“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.
Stack em high
/0 Comments/in Blog, Economic Opportunity, Housing, Related Education Blogs /by Scott W. Graves and Micaela DawsonWhat level of concentration of poverty is the right amount? Is it right for the state to create destination cities for the poor?
As it stands, the state will, whenever possible, place the poor it is “helping” in areas of cities where housing values are extremely low in order to maximize their own ability to give people shelter.
Seems to be right from the immediate bean-counting standpoint, but if you think about it, it can create a death spiral for cities, which are already deep in the trough fiscally.
Let’s start with the numbers. In Massachusetts, the following Middle Cities have easily met their “state target for affordable housing”:
Do we really want to have the state concentrate even more poverty in Holyoke, Springfield or these other cities? Shouldn’t other towns have to pick up a share of the responsibility?
How do they afford to provide the kinds of services these new arrivals need? How much of an additional public safety burden is it? What level of disruption to or limitation on the schools–and more importantly to the kids–is it? How is it possible for the poor to find work in areas where unemployment is higher than elsewhere in the state? How can you attract middle-class residents and businesses when your streets aren’t safe and your schools stink? Aren’t we locking in a culture of low expectations in these cities?
The long-term costs associated with the policy of “stackin em high” are higher than you might think.
Can we all at least agree intelligently that we are being stupid?
There are no other issues. This is the issue.
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayAt a critical moment in The Verdict perhaps the best Boston movie ever made (considerably better, anyway, than the wildly overrated The Departed), Paul Newman’s character, a Boston defense attorney, is advised by his mentor (played by the incomparable Jack Warden, who, as you movie buffs out there may know, played the grandfather in one of the all time great cheesy movies, Problem Child) that there will be other cases. In response, Newman repeats over and over, more to himself than to Jack Warden, that “There are no other cases. This is the case. There are no other cases. This is the case.”
I was reminded of this scene this morning reading Ed Moscovitch’s op-ed in the Boston Herald, Soaring health costs sicken school reform. Dr. Moscovitch’s point is simply that as health care costs for school employees across Massachusetts rose 12.3% annually between 2002 and 2006 they crowded out other spending priorities, such as textbooks and professional development.
I have made the point before and been scoffed at, but, at the continuing risk of my colleagues’ scorn, I will say it again and again: There are no other issues. This is the issue. There are no other issues. This is the issue.
The United States spends roughly 16% of GDP on health care. Health care accounts for more than 25% of the Massachusetts state budget. By 2050, local, state and federal government health care spending will roughly equal today’s local, state and federal government budgets. A recent Pew study put the cost of pension and health care benefits state governments have made to public employees at $2.73 trillion (that’s correct, trillion with a tr), of which $731 billion is conservatively estimated to be outstanding liability.
If, as a nation, we are unable to reign in health care spending, we will have very little money to spend on anything else – education, homeland security, national defense, it doesn’t matter. There are no other issues. This is the issue.
46 years ago and still true
/0 Comments/in Blog, Economic Opportunity, Housing /by Scott W. Graves and Micaela DawsonJane Jacobs was the maven of public input, but she is also in many respects a common sense proponent of organic, private market growth in our cities. Try this on for size, from The Death and life of Great American Cities, published in 1961 when Robert Moses still held the marionette of New York in his hands:
Yup, yup, yup. There is an argument to be made that the state housing agencies, by stuffing more and more poor people into our major urban centers, is making them unsustainable. Fix the schools and focus on public safety, and frankly you could tell the state housing agency staff to pack up their things and go home.