Editorial Staff

Boston Catholic Schools Supt. Tom Carroll on National Catholic Schools Week

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by Editorial Staff
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on
LinkedIn
+

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard celebrate National Catholic Schools Week with Tom Carroll, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Boston. He shares his view of the value that Catholic schools add; the reasons for their success at improving student outcomes and creating a sense of community; and their commitment to serving children from underprivileged backgrounds, regardless of religious affiliation. They explore how Catholic schools have adapted to changes resulting from COVID-19, taking a proactive approach to closures and remote instruction, and re-opening in the fall while many public schools across the country have remained closed. They discuss the impact of these decisions on their enrollment, and the efforts they have undertaken to follow health protocols and ensure safe and clean classroom environments, leading to a minuscule COVID-19 case count. They also delve into why Superintendent Carroll is a strong supporter of tax credit scholarship programs, that would allow all families, regardless of income, to enroll their children in the schools that are best for them.

Related: Wall Street Journal: “Catholic Schools Are Beating Covid”
New Book: A Vision of Hope: Catholic Schooling in Massachusetts

Stories of the Week: In Chicago, the public school district and teachers unions have entered a cooling-off period that will continue remote instruction, in an effort to avoid a strike over in-person learning. Are they merely prolonging the inevitable? February marks Black History Month, during which we celebrate the achievements of African-Americans – but few of us understand the role played by Black educators in establishing this event.

Guest:

Thomas Carroll is the Secretary of Education and Superintendent of Schools for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, serving over 31,000 students across more than 100 schools. He is also the founder of the USA Workforce Coalition, a group of nearly 300 organizations focused on adopting federal legislation that addresses the nation’s skills gap and expands educational opportunities. Before joining the Archdiocese of Boston, Carroll was president of the New York-based Invest in Education Foundation since its founding in 2012. Carroll served as New York Governor George Pataki’s Deputy Director for Regulatory Reform and played a leading role in the adoption of New York’s charter-school law. Over the course of his career, he has led a network of high-quality urban schools, renovated and constructed school facilities, advocated on behalf of Catholic schools, and raised millions in private donations for Catholic scholarships. Carroll has both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University at Albany. He and his wife, Claudia, have two children.

The next episode will air on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 12 pm ET with guest, Prof. Valerie Boyd, the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia, and the definitive biographer of Zora Neale Hurston.

Tweet of the Week:

News Links:

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-the-important-political-history-of-black-history-month/2021/01

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-chicago-schools-reopening-updates-covid-19-20210201-gzonljoum5dlnjj5gy4mjvsr6e-story.html

Get Updates on Our School Choice Research

Related Content

Voc-tech schools thriving despite pandemic strictures

0 Comments
/
HANDS-ON EDUCATION plays a critical role at Massachusetts regional vocational-technical high schools, where students alternate weekly between academics and shop classes. Given that reality, you’d think the schools would be particularly hard hit by the switch to hybrid models under which students are in a physical school building only half the time. But thanks to innovative approaches to coping with pandemic-related restrictions, voc-techs are successfully bucking statewide public-school enrollment trends.

USED Asst. Sec. Jim Blew Talks Sec. DeVos, School Choice, & K-12 Politics

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Jim Blew, the assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education. Assistant Secretary Blew shares lessons from leading and implementing K-12 public education reform efforts in often contentious policy environments, and the unique challenges of the current partisanship and gridlock in Washington, D.C.

New Study Provides Toolkit for Crafting Education Tax-Credit Scholarship Programs

In the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key impediment to private school choice, Pioneer Institute has published a toolkit for designing tax-credit scholarship programs. Now available in 18 states, nearly 300,000 students nationwide use tax-credit scholarships to attend the school of their family’s choice. TCS policies create an incentive for taxpayers to contribute to nonprofit scholarship organizations that aid families with tuition and, in some states, other K–12 educational expenses. This paper explores the central design features of TCS policies—such as eligibility, the tax credit value, credit caps, and academic accountability provisions—and outlines the different approaches taken by the TCS policies in each state.

Education tax credits don’t cost taxpayers a cent

0 Comments
/
This op-ed has appeared in WGBH News, The Providence Journal,…

Stanford’s Prof. Caroline Hoxby on Charter Schools, K-12 Ed Reform, & Global Competitiveness

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Caroline Hoxby, the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

SABIS® President Carl Bistany on International Education, Charter Public Schools, & At-Risk Students

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Carl Bistany, the president of SABIS® Educational Systems, an education company founded over 130 years ago that serves young women in the Middle East, and poor and minority students in the U.S.

MCAS testing essential to address falling test scores

0 Comments
/
Amid the chaos that was created by schools suddenly being shuttered in March as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it made sense to cancel administration of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests. But supporters of pending legislation that would place a four-year moratorium on using MCAS as a high school graduation requirement and create a commission to study alternatives to the tests are no longer responding to a crisis; they are using it to advance their anti-reform agenda.

Wall Street Journal Columnist Jason Riley on the 2020 Election, School Choice, & Race in America

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Jason Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Jason shares insights on the 2020 election, its implications for the next two years, and assuming Vice President Biden becomes president, how he may govern on K-12 education.

LSU’s Prof. Andrew Burstein on Washington Irving, the Headless Horseman, & the Presidency

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Andrew Burstein, the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and author of The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving, and with Nancy Isenberg, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, Daughter of Lead Plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Ed., on Race & Schooling

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Cheryl Brown Henderson, president of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence, and Research. She shares her experience as the daughter of the lead plaintiff in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and thoughts on how the historic decision contributed to advancing civil rights in our country.

Harvard PEPG’s Prof. Paul Peterson on Charter Schools, Digital Learning, & Ed Next Polling

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Paul Peterson, the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

Kelly Smith, Prenda CEO, on Microschooling & the Future of K-12 Learning

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Kelly Smith, founder and CEO of Prenda, a company that helps create flexible learning environments known as microschools. Often described as the “reinvention of the one-room school house,” microschools combine homeschooling, online education, smaller class sizes, mixed age-level groupings, flipped classrooms, and personalized learning.

Study: Signs of Progress at Madison Park, but Still a Long Way to Go

Four years after it began to implement a turnaround plan, Boston’s Madison Park Technical Vocational High School is showing clear signs of progress, but its performance continues to lag behind that of other vocational-technical schools in Massachusetts, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

U-Ark Prof. Jay Greene & EdChoice’s Jason Bedrick on Yeshivas vs. New York & Religious Liberty

0 Comments
/
This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Jay Greene, the Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and Jason Bedrick, the Director of Policy for EdChoice. They discuss their timely new book, Religious Liberty and Education: A Case Study of Yeshivas vs. New York, about the recent battle between Orthodox Jewish private schools and New York's state government over the content of instruction.