Education
The New York Times article doesn’t claim a trend, instead following the efforts of a single teacher, Lorrie McNeill, with a class of gifted students, but one can be sure that the positive article in the publication formerly known as “the newspaper of record” will encourage more teachers to follow her lead. What McNeill has…
The Providence Teacher’s union isn’t happy with new hiring rules put in affect this summer, according to this WRNI report from Elisabeth Harrison (h/t). The nut of it is, of course, the removal of seniority as the major factor in determining who gets hired. As Harrison reports: An order from the State Department of Education…required…
We have to give the woman some time to build up momentum (or not), but per Julia Steiny’s column today, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is still in the phase of offering vague goals: 1. “Ensure educator excellence”: Recruit, support and evaluate highly effective teachers and leaders. 2. “Accelerate school performance”: Engage broad community support, especially…
David makes a perspicacious comment to my post on the item in the teachers’ contract that the school committee approved in January that effectively extended the contract for an additional year because the deadline for notification of intention to negotiate had already passed: Actually, justin, you may be on to something. Union officials act as…
Developments in Woonsocket are fascinating: Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist has warned School Committee members that they could be sued and Supt. Robert J. Gerardi could have his superintendent’s certification questioned if the committee follows through on its threat to defy state rulings on hiring new staff for its literacy program. … She warned the…
Given recent developments, I thought I’d review my notes and the audio from the Tiverton School Committee meeting at which the members approved a largely retroactive contract. Several townsfolk warned the committee that approving the contract in the current economy was reckless. I specifically suggested that, former Vice Chair Mike Burk’s suggestion to “hold the…
State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is still in what may be termed a discovery phase of her new job — working her way through Rhode Island’s abysmal statistics. To the extent that process is made public, she’s already doing important work, and today, she’s put our low SAT scores on the front page of the…
As I pulled up to the Tiverton High School at the usual time for a school committee meeting, I saw two of my Tiverton Citizens for Change co-conspirators leaving. The committee scheduled an executive session for 5:00 p.m. and had worked through all of tonight’s interesting public discussions before 7:00. The key results, as conveyed…
Like fairness, objectivity is a generally positive principle that needn’t be — shouldn’t be — the guiding principle in every circumstance. One circumstance in which a degree of subjectivity is appropriate, applied to a collection of objective criteria is the hiring of teachers, whatever their argument might currently be in Providence: The union claims that…
There’s already been much talk about the Providence Journal‘s front-page story about teachers’ paying out of pocket for classroom supplies. It’s a story we’ve heard and a discussion we’ve had before. And it’s not a tale unique to teachers. As a carpenter, I could rewrite this complaint in terms of my trade: “When I walked…