Oped: School Choice

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?

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...

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...

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...

it’s time for Massachusetts to stop playing political games with the charter authorization process.

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.

By Sephira Shuttlesworth (This op-ed originally appeared in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on Nov. 7, 2014) To many, it’s become a cliché to describe education reform as the civil rights issue of our time. But for some of us it’s deeply...

Six decades ago, the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision sought to ensure that all children had access to good educational institutions. With the civil rights movement’s continued emphasis on education as central to economic freedom, 48 years ago...

Madison Park school needs autonomy to succeed By Jim Stergios | July 11, 2013 Originally published here. TWO-AND-A-HALF years have passed since Boston Mayor Tom Menino promised, in a State of the City address, to make Madison Park Technical-Vocational High School a...