Happy birthday, Providence Biltmore – the downtown landmark celebrates its 90th birthday tonight. Flo Jonic of RINPR marks the occasion with a great feature story, reporting, among other gems, “In the early years, the chef grew vegetables and raised roosting hens on the roof of the hotel so that celebrities like Benny Goodman could have fresh eggs.”
Speaking of downtown landmarks, the New York Times had another RI story yesterday … this one, also written by a Rhode Islander (Elizabeth Abbott is a former Projo reporter and URI prof), was about the Superman building and the Arcade.
And still speaking of downtown landmarks, we’re looking forward to the movie about the history of Haven Brothers. It could be argued that the mobile diner is the godfather of the food truck trend sweeping Providence and other hip cities across the country. (Portland will be so mad if we try to lay claim to starting the food truck trend!)
One more point about downtown: whenever I walk around the Jewelry District I can’t help thinking of how lucky the city is that it gets to double the size of its urban core. It’s a once-in-a-millennium opportunity that every other city in America would relish. It’s too bad local headlines are so often about our local cities literally starving to death because there are worlds of potential within them.
Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, the godmother of charter schools in Rhode Island, is recommending closing a Providence charter school for failing to educate its students in math. The school was originally named Textron/Chamber of Commerce Academy. So much for the private sector being able to do it better…
Speaking of the 1 percent, we’re also looking forward to Ted Nesi’s new show “Executive Suite.” It’s sure to be interesting and insightful even if the name implies it won’t be geared to the working class.
Nurses picketed outside Women and Infants yesterday to call attention to the hospital’s use of temporary (read: scab) nurses.
Good, bad or indifferent, the Pew Center says Rhode Island has been the most aggressive (read: conservative) in paring back public sector pensions.
Executive Suite – where Jon “Mitt” Brien penned his famous opinion piece, “Let Woonsocket Go Bankrupt.”
“The school was originally named Textron/Chamber of Commerce Academy. So much for the private sector being able to do it better…”
Creative spin, Bob, but the whole point of charter schools is experimentation with the idea that the low-performing schools will be closed, unlike traditional public schools, which stay around forever to serve the teacher’s unions regardless of performance. This is the system working.
Yes, Bob, in the charter world even failure is succes.
Monkeys on keyboards not typing the next great American novel? No problem, just get more monkeys! (and please don’t ask how successful it was for those kids… no, really don’t ask)
Ridicule all you want to suit your status-quo agenda, but this was always the plan of the charter school movement and any charter-school proponent will affirm this. Obviously changing a traditional public school to a charter school will not magically transform the school for the better. The key to the whole process is allowing schools to experiment with different models, retaining what works, and eliminating what doesn’t work. This is like arguing that because Borders closed, capitalism is a failure. Many people on this blog may happen to believe the latter statement to be true, but the former does not prove the latter. The beauty of capitalism is precisely that failing businesses do close and the resources can be reinvested elsewhere. The kids of that school will now have the opportunity to go to better schools. If it were a traditional public school, it would have just stayed open and kept failing them, and they would have had no choice but to keep attending.
“Ridicule all you want to suit your status-quo agenda…”
It’s a great accomplishment how the corporate movement has convinced otherwise reasonable folks that a wrong way run is preferable to doing nothing or better yet doing what actually works.
“The key to the whole process is allowing schools to experiment with different models, retaining what works, and eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Which charters are working without high-stakes, government mandated test regimes? Without punative and counterproductive efforts to assign blame to schools, teachers, and students? I’d be happy to support one.
It is what it is. You support closed-shop unionized public schools with full tenure for teachers after 2-3 years, seniority pay, etc., which is the system we have now. I think these employment practices negatively impact children’s education. You might disagree.
As it so happens, I’m not a proponent of “high stakes testing” or “corporatization” (whatever that means), but I do support giving parents a choice of where to send their kids and giving schools the power to experiment and fire bad teachers. The traditional public schools were going downhill long before No Child Left Behind and associated programs, so you can’t blame everything on “high stakes testing,” even if it has been objectively harmful to some degree.
I have yet to hear from you or any other progressives what your solution is besides throwing even more money at the problem and halting standardized testing, which may have exacerbated the situation, but certainly isn’t the cause of it.
“You support…”
I’ve never written in support of any of those things. I don’t see unions as the problem if that’s what you’re getting at.
“The traditional public schools were going downhill long before No Child Left Behind…”
Let me say first that I don’t think that’s correct. When you compare the U.S. to countries with similar levels of childhood poverty, our schools compete quite well. Compare apples to apples (for instance in counties with low poverty) and our schools are among the best. Ignoring the elephant in the room if a convenient ruse played by many on the right.
