Una propuesta modesta: Finding Funds for Providence Schools
Sources close to Sen. Magaziner’s office were consulted in preparing this composition
One of the major mandates that Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green brought to Providence after her appointment by Gov. Gina Raimondo was the full-district certification requirement for all faculty members to gain the credential (known as a license endorsement) enabling them to properly attenuate their pedagogy to students learning English as a second language (known as ESL; these students colloquially are called either MLL or ELL for Multiple/English Language Learners).
If a Providence school student were expected to pay to be trained in flipping a hamburger, their parents would rightfully be alarmed about what amounts to a workplace labor law violation.
However well intended, of course, Commissioner missed out that, per this being the State of Rhode Island, someone would screw it up royally in a fashion resembling local legends like Buddy Cianci or Ed DiPrete.
Nobody can blame the Commissioner, she really does not realize how badly corruption and graft is run in this state.
It isn’t even the existence of the graft itself, it is just how utterly blatant it is. We had a Governor get arrested over dumpster diving for bribes at a fast food joint I worked at!
One of the biggest problems is the government on the federal, state, and municipal levels have been unable to meet their basic obligation to finance the tuition for faculty members to gain this major teaching license endorsement.
The law mandates, for the very same and basic reasons that define paid training mandates in fast food restaurants or grocery stores, that employers must finance tuition and time spent in professional development trainings. If a Providence school student were expected to pay to be trained in flipping a hamburger, their parents would rightfully be alarmed about what amounts to a workplace labor law violation and wage theft.
Why won’t these governments work together on the tuition financing?
It’s complicated, and not by virtue of pure malice. Some wild stuff happened.
Like I said, the Commissioner said that EVERY teacher, ALL AT ONCE, should get this credential that costs as much as a decent jalopy and requires a year of study plus student teaching.
The reality is that the bargaining unit is so gigantic that it would have been impossible for both of the Schools of Education at RIC and URI to accommodate even a quarter of the union membership in a classroom for matriculation. It is fundamentally and logistically impossible to adequately administer training for that credential in such circumstances and those who pretend otherwise are crazier than I am.
Then some other stuff happened.
We had a pandemic create a completely unique experience where, overnight, the Providence faculty became the Spanish-language Geek Squad phone hotline for all of our families that didn’t know how Chromebooks work.
The Commissioner failed to provide adequate infrastructure and support for implementing this mandate via the local colleges and so she opted to de-regulate the local education economy by allowing for online vendors to provide matriculation services for the licensing endorsement. (At one point, the implementation of the mandate was being managed by one sole middle-management district officer in the Administration building who looked as though they’d been hit by a RIPTA bus or perhaps survived a tornado by the time they logged onto regularly scheduled Zoom meetings with Emergency Certificate applicants.)
She also failed to set aside a dedicated fund to finance tuition that, by right, should have been upfront and unquestionably paid without any expectation of employee financing.
She furthermore failed to acknowledge, per an earlier audit report filed in 2016 by Sam Zurier, that the Providence School District was approaching financial catastrophe owing to a municipal pension obligation, dating back to the final Cianci years, that inadvertently could bankrupt the Providence Treasury, meaning that making the City take on the tuition financing obligation was not smart. (Of course Providence is able to amortize the debts while trying to raise capital but nobody seems to remember how Cities can do that part either.)
These are not malfeasances per se, but they at least show a certain kind of unforeseen and (honestly) unpredictable series of outcomes that are both regrettable and preventable.
Over the past few months, Mayor Brett Smiley, City Council, the School Board, and a parade of everyone from grassroots youth organizers to Koch-financed capital interests have made a lot of hay tied to the fact that the City is trying to navigate out of these debts and State Takeover back into Local Control.
One possible avenue available to the Mayor, if he were able to collaborate with the Legislature and the Providence Teachers Union, would be fiscal relief via the Rhode Island Green Infrastructure Bank.
When Sen. Seth Magaziner was serving at Treasury, he rebranded this old state agency as part of a larger progressive initiative seeking to promote renewable energy infrastructure in the local municipalities. Towns and cities are able to use the bank to finance public construction projects/facility upgrades/renovations; they get particular support and attention from the state when they build renewable infrastructure.
