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."