The Providence Journal ran an article by journalist John Hill about my book and my appearance at the University of Rhode Island that was intended to discredit me. It declared that my arguments were “mostly false,” based on the writer’s skewed interpretation of the facts presented in my book,
As best I can tell, the writer is defending No Child Left Behind, and was deeply affronted that I criticized NCLB. He doesn’t seem to know that NCLB has very few defenders.
Nonetheless, I am printing my response to the Providence Journal here because I don’t expect ProJo to print it; neither the editor nor the journalist has acknowledged receipt of my letter. So I post it here.
This was my letter to the Providence Journal:
To the Editor:
Providence Journal writer John Hill has contorted the facts about American education in his effort to discredit my well-documented book “Reign of Error.” Every claim in the book is accompanied by evidence, most of which comes directly from the U.S. Department of Education website.
I contend in the book that test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are at a historic high point for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Nothing in his article disputes those facts. It seems that his goal is to defend the high-stakes testing and accountability regime created by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in 2001 and signed into law in 2002.
On the regular NAEP, given every year since 1992, the biggest increase in test scores occurred from 2000-2003, before No Child Left Behind was implemented. The biggest decrease in the achievement gap between blacks and whites occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, long before the passage of No Child Left Behind.
On the Long-Term Trend NAEP, the gains for black and Hispanic students from 1973 to 2008 were astonishingly large for every age group, as I show on page 52 of my book, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s website.
During that 35-year period, white students at age 9 gained 14 points; black students at age 9 gained 34 points; Hispanic students at age 9 gained 25 points.
White students at age 13 gained 7 points; black students at age 13 gained 25 points; Hispanic students at age 13 gained 10 points.
White students at age 17 gained 4 points; blacks students at age 17 gained 28 points; Hispanic students at age 17 gained 17 points.
Mr. Hill misinterpreted what I said or misunderstood what I wrote. I said at my lecture that I withheld publication of the book until June 2013, waiting for the update of the NAEP Long-Term Trend report, hoping that the great progress of the era from 1973-2008 would be sustained. Unfortunately, the 2012 report (released in June 2013) showed that the gains came nearly to a halt during the period from 2008 to 2012. This was reported on page 357, footnote 7. Perhaps Mr. Hill doesn’t read footnotes.
No Child Left Behind is generally considered to be a failure by everyone other than those who wrote that burdensome law. Apparently, I should have included John Hill as one of the few Americans who still defends NCLB.
I encourage Mr. Hill to continue to educate himself about the facts of American education. Our nation’s public education system is performing very well; we are the most powerful nation on earth. Our economy is the largest on earth. We lead the world in technological innovation. Low academic performance is highly correlated with poverty. Our genuine crisis is not with our public education system but with the failure of our political and economic system to reduce poverty. If we want to improve academic performance, we should address the fact that 23% of our children live in poverty, which is the highest of any advanced nation in the world (second only to Romania, whose economy is far smaller than our own and whose resources are far smaller).
Diane Ravitch
I was not the only one who read the bizarre article in the Providence Journal (ProJo).
John Thompson, teacher and historian, wrote this letter to ProJo, unbeknownst to me (he sent me a copy):
To the Editor:
You owe Diane Ravitch a retraction.
You wrote that the word “until” implies that progress stopped with NCLB and RttT. Where did you get that from? How is that the implication?
The reality was that decades of growth “slowed” after those reforms. Ravitch’s statement is also consistent with her carefully worded explanations that the education system, as a whole, has improved while failing poor children. We’ve had forty years of growth, but progress stagnated after NCLB.
And, that raises the question of whether you read Ravitch’s entire book, footnotes, and tables. Are you aware of the issues she is addressing and how they have been framed by various schools of thought?
It also raises the question of whether you read other NAEP reports. The one you link to did not track low-income students. That is a huge problem because the prime purpose of NCLB and RttT, like all federal education spending, is helping disadvantaged students. Other studies have shown that the income-based achievement gap stalled after NCLB.
Apparently your methodology was to parse wording and look at numbers. As I will explain, you don’t seem to understand what is behind the numbers. That would be fine – you aren’t an expert, I assume – but it is not enough for grading the work of experts.
