A Quick Survey of Rhode Island News
The Wannabe (Local) Heroes of the 2020 Election, Ramaswamy RI Election Fraud (Ironic Much?), The Sorry State of RIDE's Takeover of Providence Schools, and More
Is “all politics” truly “local,” as the famous saying goes? Probably not, or, at least, not as much as it once was.
Yet Little Rhody’s politics have an interesting habit of being interesting. So let’s do a quick survey of local Rhode Island news, and its occasional intersections with national news:
My brother and I wrote this article on failed RI politician Ken Block’s attempts to brand himself nationally as a 2020 election hero. Yes, Mr. Block is a native Rhode Islander, but The Political Pulse of America pulls no punches.
“Return of the Living Dead?” Apparently the already rapidly fading Ramaswamy campaign has some new signature problems. Per the Rhode Island Current (shout out to them, by the way), “[a] political organizing firm hired by” his campaign “has fired a staffer for intentionally forging signatures of dead people on Ramaswamy’s nomination papers in Rhode Island” (emphasis mine). Hmmm, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But I don’t think the Trump campaign will be looking into it. If they did, it would definitely be more successful than their efforts to find voter fraud in Georgia.
I mentioned this in a note to my subscribers, but check out the GoFundMe page on the Quonochontaug Beach shoreline access issue. If you are curious, the page provides a good sense of the “David vs. Goliath” battle that is currently going on there. Stay tuned for (maybe) an upcoming letter to the editor to The Providence Journal about it, written by the Salzillo brothers.
As reporter Amy Russo wrote, “[w]ithout any general notice to media or a news conference,” RIDE “has released its latest ‘star’ rankings last week.” The results are not pretty. Among other things, Classical High School, once a 5-star school, is now a 2-star one.
As loyal readers of this blog are aware, I am a graduate from Classical’s class of 2020. While Classical High School’s building has always deserved a 1-star, it has historically been known for its high academic standards. What happened? Yes, the pandemic, but what else happened?
While some partially attribute the drop to Classical’s failure to better incorporate MLL students (multi-lingual learners), remember that even the most recent increases brings the total amount of MLL students in Classical to approximately 3%. That is not enough to have such a significant impact on Classical’s ranking. The bigger culprits are probably the following district-wide issues:
high turnover rates of teachers and staff, and rapidly decreasing teacher morale before and since the pandemic.
the adoption of a new learning management system (i.e., Canvas) at the last minute, without any attempts to prepare teachers to use it before the current school year started.
one-size-fits-all educational policies like mandatory biweekly (i.e., twice a week) assignments for all classes.
a disastrously-implemented and mandatory civics class. The current civics class uses and bases its curriculum off of a college-level textbook. Note that many of these students will have had absolutely background in civics education before this class. Now, I am all for civic education done right. But you can’t just throw a college textbook at high school students who—because of the prior failings of our public school systems—have little to no civic knowledge beforehand.
The list goes on. And all these factors are directly attributable to what many see as the unwelcome presence of the RIDE/Infante-Green educational bureaucracy.
P.S. Not local, but Chuck Rocha was once the leader of Hispanic outreach for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. His fiancee, Ebony Payne, is running for Ward 7 D.C. Council. Since Washington D.C. is not a state, all of its politics really are local, which makes this contest even more important than your run-of-the-mill council race. Here is the link:
https://www.ebonypayneforward7.com/. If you can donate to the campaign, great. If you know anyone in D.C., be sure to let them know about Ebony Payne.
And stay tuned for more local news coming up soon.