The graduation rate is a sparkling 48 percent at the public high school in Central Falls, R.I.
Judging from scores on standardized tests there, either students are under the impression that they are supposed to answer as many questions incorrectly as possible, or blindfolded parakeets are taking the exams when nobody’s looking.
Half the students have found a way to flunk all their classes — which should raise eyebrows at Ripley’s, if not the chance of getting a job at any establishment that lacks a french fry vat.
In short, attendance at Central Falls High is not about education so much as crowd control.
At this point, the conditioned reflex is to tut-tut about “overworked, underpaid” teachers and to demand that taxpayers “fully fund” the school if they want better results, doggone it. (For extra compassion points, work in the phrase “Do it for the kids” at least twice.)
But those who can pause from congratulating themselves on having the “correct” reaction may want to consider some facts.
Rhode Island shells out more than $12,000 per pupil per year, ranking it among the 10 states that spend the most on public education. More to the point, average teacher pay at Central Falls High is in the mid-$70,000 range. (The city’s median household income is less than $23,000.)
At those wages, one would think teachers might cooperate with an effort to boost the school’s amoeba-level achievement. Superintendent Frances Gallo thought they would, anyway, so she asked a few things of them:
* That instead of 7:50 a.m. to 2:25 p.m., they work from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. — a 25-minute increase in their six-hour, 35-minute schedule.
* That they attend after-school planning sessions once a week and take two weeks of summer training, at a rate of $30 per hour.
* That one day a week, they eat lunch with students — presumably so they’ll recognize them years later in the drive-thru window at Burger Emporium.
* That they formalize their tutoring rotation rather than leave students wondering when they can get the extra help they so obviously need.
* And that they accept meaningful outside evaluations of their work.
None of those ideas seems especially unreasonable at a school that may actually be making students dumber than they were before they arrived. But the superintendent might as well have proposed shutting off the oxygen supply. Declaring that faculty members are entitled to $90 an hour for extra work, the teachers union indignantly rejected the plan, The Providence Journal reported.
So Superintendent Gallo went with Option 2: She is firing the entire faculty and starting from scratch with teachers who are not certifiably bonkers.
Good.
Divider in chief
President Obama tells People magazine that “what’s been lost” in his first year in office is “that whole sense of changing how Washington works.” He complains that there’s still too much divisiveness.
He should know.
You’ll recall that the president started off his administration by hiring a series of tax cheats — including one to head the department that oversees the IRS. That’s change, I guess.
He hired lobbyists to work on the very issues about which they had lobbied — in violation of his promise not to do so. No change there.
He rammed a $787 billion “stimulus” through Congress on a nearly party-line vote, and now that it has expanded government but left the private sector high and dry, he wants untold billions for a second stimulus. (The cost of the first one, by the way, has since risen to $862 billion, leaving us nothing but change.)
Without the vaguest grasp of the facts, he gratuitously called white cops in Massachusetts stupid for arresting a black man they thought was trying to break into a house. Yet ever ready to suspect the worst of his countrymen, he lectures the nation against “jumping to conclusions” when radical Muslims kill Americans on our own soil. Nothing divisive about that. No siree.
He mistakes shrieks of horror against his medical takeover for cheers of gratitude and keeps marching forward.
So I’m sorry that the president is disappointed in the public’s failure to follow his commands like so many Egyptian charioteers pausing nervously on the edge of the Red Sea. But it’s not easy when the Great Uniter thinks imitating a doormat is the only way his political opponents can prove their cooperative spirit.
To reach Steve Barrett, call 423-757-6329 or e-mail sbarrett@timesfreepress.com.