So, to quickly address your parsing of language, of course there are small dips over the decades. For instance, with black 8th grade reading, you see a 21 point increase from 1971 to 1988, which shows outstanding growth, almost certainly increased by desegregation and old-fashioned school reforms (now derided as “input”-based reform), but probably offset at the end by deindustrialization. Then as deindustrialization, crack, and the economic decline and damage to the family grew further, scores dropped 7 points until the economy recovered. Starting in 1996, scores increased by ten points and then progress slowed after NCLB.
Similarly, Hispanic reading increased by 10 points before NCLB and then one point afterwards.
Both would make Ravitch’s case even better if low-income and low-perfoming deciles were factored in, as can be done if you read other NAEP studies.
And, while I’m still on the point of parsing language, are you saying that NCLB worked, or wasn’t a failure? If so, you are virtually alone. You grade Ravitch down for making a point that the overwhelming majority of scholars would endorse.
Moreover, you ignore the fact that slower gains occurred AFTER tens or hundreds of billions of NEW money (depending how you calculate it) was invested. This point is doubly important for the RttT, the SIG, and other Obama “reforms.” They threw billions of dollars at schools for poor children of color, and the best evidence was that they drove down student performance in a large minority of schools and produced few gains with that unprecedented and unrepeatable investment. That is why the best single appraisal of school reform is Paul Tough’s. The NY Times Magazine writer had supported reform, which he characterized as “liberal ptsd” from not winning the War on Poverty. Reform, at the cost of billions, helped some (who were “creamed” off into lower-poverty selective schools,) but damaged the poorest by leaving more intense concentrations of poverty and trauma and more teach-to-the-test malpractice. That was certainly true of my inner city school.
Study NAEP and cognitive science and you will see why all its numbers are not created equally. The obvious example is scores for 17-year-olds, which are virtually meaningless. More importantly, NCLB-type accountability has had successes in increasing math scores but not reading. There are cognitive reasons for that.(Its known as the Matthew Effect. If you don’t learn to read for comprehension by 3rd grade then you won’t read to learn. NCLB reforms were based on the idea that that reality can be overcome by accountability, and they have, again, been proven wrong.) I argue that 8th grade reading is, by far, the most important NAEP metric, and I would be glad to explain why. Districts known as reform successes, such as D.C., have seen actual declines in low-income and black 8th grade reading (after years of progress.)
And that gets to the reason why you owe a retraction and, I’d say, an apology. I don’t know how many hours you put into your evaluation of the years of work, building on decades of knowledge, of one of the nation’s top education experts. But, you didn’t put in nearly enough.
John Thompson
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m hardly a scholar of education, but I also wrote a letter to the Providence Journal concerning their “Politifact” ruling on your statement. Here it is:
Politifact’s recent ruling of “Mostly False” on a statement by Diane Ravitch that “test scores had gone up steadily for 40 years until No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top” is flawed, unfair, and misleading.
The summary given in the full explanation of the finding claims that the problems with Ravitch’s statement are threefold: that the time span is “between 32 and 38 years, not 40”, that while the scores did increase overall there were “a few dips” from time to time, and that “her implication that the increases stopped after No Child Left Behind” was untrue.
The first problem is a minor quibble, the second is something that would be expected to happen occasionally given the time frame, and the third is based on something that Ravitch never actually said. Even taken out of context as it was, her overall statement should have been rated “Mostly True”.
I attended Ravitch’s presentation and the point of her statement was that corporate reformers should not be allowed to take credit for test score gains when the gains have been happening for decades prior to their ascendancy. Nothing that Politifact found contradicts this.
Moreover, if Politifact is in the business of disproving supposed “implications” that are not borne out by the facts, there have been a wealth of such in the statements of Deborah Gist since her appointment as Commissioner of Education in RI. Why have we not seen any similar analysis of these?
– Ron Poirier
Joe Williams with DFER supports the NCLB Act and recently revealed through one of DFER’s studies, that since the inception of the NCLB Act, the achievement had improved.
*achievement gap
It really looks like no one read your book. It really was an amateurish review.
Excellent response by John Thompson. I especially liked his last sentence.
Unless you’ve lived it (working with the inner city poor), you don’t “get” it.
To educate the disadvantaged you need to get them out from behind the walls of their small neighborhoods and into the world to gather and learn from new experiences. More field trips, less paper and pencil, so they have some glue on their “wallpaper” to stick to their walls. Otherwise that wallpaper will just peel off, leaving nothing of value behind.
