arlene violet – RI Future

It was by far the biggest meeting I had ever seen at Rochambeau Library, and bigger than any crowd I have seen at any of the PawSox listening tours. The crowd filled the room and overflowed into the halls. About 125 people attended the Providence Campaign Against the Stadium organizational meeting in Providence Monday night. Organizers Sam Bell, Sharon Steele, Tim Empke and Suzanne Mark conducted a meeting to recruit help in defeating the building of a new PawSox stadium in Providence.

Those in attendance were unhappy with elected officials who have decided to reserve judgement and not come out against giving the PawSox owners taxpayer monies and/or tax breaks. They also came out because they are strongly in favor of keeping the land in question true to its original intention as a public park open to all. The consensus seems to be that the vast majority of Rhode Islanders are opposed to any kind of stadium deal, and that elected officials such as Governor Gina Raimondo, Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed are not listening to their constituents even as they negotiate in secret with PawSox management.

Part of the campaign’s strategy has been collecting signatures to pressure the Providence City Council into rejecting any kind of tax deal for the Stadium. Enough signatures have been collected to force the City Council to take up the issue and the campaign is actively collecting the signatures needed to put the stadium initiative on the ballot. If Providence rejects the stadium, then the stadium cannot be built.

However, Mayor Jorge Elorza has joined state elected officials in not taking any kind of stand against the stadium, adopting the same wait-and-see attitude. This annoyed many of those who were at the Rochambeau meeting, who feel that the East Side helped to elect the Mayor, and that he should be more receptive to the opinions of voters than to the interests of out of state millionaires.

If eight members of the Providence City Council come out strongly against the deal, the stadium is a dead issue, but there is a catch. The General Assembly has the power to rewrite local laws and over ride the Providence City Council or the voters of Providence. They have done so in the past when referendums threaten corporate interests. Last year the General Assembly passed legislation (as a budget amendment to avoid public commentary) taking away the rights of cities and towns to set their own minimum wages as a gift to The Procaccianti Group, which runs several hotels downtown and around the world.

The Campaign organizers thought this scenario unlikely.

After the main meeting the group separated into several working groups, concentrating on different aspects of the campaign.

By way of contrast, two hours earlier the PawSox sales team was in the Barrington Town Hall as part of their ongoing “listening tour” to be held in every city and town in Rhode island. Charles Steinberg, who usually conducts these meetings since the death of Jim Skeffington, was not on hand because he was helping with the celebrations around the induction of Pedro Martinez into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This left the sales duties to organizer Sydney McKenna, special assistant to Larry Lucchino Dan Rea III and Red Sox accountant Jeff White.

Things did not go great.

The crowd of about 40 people were forced to submit all questions in writing before hand under the watchful eyes of two hired police officers. No one spoke up in favor of the stadium, many people spoke out against it. Former Attorney General Arlene Violet was in attendance, and she pounded the speakers with tough questions, often speaking up out of turn to make her points. It was the only way to express an opinion to the room given the format of the meeting.

Violet pushed back hard against the contention that nearly 50 percent of those attending PawSox games come from out of state. She asked where the numbers Jeff White was putting out were coming from. White said that the PawSox have been polling those coming to the game for the past five weeks.

When Violet countered that the poll lacked any kind of validity, White scowled. Sydney McKenna, former campaign manager for talk show host Buddy Cianci’s bid for Mayor of Providence commented that she missed having Violet on the radio.

After the meeting a Barrington native told me he felt insulted by the sales team. He was disgusted by their disregard of the public’s opinion and by what he considered to be the combative nature of Jeff White.

No one connotes Rhode Island quite like Arlene Violet. She’s got the full package: the accent, the politics and the resume. She’s been a nun, a lawyer, a politician and, as a result, now she’s a political pundit. Violet is so Rhode Island she even wrote a musical about the mob.

And here’s another thing that makes Arlene Violet pretty typical of the Ocean State: she doesn’t seem to have a strong understanding about the underlying issues causing the political problems in public education.

Here’s what she wrote about Deborah Gist in last week’s Valley Breeze: “Disingenuous arguments about how she ‘disses’ educators and only has a one trick pony for evaluation of students’ achievements and teacher competencies failed to derail her.”

On Newsmakers she followed this up by adding:

“It’s just a systemic resistance, for example for teacher evaluations. After I wrote a column in supporting of your reappointment I got my usual feedback when I support you, and they talked about the Rhode Island model teacher evaluation and support system addition 2 is 100 pages written by someone who has never spent a day in the classroom…”

However, there are actual issues with the new evaluation system that incentivize, rather than discourages, the dreaded status quo (that Violet herself rails against). Specifically, that the system being used to evaluate teachers inspires mediocrity. Here’s how an actual educator at the now-famous teacher rally in Cranston very succinctly summed up the real problem with the new teacher evaluation system:

“Less rigor of task or target set to low teacher becomes highly effective; rigorous task and target and the teacher is scored effective and developing. The rating has little to do with the quality of the teaching and everything to do with the subjective development and rating of the task.”

This is why holding someone accountable is only as good as the metric being used. But this didn’t stop Arlene from pretty much ignoring any criticism at all and skipping right over to educators being lazy. “First of all I’d like you to respond to that criticism, but putting that aside,” she asked Gist, “do you feel that anyone will ever accept teacher evaluations or is this just ‘don’t bother me?'”

She may as well have asked if teachers beat their spouses (the most famous example of a hard-to-answer leading question in journalism)! WPRI had no counterbalance to Violet’s support for Gist; the panel consisted of two impartial reporters and Violet, who says on the show that she often supports Gist.

But Gist, to her credit, didn’t take the bait: “They [teachers] want to make sure the process is fair, that the process is high quality and they want to be held accountable in a way that is appropriate and fair, not that they don’t want it to happen at all, that they want to make sure the process is done well.”

Tag: arlene violet

Public opposition to downtown stadium builds

Arlene Violet misses the issue on teacher evaluations