But let’s go with that assumption. The better question to ask is why? Progressives feel this was not unintentional at least for the millionaire backers of the privitization movement (especially in low income areas):
1. Starve the schools financially
2. Overcrowd the classrooms, reduce programs, supplies
3. Fail the public school using NCLB and/or Race to the Top laws leaving the public school in death-throws
4. Sell the school to private charters
“I have yet to hear from you or any other progressives what your solution is besides throwing even more money at the problem…”
So you want improvement, but you don’t want to pay for it? Question, why do the elite private schools charge so much? Do they think “throwing money at the problem” helps or don’t they?
As for solutions, if you want improvement:
1. Address poverty – by far the number one reason students fair poorly.
2. Improve the teaching profession by making it a career the best and brightest want to pursue. Call that throwing money at the problem if you like, but oddly I’m arguing for the free market solution here while conservatives like you call for massive government intervention.
I realize it’s convenient to ignore, but you know very well that I’ve proposed the progressive model over and over as an alternative. Progressive education promotes:
Attending to the whole child
Community
Collaboration
Social justice
Intrinsic motivation
Deep understanding
Active learning
Taking kids seriously
See “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find.”
This blog has also highlighted the Finland model as an alternative: “Finland Finland Finland, the country where I quite want to teach.”
** quote **
Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, told Partanan that the “main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.” At its core, Sahlberg says, this means that “schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.”
While Partanan may not be an experienced observer of American politics and society, she is almost certainly correct that the way that American ‘reformers’ are viewing Finland’s success — ignoring the equity goals that are at the heart of it — demonstrates a kind of willful blindness to what is fundamentally wrong with the opportunity structure in the US, and how it undermines both the quality and distribution of public education.
** end quote **
“I’ve never written in support of any of those things.”
But you do support them implicitly. It’s incredible to me that you don’t see the NEARI crowd as a problem. Do you really think the Pat Crowley-type union leadership who act like prohibition-era gangsters would be tolerated in Finland? Do you really think their teachers show up to rallies in red shirts and shout down public officials? What do you do when a public school wants to experiment with new school programs (progressive or otherwise) and the union is against it (as they oppose pretty much anything beside the comfortable status quo) or extort the school with $90/hour demands to implement it? Any type of reforms are dead in the water when the teachers refuse to go along and you can’t get rid of them because of tenure, seniority, grievances, etc. The whole US teacher union culture needs to be overhauled if the schools are going to be welcoming places of learning and achievement. Maybe that would look more like Finland, maybe not. 2-3 year tenure is a joke – by the time you know if a teacher is any good you can’t get rid of them. It should be 5 years minimum. Seniority pay doesn’t make any sense at all. Experience has very little correlation with ability in teaching beyond the learning curve of the first few years. Why should somebody’s salary double just by living longer?
A lot of good private schools aren’t even *that* much more expensive than public schools cost per student, and remember, parents who send their kids to private school are already paying for public school on top of that price. People generally don’t mind paying more for good services, but the problem is the schools cost more and more each year, more and more goes to compensation costs, and there is little improvement in the education itself. How much money would be sufficient to fix the problem in your view? Are taxpayers supposed to just hand the unions whatever the demand and hope the schools fix themselves?
“But you do support them implicitly.”
No, I simply support their right to collectively bargain. And Pat is like a ”prohibition-era gangster?!” I’m still laughing about that one. We’re clearly into the realm of fantasy now, as with the comment about unions in Finland which are quite strong and actively involved in setting policy (as they should be).
** quote **
Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.
** end quote **
“Are taxpayers supposed to just hand the unions whatever the demand and hope the schools fix themselves?”
You’re just throwing up red herrings now. Real improvement takes work and involves all stakeholders. Starting with bashing teachers ensures that won’t happen.
Perhaps it would make sense to look at all the data on RIDE’s Information Works web site before endorsing the Commissioner’s recommendation to close ACE, which is a district charter school and unionized.
The five year graduation rate for students at this high school with 85% of students on subsidized lunch is 89.4%, which not only puts it ahead of Mt. Pleasant High School (60.7%), Central (70.2%), Alvarez (71.9%) but also the statewide average (80.2%).
In reading, they had 81% proficient compared to Mt. Pleasant (34%), Central (47%), Alvarez (42%) and statewide (76%).
In writing, they had 64% proficient compared to Mt. Pleasant (12%) Central (22%), Alvarez (14%), and statewide (51%).
Attendance was 93% compared to Mt. Pleasant (79%), Central (83%), Alvarez (82%) and statewide (92%).
Chronic Absenteeism was 23% compared to Mt Pleasant (64%), Central (56%), Alvarez(62%) and statewide (18%).
I would find it very hard to justify with these numbers, better than schools in their sending district and even the statewide average, that this school should be closed.
And of course, these numbers don’t measure the quality or impact of ACE’s mission related work, its career exploration and internship programs. Which RIDE doesn’t seem to be interested in measuring, though I could safely surmise that the impact is partly reflected in the attendance and graduation rates.
A better question to ask might be: who benefits if this school is closed?