Superb response by Mr. Thompson!
Robert, speaking of responses do you have one for NEA Today’s Fall 2013 “10 Things You Should Know About CCSS” ?
As a parent, I like to hear (read) debates on this. (If this post is not the place, consider reading the article and post your thoughts another day about the article).
I read this piece of propaganda. It presents one outright lie after another and shows the extent to which the NEA has sold out its membership in return for funding from the plutocrats. The overwhelmingly negative comments posted by readers of the NEA’S paean to totalitarian centralization of education in the English language arts make interesting reading. I wonder whether the NEA “leadership” is getting the message or are still too busy counting the money they received from the Gates Foundation in exchange for becoming the Ministry of Propaganda for the CCSSO and Achieve. Many teachers whom I know are as yet unfamiliar with the details of the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. Some of those are not yet opposed to them. However, to know the CCSS in ELA is to detest them.
IF the CCSSO had issued the Publishers’ Criteria documents as voluntary guidelines to spur debate on our practice, then there would be nothing to object to. There’s much in the Publishers’ Criteria document that I actually agree with. But the CCSSO did not try to influence practice. It decided to mandate practice. The CCSSO hired a couple of amateurs to write inflexible, one-size-fits-all standards that were foisted upon everyone with no discussion, no debate, no vetting–standards [sic] that seem to have been written in complete ignorance of the sciences of language acquisition and of best practices in the teaching of English. The institutions that are supposed to be serving the interests of teachers have completely sold out. They are led by collaborators with the invasion force that is taking over our classrooms.
Here, what some teachers are saying about the NEA propaganda piece:
The new tests are going to be a complete failure, of course, and so the collaborators have asked for more time for CCSS curriculum implementation before these tests become high stakes. That’s sort of like the Vichy government asking for more time before it begins the deportations.
Trolls on Diane’s blog: feel free to add your comments about Godwin’s law below but be advised that whatever comments you make will not mask the overwhelming smell of totalitarianism in these current “reforms.”
Robert,
I think you are mistaken about the motivation for Godwin’s corollary. In addition to the uselessness of useful discussion after the comparison was made, Godwin was concerned with trivializing the evils of the nazi regime.
When a group or government carries out the deliberate murder of, say, a million people, a comparison to Nazi Germany might be reasonably made (or, for that matter, a comparison to Stalinist Russia. Between the two of them, approximately 14 million were deliberately murdered in the lands between the two countries in the 30’s and the 40’s.)
There are plenty of undemocratic governments around the globe who only jail and/or murder small numbers of people that could be used for comparison purposes. Why not a comparison to North Korea, Zimbabwe, or China?
Robert–thank you for replying. As for Godwin’s law, my husband coached me to never go there. :). And it is supposed to be like jumping the shark. That said, I understand what you are illustrating. And if you did mention a lesser known pursuit of undemocratic process at the expense of lives, I stand the chance of not knowing what you are talking about (unless I know a song about it or google it). So, your point was clear.
Off to bed to worry some more about what I want from my children’s schooling. Mothers don’t sleep anyway, so what d’ya know? I guess if it weren’t this it would be something else.
I am ashamed and embarrassed that the newspaper of the state I was born in, would treat an author with such disrespect by not getting back to her. I think this is the lowest of lows of human behavior…to not respond professionally when someone writes to you in that capacity…but then again I am not surprised at the caliber of many of the Projo upper echelon management. The newspaper vilifies teachers, unions, state workers, and have written so many biased/slanted articles that it’s a wonder to me that they are still in business–esp since they eliminated 11 jobs just last week.
The people who put politifact together obviously did not read the book, reign of Error nor are they truly educators in the sense that they understand the true significance what the statistics and numbers that Dr Ravitch referred to really mean…They did not bother to really check out what she was saying. Isn’t that typical of people who have an agenda of smearing someone who does not conform to their way of thinking..to discredit the information….Heavens, that seems to be the way of life here…to smear without real proof or evidence…to doctor up the facts or simply not acknowledge them? In my opinion, Dr Ravitch could have written volumes and with much evidence on the improving test scores till the cows came home, and it would not have made a difference to these Politifact propagandists..Projo has and always will support the corporate and the 1% wealthy types, the privatization schemes and charter school scams, the “Raimondo, Mancuso and the “Gists” of the world because to support public schools, teachers, and unions is just not in their “Bill Gates, Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Michelle Rhee, and Jeb Bush mode of thinking
Great responses, both of them. Keep pressing the attack! Send the little sycophants scurrying to shelter between the legs of their masters. They’re clearly on the defensive now.
