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Fri, 27 Jun 2008
Part of the state budget bill passed last week created "Mayoral Academies" a new kind of school. This was a controversial article of the budget, with labor fighting hard against it, but fairly easily overcome in the vote. So what's the story behind this effort?
One version of this story has it that these are an exciting new experiment in public education, established due to the bravery of Cumberland's Mayor Daniel McKee and midwived by important members of the progressive movement like Ramon Martinez, leader of Progreso Latino in Central Falls. The schools will be regional, serving one or more towns, and operated by non-profits, so are able to attract grant funding, possibly lavish, from the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
22:51 - 27 Jun 2008 [/y8/cols] link
By popular demand, here's a link to The Shape of the Starting Line, a report I wrote in 2006 for Working RI. It's an annotated bibliography of current research on the relation between academic achievement and poverty, nutrition, early childhood education, family circumstances, reading aloud, teacher unions, charter schools, and much more. I enjoyed researching it, and hope you enjoy reading it.
If you are interested in charter schools, I particularly recommend page 37. If you are interested in teacher unions, try page 33.
13:01 - 27 Jun 2008 [/y8/jn] link
Sat, 21 Jun 2008
An article in the Nation points out that the pay of the five most highly-paid hedge fund managers added up to $12.6 billion in 2007, while the five best-paid CEOs earned a measly $290 million. Almost makes you feel sorry for the CEOs, doesn't it? Especially when you consider that the hedge fund salaries are considered capital gains, so they pay tax at a lower rate than you do.
Find CEO salary data at the New York Times, while the hedge fund data came courtesy Alpha, a hedge fund trade magazine.
11:57 - 21 Jun 2008 [/y8/jn] link
Fri, 20 Jun 2008
The fiscal 2009 budget has now been approved by the Assembly, and everyone expects the Governor to sign it. Here are a dozen things worth knowing about it.
23:28 - 20 Jun 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Mon, 16 Jun 2008
Another idea: neat, plausible...
What do you think about tutoring kids who attend failing schools? Sounds like a good idea, right? Too bad it doesn't appear to work.
Another chapter in a series of bad-but-simple solutions to serious problems.
15:00 - 16 Jun 2008 [/y8/jn] link
Fri, 13 Jun 2008
What kind of government do you want?
As discussions about next year's state budget gets down to plastic tacks painted to look like brass, it's worth putting our heads up from the weeds for a moment to think about what our government should be.
For example, I would very much like to live in a world where my government was more efficient. Wouldn't you? I wouldn't mind lower taxes, but even more I'd prefer a government that could provide some of the services friends of mine who live elsewhere get from their governments. In Virginia, a friend who left here recently reports that there is an extensive network of community swimming pools, with youth teams that train and compete in them all summer. In Portland, Oregon, a fabulous and cheap light rail system whisks people in and out of downtown, creating new and prosperous business districts around its stations. Further afield, in most of Europe, college tuition is free or negligible, and a student's choice of university to attend is limited only by his or her grades. And of course, in most of the rest of the world, health care is paid for either by the government or a state-run insurance pool
Ok, I live near a beach, so I can do without the swimming pools, but transportation, college tuitions and health care are three of the biggest expenses my family faces. (Well, the tuitions won't hit us for a couple more years, but it's near enough to begin to scare me.) In other places, government helps families with those expenses. Why not here?
21:38 - 13 Jun 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 07 Jun 2008
What shall we do about our property taxes? Pretty much everyone agrees property taxes are too high. But that's the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it. Two years ago, Teresa Paiva-Weed, the Senate Majority Leader from Newport, had a neat and plausible idea: limit them.
So the Assembly that year passed S-3050, limiting the increases in the taxes a city or town can collect year over year to 5.5%, then 5% and marching down to 4%. Amazing, no? You wonder why no one thought of this before.
The newspaperman and essayist H. L. Mencken once wrote, in an essay about inspiration, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." And of course, the reason no one thought of simple tax limits before is it's a horrible idea.
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