A Brief Introduction

In my secret fantasy life, I'm a girl detective - a slightly off-kilter combination of Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Veronica Mars (& a little Miss Marple, the eccentric knitter).  In reality, though, my sleuthing skills are sharply honed but severely underutilized.   My sixteen year-old daughter is almost too law-abiding for my liking, my dog refuses to sniff out evildoers' secret lairs, and not one of my friends has been framed for murder - yet.  We've been living in a hellishly intrigue-free zone.  Until recently.

A little less than a year ago, the newly inaugurated Angel Taveras (you've surely heard of him - the first Latino Mayor of Providence, who went from Head Start to Harvard - pulling himself up by his bootstraps all the way) unceremoniously fired every public school teacher in Providence.  Then, in a nutshell, all hell broke loose.

Anyone reading this is bound to know that the Providence School Department has been a churning sea of educational hot mess for ages.  In just the decade since my kid started school we've had six superintendents (2 of them interim - but still!).  Our schools have been overcrowded, underutilized, partitioned, repurposed, transformed, reformed, deformed, rearranged, overhauled, underfunded, and closed.  A girl doesn't need a novelty-sized magnifying glass to see the evidence of an attack on public education.  And from 2000 to 2008, we all knew exactly who to blame.  Of course it was the Bush Administration, NCLB, Margaret Spellings, unfunded mandates, and high-stakes testing.


But when our young, progressive, brand-new Mayor - himself a "product" of Providence Schools - sent pink slips to 1,926 teachers last February, it became all too obvious that something was up.  Something big.

And collective bargaining was just a red herring.

So here we are, 366 days after Angel Taveras took office and less than 24 hours before the RIDE Board of Regents will discuss a proposal to open an Achievement First Mayoral Academy in Providence.  And, while I'm not a titian-haired teen or an elderly English spinster, I do have a pile of notebooks filled with suspects, motives, and their crimes against public education.  And there are few people who think it's time to set my scribblings loose in the blogosphere.  So here goes...