Likewise whilst in Treasury, Magaziner’s office delivered a highly-detailed infrastructure audit and report describing precise targets and needs for all of the state’s public school buildings. This emphasis upon renewable energy and renewal of public schools is a very simple notion that has tremendous value in terms of civic virtue and responsibility that includes multiple trade unions playing a positive role.
As so administered at the current moment, the City is refusing to make tuition payments so it can keep the lights on, the General Assembly is essentially oblivious to this colossal inability to figure out a voucher program at RIDE, and the Commissioner prioritizes dog-and-pony show data points while one of the following happens for the average MLL student:
The number of English Language Development (the specialized course attenuated to language/grammar/vocabulary/speaking development) classrooms that either have uncertified or “Emergency Certified” educators in them serving as little more than substitute teachers means that the students are losing essential English language acquisition time and opportunities. Teaching English Language Development class is not about being able to tell your student how to use a Chromebook in a different language. The first class for this particular licensure endorsement is a bit of a binge-dive into Noam Chomsky’s linguistics (meaning the stuff that I didn’t include in our occasional email correspondence about anarchism). It’s really hard and that is because of how this is a form of specialized education requiring intense study. This should not be taken as an insinuation of nativist or xenophobic prejudice, particularly because of the fact that having educators from the same linguistic and national backgrounds of our students is vital. But at the same time, it is illegal to inadvertently create a scenario where you foster institutional prejudice. Why should Dominicans be accorded certain privileges with the teacher owing to language abilities that are absent their peer who speaks Haitian Creole? The conflations and prejudices hindering the requirement for that universality underwrites a major public misconception about this issue. You try reading Chomsky’s theory of Generative Grammar, let alone craft sensible policy talking points around its mandate as a workplace training manual!
The few remaining teachers in the District that hold legitimate credentials and training so as to properly educate and support MLL students are burning out and leaving Providence for greener pastures in Cranston, Johnston, and the other 30-odd Districts in the midst of a national teacher shortage caused by COVID’s legacy, which also extends into Southern Massachusetts
The longtime tenured faculty at top salary steps are adamant about not giving a red penny for tuition that the District is obliged to finance as employer and Mayor Smiley can’t argue with the imposition of that financial obligation upon an employee. These mandatory classes cost upwards of $2,500 per credit. (How did the Commissioner essentially manage to con us all into serving as our own personal bursar’s office when we already had six of those located at the RIC/URI/CCRI campuses by my count?)
If you aren’t noticing the recurring theme of learning disparities and loss of access to adequate education and support as so mandated by every civil rights law imaginable, don’t worry, this will not end with a tax hike in Foster.
The reality of the conversation about “stakeholders in education” oftentimes forgets the major asset that faculty and administrators share and which both students and parents might not:
Credit.
We drive one of our credit lines into work, use another credit line via charge card to get coffee, and then go to sleep at night in a third credit line. Automotive, credit card, and mortgage debts are all a form of credit. How much or little you pay off each month impacts your credit score as an individual, which helps explain some of the intransigence of faculty members who are resistant to paying tuition bills that the employer is mandated to cover. A lot of my colleagues resent being strong-armed into taking on further student debt, particularly in cases where their own children are either preparing themselves for or have just entered college. Part of the promise of tenure and being at top salary step was eligibility for a sense of stability enabling habits of home and family, now suddenly the District told these faculty members that they needed to take out loans that might otherwise finance, in sum total, a very nice used car.
What employee wouldn’t be offended by such imposition?
My own proposition is the following, predicated upon precedent not just in the national but local circumstances.
The Providence Teachers Union, as a collective representative of the credit interests of its membership, the most rudimentary notion of union solidarity and mutual aid, should be recognized as a stakeholder capable of collaborating with the Mayor, the Infrastructure Bank, and the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority (RISLA) in financing these tuition expenses.
The Bank has the capital able to provide the tuition funds. Furthermore, because the mandate for the tuition financing ultimately is to be derived from a specific federal mandate administered via a Department of Justice (DoJ) civil rights litigation settlement with the District, the Bank in turn has the capacity to pursue federal reimbursement. It ultimately might be a matter for lawyers in arbitration or court to determine but that federal mandate via DoJ has implications in terms of interstate commerce. (Remember all those out-of-state online colleges vending education products over the internet under compulsory consumption by the employer? There’s ways to utilize these debts as assets within a larger context of public finances and it is the addition of the faculty member’s credit line as one of the stakeholders that is worth seeing as valuable.) The use of Bank capital to finance tuition and training of employees, the faculty, is in compliance with the basic founding principles of the institution, if perhaps a little novel in application.
