Needed Education Reforms for Rhode Island.
For too many school age children in Rhode Island, the educational system is failing to provide the necessary knowledge and life skills for these children to realize their greatest potential in life.
Rhode Island outspends most other states on our educational system, but achieves lower overall results than many other states.
A skilled workforce is critical to the overall health of Rhode Island's economy. Unfortunately, some large employers have declined to locate to Rhode Island due to a lack of skilled workers.
Education represents one of the state's largest expenditures, and we need to realize a far greater return on investment than we are now.
The following suggested changes to our system of education will help to better prepare our children for their adult lives, raise the quality of our professional teaching staff, reduce cost throughout the system and help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to our educational system.
Convert day care expenditures for low income households into pre-school aid. Rhode Island spends $86 million per year on day care for low income households. These dollars will have a greater overall impact on the child if instead of day care the money and child are placed into pre-school education. Project Hope in Georgia is a successful implementation of this type of reform.
Provide incentives to the best teachers to teach in the toughest schools.
Evaluate all teachers and administrators annually and provide incentive pay for the top performers, while providing mentoring, training and a financial disincentive to the worst performers. There is no systematic, ongoing evaluation process whose purpose is to rank performance across a school system, reward excellence and attempt to remedy underperformance. Our suggestion on how to implement a fair, unbiased evaluation follows:
1. Evaluate teachers with the following 4 criteria, using equal weighting for each criteria:
- Administration review
- Peer review
- Parental review
- Standardized test scored of students
2. Rank teachers based on their evaluations into a top 15%, middle 70% and bottom 15%.
3. The bottom 15% receive mentoring and additional professional development (outside of standard school hours) to help these professionals raise their performance.
4. The bottom 15% give up 1% of their annual pay increase, which is placed into a bonus pool to be split by the top 15% as a reward for excellence.
5. Teachers who remain in the bottom 15% for 3 years straight are terminated from their positions.
Provide life skills courses to non-college tracked children. Too many of our school aged children who are not destined for college are not receiving sufficient 'real-life' skills needed for success in today's society. Increased options for vocation/technical training are needed for these students, along with specially designed courses in applied mathematics, basic psychology, economics and written and verbal skills.
Allow non-certified professionals who are content experts to teach in our schools. With our current rules, a Brown University professor is not able to teach a course in any public school unless that professor has a public school teaching certification. There are many dedicated, non-teaching professionals who would jump at the chance to help educate our children but they are disallowed from doing so. This is wrong, and works against the best interests of the students. National organizations like Teach for America are unable to send smart, young, educated and driven educators to our state's neediest elementary and high schools. A scientist or engineer from the private sector should be able to donate his or her time to teach our children in his or her area of expertise.
Apply lessons learned from our charter schools to our educational system, and allow the development of more of these very successful schools which are leading the way in educational innovation. Our legislature has stopped the creation of any more charter schools in our state. These schools have an excellent track record of outstanding educational results and increased attendance relative to other schools in the district while spending less money to accomplish their goals. The state has mandated that the charter schools disseminate their lessons learned to the school district, but in many cases the district does not want to hear the lessons that the charter schools are willing to teach. These schools represent one of our best opportunities to raise the performance of our school systems.
Ban the practice of bumping in the school systems. Seniority does not necessarily make a great teacher. Our children deserve, and we as taxpayers should demand, that the best teachers are available to teach. The administration in any given district must be able to terminate the employment of a specific teacher for cause. The end result of bumping is that the youngest (and often the most driven and innovative) teachers most frequently lose their jobs. Our children's education is not like piece work assembly on an assembly line, which is where the concept of bumping began. Bumping has no place in ANY professional work environment.
Publish a model teacher's contract that is created at the state level and make state aid to local school districts contingent on how closely the locally negotiated teacher's contract adheres to the model's guidelines. Part of the effort to raise the performance of all school districts is to ensure that the teacher's contracts for all districts contain language deemed necessary by state-level administrators. Some possible issues for the model contract would include:
- Setting the contract end date to coincide with the State's fiscal year end. There is nothing to be gained by having the teacher's contracts expire on the first day of the school year. Since state aid is a component of the local school budget, and most local budgets follow the state fiscal year, it stands to reason that the local teacher's contract should also follow the state fiscal year.
- Include teacher performance evaluations and incentive pay based on these evaluations.
- Provide the ability for non-certified professionals to teach our children.
- Remove the practice of bumping from all contract language.
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