I agree. I get angry when I see such a well-researched, clearly written book attacked in this way….then I think, “Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing, because it does seem to signify a defensiveness!”
Diane:
I have been carefully reading your book since it came out. I think John Hill’s summary rating is crass, highly misleading and his comments on the number of years way too picky.
However, he does raise two good points that are worthy of reflection. First, according to the latest NAEP report from NCES(NRC),
Click to access 2013456.pdf
in 1978 the NAEP mathematics score for all 17 year olds was 300 and in 2008 it was 306 and in 2012 it was again 306 (see page 29, NRC). This shows a very small increase over a period of 34 years. Why is the improvement for this group so much less than for 9 and 13 year olds? You do note this in passing on page 52 (ROE) in raising the example of Simpson’s paradox, but you refer to the of 4 points by White students as “impressive’.
(The use of statistical significance in the NAEP report is a bit problematic given the very large size of the sample, since what is statistically significant may not be practically significant.)
Second, Hall is correct when he points to the fact that before 2004 there really was no trend for 17 year olds and for the 90s there was hardly a trend for 13 year olds and 9 year olds. Charts on page 40 (NRC) indicate that there is no trend in math scores for 17 year old White, Black or Hispanic students since 1992 – no Simpson Paradox here.
In short, the long term NAEP data for 17 year olds deserves further exploration.
I find the practical significance of these scores more intriguing. In other words, what does NAEP results show that 17 years olds can and cannot do. The latest report tries to address this, but I found it very difficult to figure out what it actually meant. (See for example page 35 (NRC))
Perhaps folks here could indicate what percentage of 17 year olds should be able to do the following:
a) identify when two lines are perpendicular (you pick from four image of two lines intersecting)
b) identify the sum of the interior angles in a rectangle (you pick from four equations)
c) determine 200% of 30 (you pick from 4 answers)
d) solve f(z)= z +8 for f(6) (you pick from four answers)
These are rated as Easy questions for 17 year olds.
As an aside I do not disagree with John Thompson on the importance of proficient reading by a certain age – but it makes no sense to dismiss all the data for 17 year olds as he seems to do when he writes “The obvious example is scores for 17-year-olds, which are virtually meaningless. A link or two would be helpful.
Bernie,
You are not reading the Long Term Trend NAEP correctly. The gains for 17 year old students from 1973 to 2008 were significant: In Mathematics, 4 points for white students, 17 points for black students, 16 points for Hispanic students. In reading, from 1973 to 2008, the gains were 4 points for white students, 28 points for black students, and 17 points for Hispanic students. With a couple of exceptions, the gains stopped in the period from 2008-2012, the very time that high-stakes testing reached an apogee. As a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, I recall being impressed when scores went up even one or two points. In a large sample, that is significant. Why do you think scores go up and up and up and up? If you average together all the different groups, the trend lines get flatter, because there is a growing number of black and Hispanic students (who have lower scores on average than white students). That is Simpson’s Paradox. I don’t understand what you find hard to understand. Our students have made impressive progress over the years. The biggest narrowing of the achievement gap occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, probably because of desegregation, reduced class sizes, increased access to early childhood education, and expanded opportunities for African American families; that is the speculation of Paul Barton in his study of the Black-White Achievement Gap.
By “significant” do you mean that we think it is unlikely that there was no improvement (statistically significant) or do you mean that it was an important increase in the mathmatical abilities of students (significant in the more commonly used sense)?
TE, the gains I cited were described by NAEP statisticians as “statistically significant.”
That means that it is unlikely that there were no gain in scores over the 34 years.
TE:
The tool on the NAEP site enables simple t-tests to be run – which can be a trap for the unwary. I recognize that you are raising the basic issue as to the meaning of significance – not many will get it. I doubt that most of these trends will actually prove to be of practical relevance given the number of data points with little period to period change.
