Education
Two stories in last week’s ProJo have been jangling around in my head. Then Justin noted Deborah Gist’s “anger” over kids not wanting to go to college and, correctly, pointed out that college ain’t for everyone. I agree, especially when the value of a B.A. seems to be less and less while we pay more…
It’s worth your time, if you haven’t already read through the Sunday Providence Journal article about RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist’s elevation of the state’s standardized test requirement for prospective education students to the highest in the country. The college and university estimates of how many students would miss the mark are head shakers, but…
A “summit” addressing the high-school drop-out rate in Rhode Island has gotten some attention, as the topic certainly deserves. Talk about students’ coming to see their teachers as the “enemy” rightly made the Providence Journal article and the WRNI audio report, but it may be that a statement of pro forma outrage from the education…
On the agenda at Wednesday night’s meeting of the Westerly School Committee, in the words of Victoria Goff of the Westerly Sun, was “[finalizing] the termination of Schools Superintendent Steven Welford’s two-month employment with the school district”. Mr. Welford had begun a three-year contract as Westerly’s superintendent of schools in July of this year. Goff’s…
It is unequivocally unacceptable that a mere fifth of Rhode Island’s high school students can achieve proficiency on the science version of the NECAP test. I’m especially incensed by the fact that Tiverton was one of only two districts in Rhode Island to lose ground at every grade level. Johnston was the other, and while…
I hadn’t intended to attend tonight’s school committee meeting in Tiverton, but I saw on the agenda that they’d be discussing the item on the floor today: full-day kindergarten, rather than the current half day. Superintendent Bill Rearick put the additional cost at $223,953 per year, although he noted that, with next year’s financial difficulty…
Dan Yorke has been talking about the East Providence school administration’s push for a pay-for-performance system for teachers, and one teacher from the district called in from her house in Barrington to explain that that sort of pay schedule doesn’t work in her profession. Teaching is cooperative, you see, meaning that unlike other professions (apparently)…
I share Julia Steiny’s aversion to teacher “bumping,” of course, but her weekend column brings out the downright philosophical difference that exists in public education, as distinct from private-sector work: A single regulation from the state, effective the moment each contract expires, would allow schools to get the best teachers they can, when vacancies occur.…
Actually, I’d argue that no knowledge is useless, although some is worse than useless. But Walt Gardner’s observation (which does not raise uselessness, by the way) is right on the money: THE NEWS that employment opportunities for college graduates have dramatically shrunk in today’s recession comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following…
My latest video blog is about open negotiations, drawing on material from Tiverton, but applicable elsewhere. I’d be especially interested in feedback on this one, inasmuch as I tried some new tricks (in an effort to throw myself at the learning curve) and am still trying to get a sense of appropriate content for the…