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Oped: Education

Education
November 21, 2016

Op-ed: Gulliver's Travels and Common Core

This op-ed appeared in The Daily Caller and The New Bedford Standard-Times on October 27, 2016. by Jamie Gass “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery,” British dramatist John Gay wrote about Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. October...
Education
October 21, 2016

Op-ed: Vote ‘yes’ on Question 2

This excerpt is from an op-ed published on Oct. 18, 2016 in The Boston Globe, authored by Thomas Birmingham and Mark Roosevelt, co-authors of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act. “We included charter public schools in the 1993 law to provide poor parents with the...
Education
October 21, 2016

Op-ed: Mass. charters fight racial oppression

By Sephira Shuttlesworth By 1959, my late husband, the Birmingham, Ala. civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, had been beaten with bike chains, brass knuckles, and baseball bats by a segregationist mob, had his church bombed twice and survived his house being...
Education
September 21, 2016

Op-ed: Charter and district schools need not be adversaries

By Thomas Birmingham This op-ed appeared in the New Bedford Standard Times, The Lowell Sun, The Springfield Republican, and The MetroWest Daily News. In the run-up to a November ballot initiative that would allow more charter schools to open in Massachusetts, charter and traditional...
American Citizenship, Education
August 25, 2016

Op-ed: Teaching American History: A Straightforward Fix For The Bay State

Read this full article on WGBH News.  THOMAS BIRMINGHAM It’s often said that what isn’t tested isn’t taught.  At the same time, recent federal laws compel far too much standardized testing.  State education leaders should reinstate passage of a U.S. history MCAS...
Education
May 9, 2016

Op-ed: Poetry teaches more than rhyme

Originally posted beginning on Apr. 23, 2016 in The MetroWest Daily News, The Milford Daily News, The Brockton Enterprise, and on Diane Ravitch’s Blog. “[T]he best words in the best order,” is how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who authored the lyric sea ballad...
Education
March 30, 2016

Op-ed: State plays politics over charters

it’s time for Massachusetts to stop playing political games with the charter authorization process.
American Citizenship, Education
March 25, 2016

Op-ed: State should revive US history requirement

To teach students how to exercise the rights and responsibilities associated with active citizenship in a democracy, Massachusetts should revive the requirement that public school students pass a US history MCAS test to graduate from high school.
Education
March 22, 2016

Guest Opinion: Time to end Know-Nothing legacy once and for all

We should expel the Know-Nothings’ anti-Irish-Catholic amendment from the Massachusetts constitution, and remove bigoted Governor Gardner’s portrait from a position of prominence in our Statehouse.
American Citizenship, Education
February 29, 2016

Column: The last of 'The Last of the Mohicans'

Public school children are unlikely to read "The Last of the Mohicans," a masterpiece of American literature, thanks to Common Core's emphasis on "informational texts."