Education
If President Obama is going to foist a “Swedish model” for bank reform on the American public, he should also toss in some Swedish-style public education reform while he’s at it…It may sound out of place in Sweden, that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare. But a sweeping reform of the school system has survived the…
So says Robert Flanders,chairman of the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education. Prison guard (and union member) James Petrella essentially agrees: James Petrella, a prison guard, has a few things in common with his son’s teachers. He is in a union, and he knows what it’s like to work without a contract…
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently lamented, “I think we are lying to children and families when we tell children that they are meeting standards and, in fact, they are woefully unprepared to be successful in high school and have almost no chance of going to a good university and being successful.” Do his remarks…
Back on the fourth, I mentioned Sen. Leonidas Raptakis’s legislation to suspend the Caruolo Act, which empowers school districts to sue their towns for more money. Saturday’s Providence Journal brought news that Governor Carcieri’s got a plan of his own: A proposal to suspend the law that empowers school districts to sue cities and towns…
East Providence Representative John Savage (R-East Providence) describes a philosophy of public education that is fundamentally self-contradictory. On one hand, there was the system back in the day — which cultivated those Americans who reached for the moon, invented the computer-driven society, and built history’s most dynamic economy: WHEN I BEGAN teaching in the late…
There’s a hearing at the State House today on an excellent bill (PDF) from newcomer Representative Roberto DaSilva (D, East Providence, Pawtucket): (a) No educational mandate shall be enacted or promulgated after the effective date of this chapter, unless the body enacting or promulgating the same shall first, after public hearing, determine the cost of…
With other contributors covering the state of the state and the hoopla in East Providence, I’m at the Tiverton School Committee meeting, to which I arrived in the midst of Superintendent Bill Rearick’s description of the various cuts to come for the next budget — you know, the one that increased by about $150,000 when…
This is being treated as a secondary matter, but in the long range it might be the more significant thread coming loose in East Providence: The state Labor Relations Board has decided to hold a formal hearing on a complaint by the city teachers union that the School Committee violated Rhode Island labor law by…
How much of life is phrasing? When it comes to the political battle with unions, the spats are like Abbot and Costello skits, which (for the young’ns) often hinged on a semantic misunderstanding. One must read to paragraph six to reach the punchline under the headline “Teachers deny killing science initiative” (emphasis added): The union…