Education
Anybody who’s surprised that the teachers’ union in Central Falls has chosen to stare down mass firings and do battle rather than submit to some eminently reasonable additional responsibilities should think through the future scenarios of the game. With administrators now standing firm on key planks that were previously popular political catch phrases, the unions…
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton explains why middle-class students should not be seduced by a “life of the mind” in academia; unless they know what they’re getting into. Namely, post-graduate degrees and the academic life are set up in such a way that only the socially and financially privileged can really take…
Tom Ward writes on the success of Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley charter school in Cumberland, noting: “My concern, as the [Lincoln] superintendent (Georgia Fortunato), is that if they move into Fairlawn, Democracy Prep, people are going to think they are part of the Lincoln School Department and I think we are going to lose a…
You’d think some higher-up planner in the teachers’ union would begin advising members that it’s time to back off for a while for the purpose of public-impression rehabilitation. Apart from the wholly inappropriate imagery of using a candle-light vigil for a union action, the particulars of the circumstances in Central Falls are absolutely certain to…
Pink slips are flying at teachers in Woonsocket, East Providence and Lincoln and probably soon in your town, too. Two points: 1) State law dictates that all layoff notices be sent by March 1st. Why then and not later, say mid-May? Could it be that it is more politically beneficial for some to have teachers…
On the day that the news section of the Providence Journal acknowledged that abstinence-only sex-ed programs could potentially be successful, the editors of the Lifebeat section thought it necessary to rush to the defense of their modern kulturkampf with the headline, “Program blamed for rise in teen pregnancy” on the section’s front page. Of course,…
Julia Steiny presents some thoughts on how to hire great teachers, and this point caught my eye: [Delia Stafford, CEO of the Haberman Educational Foundation] adds that an interviewee might answer a question with: “‘What do they expect of me? The parents don’t show up and the kids don’t bring homework.’ If they tell us…
You may have read that North Smithfield students have been making significant gains: In a single year, the school’s test scores jumped more than 20 percentage points in reading — the largest improvement in the state — and more than 9 percentage points in math. Only Barrington, East Greenwich and Jamestown — the state’s highest-performing…
Having challenged the premises (and the math) of naysayers of abstinence-only education, I don’t find these results surprising: Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn’t preach saving sex until…
I was surprised to learn that Warwick is alone in “weighing” its students based on whether or not they have an IEP (Individual Education Plan). It goes like this: kid with normal educational needs = 1; kid with IEP = 1.5 (and sometimes 2). So, as the Warwick Beacon reported last week, “there are 10,482…