Thursday, February 18, 2010

A Central Falls teacher contributes

You'll want to read this post from a Central Falls teacher, if you're following that:

"Which brings us to the situation between our union and our superintendent:
After many years of being on the low performing tier in the state testing
heirarchy, our high school finally found itself on the upswing. We made 21%
points of progress in reading scores, and 4% in math in the last 2 years, just
recently reported. The scores are still not acceptable (55% & 7%
respectively) but they are certainly going in the right direction. With backing
from the newest, hungry state commissioner of education and a dangling carrot of
reform called a School Improvement Grant, our district superintendent (the 3rd
in 4 years) made a unilateral decision to lengthen the school day by 25 minutes,
mandate 90 minutes after school per week for teacher work groups, another hour
outside of school for student tutoring, PLUS mandate lunch with students once
per week (the teachers at this HS get 18 minutes for lunch...). All this plus 2
weeks in the summer (paid) for PD. The thing that blew us away was that it was
non-negotiable! Never mind that our district is only halfway through a 3 year
contract, approved and signed by this superintendent, the district board of
trustees, the former state commissioner, and the highest seat in RI's education
heirarchy, the Board of Regents."

2 comments:

kicia said...

I also work in Central Falls. What is also not being said is that one of the proposals put forth by the superintendent is to have teachers evaluated by an "outside party" starting 3/1/10. The cost of this outside party? More than $300,000 & there are only 74 teachers at the high school! Where is this $ coiming from? At present there is not one teacher at the high school who has anything but good evaluations. There is a district evaluation process already. The union applied for & was awarded (along with 3 other urban districts) a huge grant to look at teacher evaluations. There was a meeting in NY for the grantees and guess which district did not have administrative representation there? Yup...Central Falls!

Tracy Novick said...

Thanks for commenting! It's good to hear something from the source.