“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Eating his words
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byAs noted last week, the Board Chairman S. Paul Reville performed a disservice to the parents and kids of Brockton, when he attacked a proposal for a new regional charter school at the last Board of Education meeting.
It was the first time that the Board turned down a recommendation from the Commissioner of Education, whose department puts all proposals through a rigorous vetting process.
Now, golly, I have intimated that the whole thing was rigged, given the bent of the Brockton Superintendent, the Governor’s Senior Adviser on Education Dana Mohler-Faria and the Governor against charters. I have received a couple of emails noting that I am pre-judging the decision.
Uh, no.
Just look back to a report issued in 2003, by S. Paul Reville’s own Rennie Center (then part of MassINC) which identified the school operated in Springfield by SABIS Int’l, the proponent of the Brockton charter, as one of eight “non-selective urban high schools that are on the road to success in helping their students achieve at high levels (the study’s parameters were 50% minority and 45% low-income).”
The report is called “Head of the Class: Characteristics of Higher Performing Urban High Schools in Massachusetts.”
In the press release accompanying the report, Mr. Reville noted that “Too few urban high schools are meeting the learning needs of low-income and minority youth” and that “this challenge should command the immediate attention of policymakers and researchers.”
So how could Mr. Reville in good conscience attack the Springfield SABIS charter school he so applauded before as a way to justify the rejection of SABIS’s application to establish a charter in Brockton?
What a difference an appointment makes. Or am I pre-judging? Maybe I am wrong and that challenge to deal with the achievement gap simply no longer commands the immediate attention of policymakers…
Certainly the aspirations of the 1300 kids, who would have been able to attend the proposed Brockton charter, did not matter to Mr. Reville.
I wonder how those words tasted as he redigested them. Can’t imagine it felt good.
Boom market for teachers in Denver
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byNext thing you know, it won’t just be the skilled workforce in the private sector. Soon, the teachers will be leaving! A crosspost from Mike Antonucci’s Education Intercepts:
The autonomy movement in Denver is leading to a strange phenomenon: a boom market for quality teachers:
Diane Kenealy interviewed for a teaching job at West Denver Preparatory Charter School on Jan. 9, received a job offer within 24 hours and accepted the position three days later.
Compare that rapid hiring to this spring’s staffing calendar in traditional Denver Public Schools, which dictates principals can’t schedule interviews with teaching candidates until the middle of March.
Even then, they can only talk to candidates already working in a city school.
A DPS principal who wants to talk to a college senior such as Kenealy, who spends her summers teaching poor children in Denver, has to wait another full month, until mid-April.
Kristin Waters, principal of Bruce Randolph School, the first of the autonomy schools, called the hiring process “a mad rush.”
“It’s very fast,” she said. “Everybody is kind of jockeying for the same candidates . . . and they get lots of offers, and you have to try to convince them why you are the best place to come.”
Schools fighting for the best teachers? How can this be bad? Leave it to Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, to find the dark cloud behind the silver lining.
She told the Rocky Mountain News that some teachers will interview from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. before school, work a full day and then interview after school until 10 p.m.
“It’s very hard to have a quality interview with such tight timelines,” Ursetta said.
Is Christy Available?
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byOn the heels of Tuesday’s results, Obama’s ability to take a punch and deliver an effective counterpunch is the key question going forward in this race.
But I’m not sure that the Axelrod Formula, summarized by the NYTimes:
allows for this type of behavior.
If you recall the experience of another Axelrod client – Deval Patrick – he was able to avoid most of the negative campaigning in the general election by leaving it to Christy Mihos, who was only too happy to oblige, attacking Healey at every opportunity.