Education
David Anderson, candidate for State Representative in Rhode Island’s 4th District (Providence), and opponent of House Majority Leader Gordon Fox, has presented some concrete ideas for reforming public education in the state of Rhode Island…Given the large number of failing schools in Rhode Island I would not try to overhaul all of them at once.…
In “The Unspoken Roadblock”, Justin points out that, while ignoring the six letter complication in our education system, among other education reform measures, RIPEC has called for the state to implement a predictable formula for state financing of local schools RIPEC is not the first to use this phrase. The question that pops into my…
Something still isn’t making sense, for me, from a Friday article on RIPEC’s study of RI education: RIPEC has released a report entitled Education in Rhode Island 2008 that is chock-a-block with data, and it reinforces RIPEC’s standing message that lagging student performance does not reflect the size of the investment. And yet (emphasis added):…
None can doubt that this is part of the “value add” of the union structure, but it still strikes the ear as sinister: The organization opposing efforts to eliminate the state’s income tax has received two-thirds of its funding from large teachers unions based in Washington D.C. The Boston Herald reports in Wednesday’s editions that…
In a town that has witnessed nearly a 12% increase in property taxes in the past year, this sort of thing should get the union-busting, pink-slip-preparing blood boiling: [Johnston teachers] were a no-show on Monday at Winsor Hill School’s open house, an event where they typically meet parents and fill them in on their instructional…
The Rhode Island chapter of the 2007 State Teacher Policy Yearbook, issued by the National Council on Teacher Quality, pinpoints one of the major culprits responsible for the unacceptable state of Rhode Island’s education system: Rhode Island’s state government. [In my view, the two other culprits are School Committees and City/Town Councils.] And with apologies…
So the teachers head back to class today, in Tiverton, and although their contract is still under negotiation, there appears to be some movement. One of the reasons, however, is probably not a positive: … both sides agreed to keep the details of negotiations private, in a departure from the practice of publicly airing differences…
So a number of folks opined that the list of SAT scores for all fifty states that I posted the other day is meaningless because the states vary with respect to participation rates (PDF). Many states’ students don’t even take the SATs unless they want to go to certain higher-end universities on the East Coast,…
For the curious, I took a few obsessive-compulsive moments last night to compile the public school SAT data for all states. Rhode Island ranks 47th for every test except writing and 47th for total score. It’s interesting to note that states’ public school scores do not appear to correlate with private school scores, inasmuch as…
Congratulations to the National Education Association’s Pat Crowley for managing to push his story about Governor Carcieri’s Florida condos onto (astonishingly) the front page of the Providence Journal, which used it as a contextual gotcha against the backdrop of the union healthcare story. (Gee, I didn’t realize that the governor is rich!) Normally, I wouldn’t…