The East Providence School Committee can step off the main stage. Their formerly astounding move to cut teacher pay and increase benefit co-pays is no longer the most dramatic school administration move in the state.
Sure, it got a little national attention. But did the president talk about it?
No.
But he had something to say about the situation in Central Falls this week, where the entire high school teaching staff was recently fired by the superintendent. It is not easy to make this long story short, but here goes: The snowball that resulted in the firings rolled downhill from Washington, DC to Central Falls. President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, asked the states to identify their lowest-performing schools. RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist did just that. Her list included Central Falls High School, where barely half of the students graduate and hardly any of them can pass the math standards tests. She told the superintendent there to implement one of four federally mandated changes. The superintendent chose to negotiate a plan in which teachers would spend more time with the students outside of class and do a couple weeks of training in the summer.