Education
Commenter “Mike” points out a Jennifer D. Jordan article in today’s Projo that declares, if not dead, the idea of a statewide “funding formula” for education is now comatose…An unlikely coalition attempting to develop a statewide school-financing formula has broken apart just as the state grapples with a $600-million budget gap over two years, leaving…
Clarity on meaning is going to be absolutely crucial as competing visions are put forward to solve Rhode Island’s ills, and one pair of concepts that may have confusing overlaps in education policy is “statewide funding formula” versus a “statewide teacher contract.” The former phrase, as came out in my discussion yesterday with Representative Joe…
Dan Yorke reminded me about this story in today’s ProJo: Rhode Island has received mixed grades on the quality of its public education system, scoring poorly in two critical areas: student achievement and efforts to improve teacher quality, according to a national education magazine. Education Week’s “Quality Counts 2008” report card gave Rhode Island D’s…
Tiverton Superintendent Bill Rearick just handed out a budget packet. Here’s a key page: Obviously, the teachers’ increase is TBA and estimated. (Amy Mullen got up and asked how they can be considered if there’s no contract.) The bottom line is that, “as of January 8, 2008, the School Department is $149,011 over the spending…
Thomas Schmeling passes on a bit of information of which we’d all do well to take note: In December, I attended a meeting of the RI Board of Regents for Primary and Secondary Education. Parent/citizens were invited to comment on the question of how the teachers’ contracts affect public education. It was not a large…
Marc offered the substantive commentary yesterday, so all I’ve got in response to bad news about Rhode Island’s high schools is a quip (emphasis added): But proficiency rates among students statewide are stagnant. Despite an aggressive statewide high school reform effort, test scores of high school juniors have remained flat for the past several years,…
The RI Department of Education released the latest RI High School proficiency ratings. Not good: Only half of Rhode Island’s 58 public high schools are making enough progress in English and math, while the other half are failing to make adequate yearly progress — a slight dip from last year’s 54 percent. According to the…
My first reaction is to applaud efforts to make high school graduation requirements more stringent, but something in the execution always seems to cloud the picture: To ensure that a high school diploma in Rhode Island really means a student is prepared to graduate, education officials are developing tougher graduation requirements that would go into…
Also in yesterday’s Sakonnet Times is an article about the transitional pains at one of the Tiverton elementary schools that I mentioned last week. Principal Ed Fava ends the article on an interesting note, albeit by missing the more significant factor: Mr. Fava has one more stress to add to his list this month: a…
The school committee is looking for a temporary classroom because a school that’s being phased out as new construction completes after this year is substandard. The idea is, as soon as possible, to spread the children out in (and out of) a building that is too small to accommodate them, for health and noise reasons.…
