NBC10 Wingmen: Debating Deborah Gist

During her six years in Rhode Island, Deborah Gist said she never once went digging for quahogs. This is just one of the ways the embattled commissioner of education, who is leaving at the end of June to become superintendent of her hometown school district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, never really warmed up to the Ocean State.

I’ve already graded Gist’s tenure in Rhode Island, but Jon Brien and I debated her legacy on NBC10 News Conference this weekend. Brien says organized labor was too powerful for her to fully implement her anti-teacher agenda, while I say overall public education improved even though Gist’s focus on more tests for students and teachers weren’t the areas the state needed the most help.

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