Believing the political worst of priests; spinning bad SAT results; the skill of being trainable; the strange market valuation in Unionland.
Many faces of big government: standardized tests; interest group buy-offs; government as marketing practice; and the United States of Panem.
Chafee shows his bond cards, Chicago exposes a metric discord, Rhode Island misses the skills-gap/business-cost lesson, QE3 misses the inflation nebula, and college majors miss the mark.
RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse notes the successes and failures of “Make It Happen RI,” with concern that the latter will prove to dominate.
Being right about district 1 messaging; PolitiFact prepares for the election; what’s a charter; being right about quantitative easing, First Amendment; and Bob Dylan says what he means.
Madness overseas and at home, lunacy in the Fed, the disconcerting growth of government, and the performance art of public-sector negotiations.
No deep theme, today, but bad British commentary, union priorities, stimulus as wishlist, the fame of Dinesh, and a response to Dan Yorke’s Congressional District 1 analysis.
Chicago teacher strike exposes communities’ strategies for working around government.
The topics of hope and hopelessness pervaded this weekend’s readings, from absurd labor rules in schools, to the likely outcome of Make It Happen, to Spencer Dickinson’s insider view, and then to Sandra Fluke.
The Chariho school district is the latest to test boundaries in search of budgetary relief from the teachers’ union machine.
The North Kingstown janitor controversy provides the latest evidence that taxpayers pay a substantial premium for the workers on their payroll, compared with the private sector.
A closer look at the RI Dept. of Education’s ranking of elementary schools suggests that parents and the public at large should consider their schools’ results with care.
A New York Times op-ed gets a little too close to the edge of politicizing math education, for Justin.
A new study of teenage unemployment, with an eye on public policy such as the minimum wage, suggests that we might be failing young adults.
Rhode Island taxpayers have been fleeing the state since 2003, bringing their money and productivity with them; the trend can definitely be reversed, but it’s a choice that residents will have to make.
Rhode Island’s regular public school districts are losing enrollment as a percentage of population under 18. The Current explores how each city and town is faring.
With Education Commissioner Deborah Gist recommending that the charter expire for one of Rhode Island’s charter school specifically on the grounds of its math scores, the question arises whether private-sector methods and non-union teachers might underperform their public-school peers. Comparing several charter high schools in RI shows that the lesson may be the opposite.
A Gallup poll finding American confidence in public schools at an all-time low also points to a disconnect between Americans’ opinions of various institutions and the priorities of government.
Although enrollment is down in almost every Rhode Island city and town, expenditures have continued to grow at several times the rate of inflation.
NEA Executive Director Robert Walsh may disagree with findings of deteriorating opinions of teachers’ unions, but technology and events of recent years suggest reevaluation may be in order.
Teacher unionization may work in smaller, less-diverse systems, but that’s proof that those systems are different, not that the United States should match them.
Continuing talk of the “skills gap” in RI’s labor force (with the call for more resources) further defines the extent to which advocates are on the wrong path entirely.
Justin liveblogs from a Tiverton School Committee that promises controversy over tactics used while advocating for particular budgets.
A jumble of news and commentary headlines leads Justin to wonder where the cause and effect lie in entitlement and nanny-statism.
The intricate machinations suggested by Gary Sasse in the “tax-the-rich” debate raise the question of whether RI can afford the risk (or the wait) involved with technocratic designs.
Is it the bull or the bear for Rhode Island? Justin suggests that if Rhode Island is to cease to be a drag on its region, the model has to be quite different.
A consulting group under contract with two of RI’s most-struggling cities is sufficiently confident in its turnaround estimates to proclaim a specific dollar amount; Justin suggests they just go ahead and find the money.
Justin writes live and extemporaneously from the Senate Finance Committee hearing on Gov. Chafee’s municipal relief package of legislation.
A pair of articles point to the use of statistics in public policy debates, and Justin encourages everybody not to lose sight of the points being made.
Objections that low state contributions to public institutions of higher education should mean low authority over their operational activities raise the question of what the relationship between the schools and the state actually is.
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