There is a chart in the latest National Report Card on page 34 that seems to be worth exploring in order to understand what might have contributed to the visible trends. Unfortunately the data tools do not let you explore it by ethnicity, level of parental education or the poverty proxy. Perhaps somebody is already looking at this data.
Diane:
I have read the Longterm NAEP data correctly. I have looked at the data closely enough to know that you should start the series in 1978 rather than 1973 to ensure anything by way of actual comaparability – especially if you are talking about small changes. I als understand the Simpson paradox and it does not hold for 17 year olds at least when looking at ethnic categories. The question remains as to why there is so little change in the scores of 17 year olds.
Statistical significance cannot be interpreted the way you appear to do and certainly should not be confused with practical significance nor that there is a statistically significant trend. Essentially statistical significance in this context means that if you drew similar size samples from the same populations for the same periods you have only a 1 in 20 chance of the scores being the same for the two periods being compared.
Bernie, while I was a member of the NAGB board, we devoted an entire meeting to the problem of 12th grade/17-year-old motivation. Frankly, Bernie, they know the NAEP tests don’t count, and they are not motivated to do their best. We discussed giving pizza, prizes, anything that might make them care. They doodled on the answer sheets; some kids answered all A or B or C or D, or made patterns. I sorry to say that we never figured out how to motivate 17-year-olds to care about their scores on a no-stakes test.
I am not surprised. There are ways to filter and clean the data – which I assume they have tried. It would help if that issue were made explicit. It does raise similar issues with the PISA data. Have they raised the issue?
Bernie, I don’t know the answer to your question. All I know is that the youngest children–in fourth grade–take the no-stakes assessment seriously. As kids get older, they ask, “Does it count?”
Interesting to see exams called no-stakes exams when there are no consequences for the exam taker. Would you agree that for high school students in most states the vast majority of high stakes exams are prepared and graded by teachers?
TE:
Can you say more on the point you raised about statistical significance? Was my interpretation correct or were you raising a different issue?
Perhaps we can all agree that No Child’s Behind Left and Dash for the Cash—¿?—sorry…
No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top have had a toxic and severely debilitating influence on some American journalists and newspapers.
I do not mean this to be anything but descriptive: the article referenced is so bad that I can only regard it as a), a devastatingly embarrassing bit of badly written trivia that discredits both the writer and his employer or b), an exceedingly poorly executed piece of political satire that appeared in the wrong section of the newspaper.
Or both.
Even on their most incoherent days, folks like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee and Steve Perry—ok, you too Bill!—do better.
Not much better, but never say the edufrauds and their edubully subordinates can’t create new lows in the ed debates.
To the owner of this blog: even when it means being the target of such calumny, thank you for following Mark Twain’s advice—
“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
Color many of us gratified and astonished.
🙂
I was so cracked up with the reviewer over his sub-par work as a professional journalism. Here are the sentences that I dropped my eyes:
>Part of her argument is that champions of such so-called reforms are overstating the problem. She said a decades-look back at standardized test scores shows more student improvement than the nation’s public schools get credit for.
What is “the problem” he is referring to? I wonder if he really knows what the reformers have been saying repetitively for their grand-standing play.
>”Test scores had gone up steadily for 40 years until No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top,” she said.
He apparently confuses nationally accredited long-term assessment with cookie-cutter standardized testing. I really don’t think he knows what NAEP is. Nor he understands how it differs from state-standardized tests in terms of assessing student’s academic achievement. The former is based on voluntary participation while the latter is mandatory (this means everyone has to take test). As most people point out, the word “until” is misleading because that’s not exactly what the author ‘said.’ Nowhere in her book does she ever claim that the scores “decline” or “stall” after the implementation of NCLB (as far as I read). Indeed, the reviewer unknowingly admits his mistake, as he states, “Finally, despite her implication that the increases stopped after No Child Left Behind, . . . .” Oh my, how disingenuous.
Anyway, his sub-par book review pretty much indicates his serious problem with an unscientific, fallacious attribute he should knock off for the sake of his profession. That makes me give an F to the Providence Journal.
And I love A+ responses to the reviewer.
