Oped: Education

This op-ed appeared in CommonWealth magazine. TOM BIRMINGHAM Jun 2, 2017 LONG BEFORE MORE than $40 million was spent last year making the cases for and against charter public school expansion, I was skeptical about using a statewide ballot initiative to decide...

The Archdiocese of Boston recently announced that after operating for 93 years, the Saint Clement School in Medford will be closing its doors at the end of this school year due to a persistent decline in enrollment.  That means a multitude of...

By Tom Birmingham   APRIL 13, 2017 Massachusetts’ story is well known in the education world. In the wake of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, student achievement shot up, and the Commonwealth’s students became the nation’s best performers. The law worked...

“How I could wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March!” the heroic Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote to one of the Roman senators who stabbed perpetual dictator Julius Caesar to death more than two millennia...

By Cheryl Brown Henderson and Jim Stergios The Boston Globe | MARCH 08, 2017 THE 50TH anniversary of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco), which allows about 3,300 Boston and Springfield students to attend school in surrounding districts, provides a good...

Read this op-ed in The New Bedford Standard Times, The Lowell Sun, The Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, The Springfield Republican, The Berkshire Eagle, The MetroWest Daily News, and The Federalist. “In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky...

Read this entire op-ed online at CommonWealth Magazine, the New Bedford Standard Times, The Berkshire Eagle, and The Salem News. Written by Tom Birmingham MASSACHUSETTS VOCATIONAL-TECHNICAL high schools are like the person who toils for years, only to be termed an “overnight sensation” when...

By Jim Stergios and Charles Chieppo Read this op-ed online at USA Today. Education nominee could improve on past secretaries by backing state and local innovation. Every administration since President George H.W. Bush’s has pinned its hopes of transforming American K-12 education on several...

Given our desire to do as much as we can, especially to help poor urban kids participate fully in the American Dream, we need to provide them with access to school choice options: charter schools; vocational-technical schools; private and parochial schools; and METCO. Choice is what the privileged have for their children. Why shouldn't everyone have access to high quality academic options?

Our schoolchildren need to learn Elie Wiesel’s wisdom, and the tragic events of the Holocaust, but they largely don’t. Wiesel's book Night is not an “exemplar text” in the nationalized K-12 standards, Common Core... Despite the post-World War II pleas to “never forget,” we are forgetting, and so are our children.