I try not to think too much about the Providence teacher terminations (my inner therapist says I should be exercising instead) but I can’t help but ask a couple of questions.
Here’s my first big, hairy question about the teacher terminations: if Providence gets away with it, how long will it be before they try it in Cranston and every other district in the state and country?
Which brings me to my other big, hairy question: Do we value experience in teaching? Or will there be a general trend to get rid of the experienced teachers in favor of the newer teachers who are hip to all the mandatory testing and really good at test prep?
But that’s a big, scary topic. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s go watch the Jon Stewart show and have a good laugh at how ridiculous it is to be hating on the teachers.
Kmareka.com 
I’m thinking that some of the likely teachers to take offense and move on are the ones with the best marketable skills and options.
Experience is undervalued everywhere.
Experience in any discipline has two faces-in my job we used to say there were agents who did the same year twenty times and then retired,and those who did twenty years of developing and then retired.
It depends on the idividual what they do with the chronological experience they acquire.
It’s my understanding that Providence schools actually need some staff trimming, we have a 12:1 student:teacher ratio system-wide (one of the best in the country), and our population in Providence has dropped to circa-1900 levels. In reality, about 90% of the teachers will likely be brought back, and they won’t ‘miss a step’ if they are. The alternative is to find $40M from property taxes, which are already at the breaking point in Providence. This city cannot afford to hike rents 10% just to pay for extra school capacity.
This does NOT re-set everyone to step one or put a black mark on your record, -unless- you don’t get an assignment this fall.
Sorry, those are the breaks; when there’s less work to be done (fewer students) and the boss can’t afford to keep you on, there are going to be terminations. There’s no sense in having 200 teachers in the substitute pool come September, collecting pay for playing Foosball downtown.
Think about the bright side: If the school department costs can be reined-in, maybe we can shut four schools, keep class sizes reasonable, and then use the money to actually bring the closed schools up-to-code, then move students back into them, close the school they left, and renovate those. Given that RI looks to have it’s farthest-left yet fiscally-responsible government in decades, I suspect this will happen.
I find skateboarding is helpful.
On a more serious note, all indications up to this point is that the pain is going to be concentrated on the 4-6 schools that are closed and the as yet undetermined number of schools that will be reorganized as part of federally mandated turnarounds.
Providence is set to flat out fire the teachers in schools that are closed for budgetary reasons — that’s virtually unprecedented in a US urban district, certainly a unionized one. This is an incredible disincentive to work in the majority of high-poverty schools in Providence.
The PPSD will never recover from this.
I’m looking at my 1st and 2nd grade class photos and we had 35-40 kids per classroom.
In HS we had more than that.
There was really no language barrier,because most of the foreign born students were from the British West Indies and spoke better English than we did coming from Brooklyn.
Thanks for your thoughts, all. I don’t see how the schools can legally fire anyone, let alone just the staffs in the schools that are closing. This seems like this would give many teachers just cause for filing a wrongful termination lawsuit, particularly if they had a good record as a teacher.
The last phrase has a lot of merit,but has there been an ongoing evaluation program that could give empirical evidence of who has been an effective etacher?
I am hearing from friends in Florida and elsewhere that they think I should leave RI and move to their states.
This really will not motivate people who value education to move here…
Kiersten, I appreciate your post.