Here is the post with comments. I am not sure why the other one does not allow comments. I even put in my 2 cents 🙂 http://www.providencejournal.com/politics/content/20131027-politifact-r.i.-rules-ravitch-claim-on-test-scores-mostly-false.ece
Projo recently changed its online format so that readers need to pay in order to read more than 15 articles a month. Right after they did this they started posting slightly altered variations of the same story so that readers have to read more than one article to get the whole story about a news event.
Some articles allow comments, and others do not. It is worth mentioning that as of this morning, the article that allows comments was no longer visible from the “front page” of the online paper, but the one that does NOT allow comments is still visible.
To be fair to the Projo, they have printed a number of commentaries in the last month that are clearly in opposition to the corporate reform movement. This latest “Politifact” is, of course, trash.
Thanks for the explanation. I just wanted to make sure that Diane knew you had posted her letter there and made a nice rebuttal online. Also that others of us had chimed in and were following your lead. 🙂
Thanks. I am apparently getting well known in education circles for my comments on Projo.com education articles. Some call it “blogging”, but I don’t think that is really the right word.
HA! That should be LOCAL education circles!
Ron,
Like you I too am limited to the 15 articles that Projo will allow you to read…however I did make a comment about this issue and was emailed by one of the editors…did you also get a personal reply?
I guess my views were strong enough to elicit a personal response from Projo!
Dee Ploma
Dee,
I received no personal reply. I am curious what the Journal editor told you.
To Ron and Dee, I’m just curious. I had posted a comment to a projo article about Gist’s embargoed dissertation, with a link to Diane’s blog post about it. I think I remember that both of you had also posted comments to that article. A few days later I got an anonymous letter in the mail (at my home), with a copy of my comment and a nasty response. I’m wondering if anything similar has happened to either of you.
Sheila, I have never had that happen (to my knowledge — I can be sloppy with snail mail and don’t check it nearly often enough). What did the response say?
John Hill isn’t the regular education reporter for the Projo, nor does he even regularly cover education politics; so it was odd to me to see him assigned to cover this subject since it seems to be outside of his regular field.
It is important to note the Ed Achorn, the editor of the editorial page of the Projo, is married to Valerie Fortie, who used to run an organization in Rhode Island called the “Education Partnership” which, until it when out of business under a cloud of suspicion, was a very pro-corporate reform organization.
Great responses! Thank you for your work.
I’m not an educator nor am I a historian of education but I wanted to leave a comment that can hopefully shed some light on the (lacking) print media in the State of Rhode Island for those who represent an out-of-state audience on this blog. If you’re from Rhode Island, you already know what I’m about to talk about. I want to give some resident insight into the Providence Journal phenomenon but first some disclosure.
I’m actually a Political Scientist by education and an IT professional by trade/training so this blog and the author were brought to my attention in more of a social setting. My area of expertise is not education or education policy but I’ve always had a hankering to understand why the general public has a tendency to hate teachers, unions and the public sector. My friend, who is an educator, suggested Diane Ravitch as a good starting source for gaining an understanding of whats going on with public ed.
I picked up Reign of Error and I was at the talk at URI earlier in the month. Since diving into education policy and learning about corporate reform, I can see how well education policy fits into my area of interest – Political Science.
That being said…
The ProJo is a newspaper that is having a tough time. (Its circulation and business model suffers…) It is a paper that serves a state that has had a rough 4 or so decades. Rhode Island really struggles in a variety of ways. We have a series of revolving economic crises that combine with crumbling infrastructure, a public sector that is mismanaged at the top and key areas of the state which have never transitioned from early to mid 20th century medium to heavy industrial activity after those sectors moved away. The Providence Journal is a representative piece of media. It represents a bloated and decayed state. Within that state is a worn out, under-educated and beleaguered New Englander. That is the audience. Anti-intellectualism and *partially* legitimate hostility towards the public sector leads large groups of the population of this state down the war path that is hatred for public educators.
We’ve got a suspicious and poorly educated body of citizens who have some real cultural and social quirks that go beyond typical Southern New England curiosities. Major indicators about the quality of life and management of state resources paint the picture of a backwards state that tends to fall far below national norms. The Providence Journal is a paper for the folks too disadvantaged to realize that they shouldn’t be conservative.
It really isn’t a legitimate paper with genuine coverage. We’re the kind of state that has to get a paper from an out of state regional locale for anything worthwhile. Boston papers are the only safe bet regionally.
