Stop the Psychobabble - Have Press Conferences When Providence Schools Aren’t National Embarrassment

Stop the Psychobabble - Have Press Conferences When Providence Schools Aren’t National Embarrassment

The most recent missive from the administration of Mayor Jorge Elorza was to invite the media to go on a tour with the new interim Superintendent Frances Gallo of an “Innovative Summer Learning Program.”

Gallo comes to Providence after having run the worst school system in the state -- Central Falls.

No one could answer why this summer program is “innovative.”

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The press event is Gallo's first priority on her first day.

In Providence, Elorza loves a good Harvard Kennedy School buzzword. He likes the big ones. His favorite is “transformational change.”

What exactly is “transformational change”?

According to BusinessDictionary.com, it is defined as, “A shift in the business culture of an organization resulting from a change in the underlying strategy and processes that the organization has used in the past. A transformational change is designed to be organization-wide and is enacted over a period of time.”

Yay, we are for that!

To try and capture “transformational change” in words for the rest of us, and we are guessing it means hard work by competent dedicated public employees to try and fix our horrific schools from being a national embarrassment.

That might be good “transformational change.”

But buzzwords be gone. Let performance speak for itself. 

Guess what? This is not the time to be claiming anything. Nothing in Providence schools are innovative. The only thing Providence schools have innovated is how to spend one-third of a billion dollars plus and not educate any children.  Zero for 24,000.

Think about it, the usual graft, corruption, and incompetence can only get you so far. You really have to be an innovator to piss away $350 million.

GoLocal asked the Providence School’s PR flack Emily Martineau in an email what makes this program innovative. No response.

All we can say is, "On to PVDFest" and have us some good old “transformational change.”  But, this time let's include the “innovative stakeholders.”