive to observe the varying reactions and strategies for handling them. In Tiverton, the established order, so to speak, has redoubled its efforts to keep the negative focus on Tiverton Citizens for Change in the hopes that people won’t notice that the plans for improvement bear a striking resemblance to the…
Andrew has inspired me to hop on his coattails concerning the way we look at NECAPs (so read his post first). Basically, I’ve been putting off posting how we can look at the same NECAP data in two ways. As Andrew explains, the “value-added” method would be to follow the cohorts (ie; the same group…
The graph at the bottom of this post, compiled from the two most recent years of New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) proficiency scores, contains the information you are probably used to seeing for describing the state of education in the cities and towns of Rhode Island. And if you are familiar with the data…