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Education

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05/18/2008

Statewide transportation would cost less, help kids more
Luckily, the three kids were attending Highlander Charter School when the mom’s marriage began to fall apart. As a charter that draws from many districts, the school could keep the children enrolled no matter where they lived. Unlike other Highlander moms I’ve spoken with, this one barely mentioned the qualities of the popular school. Instead she talked about being profoundly grateful that the school provided a stable environment for her kids during the dark period when they moved several times to different living situations in different communities. The kids continued to learn, among friends and familiar teachers, even amid the upheaval of divorce. The mom has settled since, and things are better. Educational stability greatly helped.

05/11/2008

Steiny: Seniority ‘bumping’ of teachers creates havoc in schools

05/04/2008

Columnist Julia Steiny looks at Minnesota’s plan to save money and improve schools
Rhode Island’s public school population is roughly similar to that of Dallas, but it is divvied into 36 school districts. So we have 36 superintendents overseeing 36 special education directors, 36 bus contracts, 36 lunch contracts, and a great many other expensive redundancies.

04/27/2008

Steiny: An after-school haven for middle schoolers
Kids are snacking at one of the lunch tables in the cafeteria shared by Highlander Charter School and New Urban Arts, an artists’ studio. I hang out with the group that will attend classes in architecture or ceramics. Chatting at other tables are yet more middle school students getting a little social time before spending the next two hours painting, drawing and working in other media. This cafeteria is only one of many cafeterias around Providence where roughly 600 middle school kids gather after school, Monday through Thursday, to participate in activities they call the “After-Zone,” organized by the Providence After School Alliance (PASA).

04/20/2008

Education Watch: Columnist Julia Steiny looks at the expansive and innovative roles schools must take
In the front office of The Learning Community Charter School in Central Falls, a tiny boy with shiny, jet-black hair sits at a small desk, wriggling and squirming with a swaying motion. He makes no noise, but as a perpetual motion machine, he’s far too agitated to be in a classroom. But he doesn’t seem inclined to bolt from his seat or otherwise protest his circumstances.

04/13/2008

Education Watch: The Learning Community Charter School runs on listening
The first thing you notice when you step into the lobby of The Learning Community Charter School in Central Falls is the smell of fresh coffee. The large lobby of this former nursing home is a big, bright space, furnished with café tables and chairs, where coffee and the day’s newspaper invite the parent dropping off a child to sit down for a moment before heading off to home or work.

04/06/2008

Worthy crusade: Mentoring to help urban youths succeed
Sitting in a conference room at the Providence Academy of International Studies (PAIS), four high school seniors spoke gratefully of the help and opportunities they got from the College Crusade. The Crusade’s mission is to prevent low-income, urban students from failing in their education. The kids who sign up and stick with the program get a mentor, academic support and scholarship money to attend college or post-secondary training.

03/30/2008

Education Watch: It’s not easy to understand why students perform dismally on high school standard math tests
When I was a teenager and we got our standardized test results back, I would deflect interest in my actual scores by bemoaning the fact that I got an “F” in sex. It was a serviceable joke because it took people a moment to let go of the knee-jerk assumption that I’d failed, and grasp that the “F” on my test-results sheet meant that I was female.

03/23/2008

Steiny: It’s time for more choices across school district lines
Last February, Kelly Connerton and her husband, a chef in Boston, were living in Cumberland, but shopping around Northern Rhode Island for good schools. Their eldest son would enter kindergarten in September. They were more than willing to move to get the best education for their children.

03/16/2008

Steiny: Budget cuts could threaten R.I.’s victories over poverty
Public investment in low-income kids is a hard sell. Lots of people believe that their parents don’t vote and maybe even don’t count — hey, they got themselves into this fix by having babies they can’t support. Poor kids are not a popular cause, like the arts or civic improvements.

03/09/2008

Education watch: Afterschool detention can be a chance to learn better behavior
This is the third in a series of three columns about the benefits of improving disciplinary practices.

03/02/2008

Education Watch: Columnist Julia Steiny discusses a school that transformed the way it handled student disciplinary problems
This is the second in a series of three columns about the benefits of improving disciplinary practices.

02/24/2008

When punishment doesn’t work, a school changes course
This is the first of three columns about the benefits of improving disciplinary practices.

02/10/2008

Blue-collar teacher contracts work against the students
“I’m probably the only person in the room who was actually at the negotiating table in the mid-1960s when the first collective bargaining laws were being passed.” So said Ray Spear, former superintendent in Coventry and now a member of the Coventry School Committee, addressing the Board of Regents.

02/03/2008

Steiny: Sophia counters the downward spiral — one girl at a time
The Sophia Academy intervenes in the lives of low-income girls who are “most at risk of repeating the cycle of poverty,” according to the school’s fact sheet. Not an easy mission.

01/27/2008

What if the deficit could actually bolster youth services?
If America’s juvenile justice system were a school district, it would be deemed “in need of improvement,” the federal euphemism for “failing.”

01/20/2008

A more practical road to becoming a school principal
A school principal’s job is like herding cats.

01/13/2008

Steiny: Students + blowup monkey + word wall = … algebra?
At the beginning of his ninth-grade algebra class at Mt. Hope High School in Bristol/Warren, Scott Pellerin gestures emphatically with one hand, while in the other he holds a ridiculous 5-foot blowup monkey. While he reviews what they’ve been learning so far, the slumped, blasÉ teens seem amused by the high-energy Pellerin.

01/06/2008

A high school with guts is trying to turn itself around
Here’s a School Improvement Team with guts.

12/30/2007

Traditional pensions can curb enthusiastic teaching
Traditional “defined benefit” pensions motivate some teachers to become deadwood. Teachers who have lost their appetite for the work must continue to put in their time, however half-heartedly, to qualify for retirement benefits that are far more valuable than most private-sector employees get.

12/23/2007

Caring for each other isn’t just a Christmas message
When I was a girl and later a young woman, every sort of work looked better to me than motherhood. I grew up in a Roman Catholic neighborhood during the baby boom, where the families were enormous. The lady at the end of our block had 21 children. My friends’ homes usually had a second full-sized dining-room table that occupied the living room. The older girls, conscripted to help their mothers with the younger kids, exuded resentment.

12/16/2007

Adults can really help teens, even if they aren’t the parent
About two years ago, a group of seventh-grade girls adopted me as their mentor. (Long story.) Last year, I met with them at school most Wednesdays during their lunchtime. Now, inconveniently, the six of them are in the ninth grade at four different high schools.

12/09/2007

Our factory-model schools are soul-killers for students
Factory-model schools produce many dropouts. Actually, they’re designed to do so. Factories eliminate product failures, in this case disaffected students, as early in the process as possible, in the service of efficiency. Until these schools cease to be educational assembly lines, dropouts should come as no big surprise.

11/25/2007

Julia Steiny: Engage youths by helping them solve their own problems
My grandmother and her sister were elementary-school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District for over 30 years. They were experts at entertaining children with learning activities. They also had nonnegotiable ideas about what a child should know and be able to do, whether she liked learning it or not.