Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce stands by his charge that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh had pulled a “full Scott Walker,” doing what he never acknowledged as a candidate.
The Mayor’s statement said, “The Mayor ‘has never said, nor does he have a plan to close 36 schools.’ The Mayor HAS said that he plans to ‘consolidate’ schools.”
Pierce responded:
“How can he consolidate schools if he does not close some?
“Oh, wait—if he leases some of the ‘consolidated’ school buildings to charter schools then the buildings will technically remain open. They just won’t be Boston Public Schools. Despite the expressed concerns of the Mayor’s office, the Blog post was sourced and linked to twelve relevant documents obtained in response to what Boston public school blogger Mary Lewis Pierce [no relation] described as a FOIA [Massachusetts Public Records Act] request.
“Among those records was an agenda for a meeting between the Boston Compact and Mayor Walsh and a Boston Compact talking points memo prepared for the Mayor in which the Mayor is scripted to announce and define Enroll Boston.
“Despite the claims of the Mayor’s office, the Blog post was neither untrue nor unsourced. However, the Blog is newly concerned by the reading comprehension levels of those entrusted with the education of Boston’s public school students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters Still Serve Fewer Special Ed. Students, But Are More Inclusive
A study finds that charter schools serve a smaller proportion of students with disabilities than their district counterparts, but are more likely to place them in general education classrooms. Read more.
And, Education Next (Petrilli’s crew) says with “common core” we don’t need ELL programs/teachers. This is one huge attack on public education by the ideologues (like Petrilli and friends) and the budget cutters (like Pioneer Institute)….
All you have to do is look at who Boston hired for superintendent and you can see the writing on the wall. Klein did his damage in Boston before he went on to New York and Washington.
Thanks for pursuing this, appears to be a sleazy, clumsy effort to cover up another attack on public schools by a bought politician in league with private forces. The capture and looting of public education indicates how grave our democracy crisis is. Electoral politics is too vulnerable to big money, from local school board elections to mayoral campaigns to the national presidential campaign. Democracy has been an acknowledged threat to the status quo for decades, since the Powell Memorandum of 1971 and the Trilateral Commission reports of the 1970s. Happily, the Opt-Out movement is still out of reach for takeover by the billionaires and their cronies in govt. and in the teacher union leadership. Opt-Out is still an autonomous asset for promoting democratic opposition. Pushing all-out to spread Opt-Out is best way now to stop the billionaires.
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘close’ is” — Mayor Marty Clinton
This is bringing back to my memory an episode in the UK some years ago, when a senior government minister was accused of lying. “Oh no!”, he said, “I may have been economical with the truth”. This phrase is now part of English English.
It’s just really reminds me of Chicago. If he’s going to say he has to close public schools because they’re under-enrolled he’ll probably have difficulty explaining opening a bunch of charter schools after he closes the public schools. People should wonder about that. It doesn’t make any sense.
Chiara,
It reminds you of Chicago because it’s the same Gates’ funded and driven “compact”. Same page of the playbook as ALEC. This one is called BillandMelinda.