The RISLA, as an agency under regulatory authority of the State Treasurer, can provide oversight and infrastructure for administration of the tuition fund. Furthermore, as so guaranteed by the Constitution, the State Treasurer is entitled to use this public Authority for issuance of bonds for purposes of public financing.
Ok, so I am not going to even bother trying with Robert Caro’s gargantuan biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which has a particular reputation among a certain stratum of political wonks, advocates, lobbyists, politicians, journalists, municipal planners, and other habitual readers of the New York Times. It is a gargantuan tome that is called the greatest urban history of New York City in the twentieth century.
The unelected midcentury municipal bureaucrat Robert Moses essentially flipped the entire Big Apple inside out, implemented construction projects through/on-top-of minority neighborhoods in ways that should be considered ethnic cleansing by state forces, operated a private police force that answered solely to him as head of this obscure public Authority, and accrued power on an unprecedented and gargantuan level considering he never had been granted this power by plebiscite of any type. Caro’s project is about the cynical corruption of power.
Moses did some wild and pretty evil stuff as one of the major social engineers of postwar New York’s racially segregated landscape.
And it stemmed from his recognition that the Federal government is mandated by the Constitution to insure and provide an entire legal apparatus for the administration of bonds on the State level. This means it is possible for the Treasurer to gain federal support by default in the issuance of bonds, which is the pathway for tuition financing and reimbursement as so provided by the State Constitution and the General Assembly. Furthermore, a public Authority has capacity to collect taxes or tolls to rebate the bonds upon their maturity date. This means that the State Treasury has a significant capacity in terms of regulatory mandates. Why not provide these utilities to the Smiley administration as a method of rebate for the tuition expenses? Treasurer Diossa could utilize these opportunities for a larger bond campaign predicated upon labor as an active participant seeking to invest in the future of the student body and the civil rights of MLL students.
As the final actor, the Teachers Union provides a collective protection and support for all faculty members requiring the endorsement by pooling their credit as an institution, which is not a new innovation considering that the Union building is located beside a longtime union-backed credit union. The Union would not be acting in the capacity of a borrower or creditor so much as a co-guarantor for their members matriculating for their credentials working in tandem with RISLA, who should provide the infrastructure for faculty members to make the best financial decisions for their individual cases.
What do I mean?
Besides a lot of top-step tenured faculty, Providence has lots of recruits from Teach for America (TFA). The generational difference between Millennials and late Boomers alone is stark, now try grasping it in terms of how much capacity you have to take how many classes.
Individualized supports are necessary because of the following basic fact:
It is more expensive to matriculate part-time as opposed to full-time, which means the employer incentivizes over-exertion inadvertently by failing to provide an adequate infrastructure to administer this program. A recent college grad TFA has far different abilities and capacities than a soccer mom faculty member and it is unfair that the soccer mom would face a financial penalty because of her opting to take courses part time.
These are natural rules governing the normal matriculation process at the local colleges that are completely unacceptable for the administration of professional development mandated by federal law.
It constitutes a violation of workplace discrimination on basis of multiple minority concerns stemming from sexism/patriarchy, racism in the student lending industry, disability rights, and marriage/family status.
It is wildly illegal for the employer to foster this dynamic of prejudice in administration of professional development mandates from the Department of Justice. The Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office responsible for consumer protections needs to better recognize the opportunities for abuse that arise within such unregulated markets as so introduced via new platforms like long-distance digital enrollment in pursuit of employer-mandated training modules. This Commissioner has a mandate for regulation of this market which she seems to have absconded completely by virtue of how chaotic this licensure endorsement’s administration has been.
The reality is that the unregulated free market administration of the ELD license endorsement, meaning lack of oversight and proper regulation by Education Commissioner Infante-Green, might end up being her own personal version of the Credit Union Crisis…and she probably has no clue what that even means!
But, if she can understand why the collective credit rating of the Union is a massive asset as opposed to a weapon to use so to bust the union, maybe she can work with RISLA to extract herself from this mess and finally deliver the goods she promised when first appointed by Governor Raimondo.
Feliz Navidad!