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Johns Hopkins’ Ashley Berner on Educational Pluralism & DemocracyApril 17, 2024 - 2:53 pm
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How to stop investment in urban areas
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byGreg Peterson knows the development world and related environmental issues about as well as anybody I know. (Full disclosure: I often sought out his advice when thinking through puzzles at the state’s environmental affairs office.) I have been hearing an earful from folks involved in clean-ups as part of the 21E program run by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The short version is that that state in the 1990s moved to a partially privatized program where Licensed Site Professionals (LSPs) were allowed to audit and certify compliance with the state’s clean-up standards. The program allowed the state to turbo-charge clean-ups–something that is necessary if we are serious about revitalizing our older industrialized cities. Together with the 1998 Brownfields […]
The Cake Is Baked, Convention-Center Style
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /bySunday’s Globe brought a supportive editorial asking for a careful look at the Mass Convention Center Authority’s planning process around doubling the size of the BCEC. It introduced a new line of argument — the larger size is needed to attract life science conventions, our expanded center will attract classier conventions than Vegas, and somehow being the site of life science conventions will result in innovations being spread around the world that benefits Boston’s reputation. That’s a pretty delicate reasoning chain, particularly during a recession when taxpayers will look skeptically at a follow-up request for $1 billion in funding, or perhaps more. Its intriguing to look at the data on our existing convention calendar (pulled 12/7 off the MCCA’s event […]
Growing discomfort with P21?
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byEdWeek‘s Stephen Sawchuk gives a wide-ranging look into the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (subscription req.) After seven relatively quiet years of work, P21 is facing a vocal chorus of detractors of its initiative, primarily from among advocates for a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. (“Backers of ’21st-Century Skills’ Take Flak,” March 4, 2009.) “The closer we look, the more P21’s unproven educational program appears to be just another mechanism for selling more stuff to schools,” Lynne Munson, the president and executive director of Common Core, a Washington group that advocates a stronger core curriculum, wrote in a recent blog item. Ken Kay, the president of P21, may consider that criticism to be a “cheap shot.” I haven’t looked at […]
Hard hitting WaPo piece on scholarships
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byAnthony Williams, the D.C. mayor from 1999 to 2007, and Kevin Chavous, former D.C. City Councilor and co-founder of Democrats for Education Reform, penned a powerful call for the President to show leadership in the Washington Post. Despite the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program’s five-year record of success in helping children from low-income D.C. families attend the best schools they have ever known, President Obama, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) are threatening to end it… Plain and simple, the position of Obama, Durbin and Serrano is to let the program die. Williams and Chavous are especially sour on Serrano: In his Nov. 28 Local Opinions commentary, Serrano said that the Opportunity Scholarships were “imposed” on […]
Whining About Legislative Process
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byYesterday’s Globe highlighted a troubling aspect of the state Legislature’s current process: cramming really detailed pieces of legislation into a few short days. What does this do? It concentrates power in the hands of lobbyists (who provide drafts of amendments) and staffers (who create the actual product). It drains power from elected representatives, who have no hope of actually reading, analyzing and pondering the consequences of all the paper that flies through the chamber. And it also cuts the press and the public out of the process almost altogether. The Globe piece examined an amendment offered by Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz that severely limited the number of districts where the charter cap might be raised. From my read of the amendments, […]