I , too am a native Rhode Islander…I think what you have said concerning the Projo is very mild. And that may be because you are not a teacher and thus not subjected to the humiliation and dehumanization of their editorials and news articles. They crucified the teachers of Central Falls a few years back…That school is state run and under Commish Gist and Super Gallo…They are the leaders and yet they went scot-free from criticisms…Teachers then and teachers now have become the scapegoats for the ills due to poverty but no one wants to speak about poverty as the crucial factor in why children do not do well in school…But that’s a debate for another time.
The paper has over the years, vilified teachers, unions and anyone who is not a wealthy or corporate believer in the privatization. They are a slanted and biased paper and should go out of business for their arrogance to those who do not support what they support.
I take issue with your one statement:
“The Providence Journal is a representative piece of media. ”
THEY ARE DEFINITELY NOT A REPRESENTATIVE PIECE OF MEDIA. THEY HAVE NO COMPETITION BEING THE ONLY STATE SERVED NEWSPAPER AND BIASED IN THEIR CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS.
PROJO IS A VERY PRO CORPORATE REFORM NEWSPAPER AND THEY MAKE NO BONES ABOUT SAYING SO IN THEIR MANY ARTICLES
As an aside, look in today’s golocalprov.com site, you will see a list of the 50th wealthiest and influential Rhode Islanders….I did not see any on the list who is pro public schools…In fact, one
name on that list, the wealthy Angus Davis was a former member of the Board of Education who supported charters, vouchers and high stakes testing in addition to the RacettTop mandates written by Jeb Bush’s Chief for Change doobee Deborah Gist.
Gist’s reform agenda is quintessential FEE/Chiefs for Change: Virtual education; school grades; comprehensive student data collection system, and an “academy” for “transformative” leaders.And this
is what Projo supports—-the Republican playbook of education…treat public schools as free enterprise and support Gist who is closely allied with a far right GOP Presidential contender, Jeb Bush.Just like Projo again being a republican paper supports pro charter and pension buster Gina Raimondo…
Dee Ploma:
Rhode Island is an overwhelmingly Democratic State. Why point fingers at the Republicans? Is it not a Democratic “playbook of education”?
Bernie, don’t let the term “Democrat” fool you….These politicians are DINO’s -Democrats in name only.
Look at the make up of the General Assembly and you see there is a high percentage of lawyers…The Democratic leadership are lawyers..What kind of democrat votes against unions, against binding arbitration, against pensions and I can go on and on…They are Republicans wearing Democratic attorney suits! In fact, they make 6 figures and they didn’t even give up their automatic 2% raise they received back in July. They follow the Republican education playbook– (Arne Duncan the biggest fool of all fools in education is a follower of Jeb Bush- a potential future Presidential contender)
The Democratic Party has changed over the years…used to be for the down trodden….not any more…they are in there for their own self serving agenda…They throw crumbs at union leaders to get the vote but look at the record of the GA and you will see these so called career democrats are really not!
Dee Ploma:
I think you are making my point. Your issue is with whoever is running the Democratic Party in Rhode Island.
As for lawyers in the GA, most state legislators are dominated by lawyers. 43% of Congress are lawyers and 60% of Senators. In Massachusetts, currently 30% of our Reps and Senators are lawyers (60 out of 200) plus our Governor.
Interesting take. RI voted overwhelmingly for Obama, has 2 Democratic Senators and 2 Democratic Congressmen. Its State legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, “Rhode Island has some of the highest taxes in the country, particularly its property taxes, ranking seventh in local and state taxes, and sixth in real estate taxes.”
The GA will do anything for the Obama $$ …Sen Jack Reed comes home with money for projects and that is how he gets re elected. I can’t even begin to explain why David Cicilline who left Providence in financial ruins got re-elected unless it’s mob payback….He deserves to be in jail for what he did to Prov and yet gets re elected–just like the democratic city and town mayors….It is a MOB state.. which is synonymous in RI with the democratic party!
The other aspect of RI is one nobody will touch…must be politically correct not to mention it but I will mention it…I am not politically correct but a RI taxpayer…it is the topic of illegal aliens…big majority live here…they voted in the last elections..were bussed in last minute in Prov to polling places about to close but were allowed to vote….need I say more?