NEW: Providence lands $5M prize for Early Education Initiative
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Mayor Angel Taveras' "Providence Talks" program beat out over 300 other applicants for coveted Mayors' Challenge prize.
A competition to “inspire American cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life,” the Mayors Challenge contest selected a total of five victors, each taking home over $1 million dollars to support implementation of the ideas pitched.
Providence captured first-place for its “Providence Talks” campaign which, according to Bloomberg “combines a revolutionary approach with proven technology to measure vocabulary exposure for children in low-income households and help parents close the word gap.”
The pitch by Mayor Angel Taveras was selected for its “direct, simple, and revolutionary approach to early childhood education,” and the foundation hopes that it will ultimately be shared with other cities to “improve the well-being of the nation.”
“The Mayors Challenge is dedicated to the idea that cities are the new laboratories of democracy,” New York Mayor Michael Boomberg said. “If an innovative program or policy can work in one city, it can spread across the country and even across the globe. Too often, great ideas don’t get the support—or the funding—they need. The Mayors Challenge helps eliminate those obstacles by elevating and funding the most promising and innovative ideas.
The winning cities—which included Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Santa Monica, Ca.—were selected based on “vision, ability to implement, potential for impact, and potential for replicability.”
“In the months ahead, we look forward to seeing these ideas implemented, take root locally, and then hopefully spread across the nation to improve the lives of all Americans,” Bloomberg said.
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Comments:
Caroline Evans
11:15am on Wednesday, March 13, 2013
We can soundly doubt there is anything revolutionary and effective coming out of Providence schools.
This will is nothing but a political reward aimed at a decrepit and bankrupt city that is dominated by typical corrupt-city Democrat politicos.
Take a look at the recipient cities.
Caroline Evans
11:19am on Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Go ahead and look up Bloomberg Philanthropies in WikiPedia.
Guess who is giving away the money?
The Mayor of Nanny York City, Mr. Sodacop Bloomberg.
Need you look any further? This is no reward for a clever bit of education.... it is a subsidy to try to prop up a city bankrupt of money, ideas and of ethics.
Edward Smith
11:57am on Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Thank you, Caroline. Unlike the rest of us you are clearly brimming with great ideas, positive energy and zest for life. That was very clever of you to encourage people to search Wikipedia to discover that it is, in fact, Michael Bloomberg a.k.a. Dr. Evil who is behind the evil philanthropic efforts cited here.
Shame on Bloomberg for offering anyone $5M of his own money to attempt something that hasn't been done before. He should have just given it to you. Then you could complain about how much of it the IRS would keep.
anthony sionni
9:03pm on Wednesday, March 13, 2013
why are children so bad in vocabulary in providence and is it because they are low income?
Caroline Evans
2:53am on Thursday, March 14, 2013
We need not expect the slightest good to come from this "award".
There is nothing substantial here... it is just a lot of purely empty educacrat-ese blather.
It is more than likely just an excuse to fund some politicos while dodging examination.
They might as well have built a bonfire out of five million one dollar bills as we will see it go to the usual self-congratuating losers who run the cities schools into the ground with only the tiniest concern for the students and vast concern for the teacher's union.
Caroline Evans
2:53am on Thursday, March 14, 2013
We need not expect the slightest good to come from this "award".
There is nothing substantial here... it is just a lot of purely empty educacrat-ese blather.
It is more than likely just an excuse to fund some politicos while dodging examination.
They might as well have built a bonfire out of five million one dollar bills as we will see it go to the usual self-congratulating losers who run the cities schools into the ground with only the tiniest concern for the students and vast concern for the teacher's union.
Caroline Evans
3:38am on Thursday, March 14, 2013
Here is a paragraph from the New York Times describing the Wile E. Coyote Super-Genius idea:
Providence took the grand prize for its plans to improve early childhood literacy. The children who participate in the program would wear a small device called a digital language processor that would record their daily interactions with adults. Those would then be converted into audio files containing the day’s adult word count and the number of conversational turns. That data would be used to help parents in monthly coaching sessions improve the quality of their conversations to improve their children’s vocabulary.
Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/us/providence-ri-wins-mayors-challenge-with-literacy-plan.html?_r=2&
Now.... here is what we can presume this bit of uber-genius might be:
We see a lot of pathetic hype about attaching a voice activated tape recorder to a kid.. or the solid state equivalent.... and then someone will feed it into Dragon voice-to-text software.
We will see some person who will be paid to sit and pick when the kid is speaking and when the adults and tag the Dragon-transcribed words accordingly.
Then they use the word-count feature of word processing software to see how many words are spoken by who.
An arbitrary list of "big important words" and "not important little words" will be created and then thy will count those words.
We know that no one thought of the wire-tapping and eavesdropping statutes and the potential for litigation when a kid "wearing a wire" is sent off on his mission to capture the conversations he will capture.
We know full well that those who are hired to do this will be corruptly selected.
We already know that the "educators" will cook this to ensure they can demands more money to do more of this.
We know they will dream up some totally ineffective ..but certain;y expensive... form of "remediation".
Thet will drag this out for as long as possible... then .. .after a decade or more and tens of millions of wasted dollars it will be discovered that this was a totally ineffective effort.
We are reinventing the wheel since it has been known for centuries (or is it eons?) that kids learn from language their environment.
What we see is a startlingly unimaginative program that will do little of any real value to anyone except the little collection of Wile E Coyote Super Geniuses who cooked up the grant applications.
We can expect them to be political favorites... union members... who will "just happen" to have a little more incentive to support the same moribund politicos who have run the city into the ground.
This is a nice little windfall that will do nothing of the slightest value except enrich whoever has cons them out of their funding for equipment and software.. which will certainly be purchased at ten to one hundred times its actual value... and which will pad the resumes of some people who probably are of no value at all when it comes to education of kids.
No.. this is people playing at things because they are shiny ... and like all RI "leading edge" efforts.... is a sad joke that only highlights how "the wrong people" dominate our every institution.