“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.
Huey Long. . . er, I mean, Hilary on vouchers
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayMy colleague, Jamie Gass, the cynic that he is, predicted after reading my last post that Barack Obama would backtrack on charter schools and vouchers. And, sure enough, he was right. From an Obama campaign statement Jamie forwarded to me:
Still, as Democrats for Education Reform does, contrast that statement with Hilary Clinton’s response to Mr. Obama’s orginal comments (see my last post). As reported in the New York Sun:
Plainly speaking, this is demagoguery of the worst kind. Nothing else.
Nice job by Regional Planning Agencies
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Economic Opportunity /byKudos to the state’s planning agencies for coming together to do a great service for communities and businesses statewide. The Massachusetts Association of Regional Planning Agencies has cobbled together the basic premises for effective local permitting in its A Best Practices Model for Streamlined Local Permitting.
The document lays out ways to improve communication, standardize procedures and how to implement expedited permitting for select sites, per legislation (Ch. 43D) passed in 2006.
Timely and helpful work.
Obama on charter schools and vouchers
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayI like Barack Obama. I like the rhetoric he uses and the hope he embodies and, unlike some people, I believe rhetoric is as important as policy. More important even, for rhetoric defines the parameters in which policy operates. In a sense, rhetoric sets strategy, whereas policy only defines the tactics to achieve the strategy outlined by rhetoric. To refer to a prior post of mine
A candidate’s rhetoric helps define the strategic goals he or she seeks to achieve and from which he or she refuses to waver.
That being said, rhetoric without policy is empty. I want a candidate who has some idea how to achieve his or her strategic goals, especially when they are as lofty as Obama’s. To that end, I was more than pleasantly surprised to read the following quote from the Democrats for Education Reform website in Slate Magazine:
According to Democrats for Education Reform, Mr. Obama went even further:
“You do what works for the kids,” Obama said.
In many ways, Mr. Obama’s run for the presidency is a fulfillment of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream. His campaign has, as he has so often exhorted audiences on the campaign trail to do, transcended race. It is yet another reminder of the success of the civil rights movement in this country.
Despite that success, however, and despite Mr. Obama’s success so far in the primaries, racial inequality persists in America, and specifically in the area of education, where it is manifest in a racial achievement gap, an achievement gap maintained by the unequal access of poor, minority parents to educational options for their children.
Mr. Obama’s rhetoric sets out a goal of racial transcendence. I applaud. I also applaud the policy tools he appears open to use to achieve it – supporting charter schools and vouchers. It seems that Mr. Obama has identified worthy strategic goals and is unwilling to let special interests deter him from achieving them, exactly, in fact, what a leader should do. Let’s hope that, if elected President, he follows through.