Hundreds of students walked out of school in Boston this week to protest budget cuts that are pending.
Costs are rising faster than funding, and the schools may sustain $50 million in cuts to programs and services.
A day of protests by Boston students over potential education cuts — with hundreds walking out of their classes and three arrests — was capped by a demonstration at a School Committee budget meeting in Jamaica Plain last night, where hundreds of pupils demanded the board not slash funding.
Sera Tapia, a freshman at Boston Latin Academy, urged the committee to fully fund the schools at current levels.
“I have three more years at BLA. If they cut the budget next year, my education and learning will be undermined,” Tapia said. “It is not right for schools not to be fully funded at all levels: elementary, middle and high school.”
Nathaniel Coronado, also a freshman, called the next year’s budget proposal “unacceptable.”
“People stress they want the younger generation to be leaders in the 21st century, but if our schools aren’t properly funded, we can’t become the people we aspire to be,” he said. “It is wrong for our schools not to be fully funded at all levels.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just read the article and am so encouraged by these students and their willingness to speak out. Hope many more students follow them!
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I really, really don’t want to sound like a populist or anything like that, but how is it possible that this country is able to spend billions of dollars on wars and weaponry and, at the same time, it doesn’t seem to have enough to fund the education of our children? I have concluded that government officials simply don’t realize how vital education is to the future of this and any other country.
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Cesar,
When you think of our recent wars, think trillions, not billions.
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The Republican candidates want to cut social security, Medicare, and education yet increase military spending to somehow “balance” the budget. While soldiers get generous retirement and disability, the average military family is barely able to get by. So if the people actually fighting these wars are not seeing the money, where are all the tax dollars going? Maybe jets that don’t work, pentagon brass, and defense contractors and lobbyists?
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I 100% agree. Politics in Washington are completely messed up.
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And, if I may, it’s difficult to appreciate the value of a trillion dollars.
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As a followup to John’s post about what a trillion actually is:
http://rockhavencapmgmt.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-trillion-here-trillion-there.html
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Boston won’t fund its schools, yet paves the way for GE to bring its headquarters to Boston with $25 million in city property tax breaks.
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The latest cost is $150 million, which includes a helipad and rebuilding an iconic bridge. GE is responsible for contamination of the Housatonic River in the western part of the state; it is a Superfund site due to the PCB’s dumped into the stream. GE has tried every trick in the book to avoid payment to clean up their mess. One more thing, the wooing of GE from Connecticut has meant the loss of jobs there. GE wanted to leave due to a proposal to raise business taxes temporarily. GE has paid virtually no taxes in recent memory and actually got a tax credit in 2014.
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Finally, the mainstream media is quoting actual students as to the causes and issues of the protest.
Until now, there’s been nothing but education officials claiming the students are puppets put up to it by self-interested adults. The only person asking those students, and reporting what they say has been Jennifer “Edushyster” Berkshire.
Until now, this compliant media that have to spin things. Instead of reporting on an uprising among students against the privatization of their schools… in the same vein as those 1960’s protests, it’s there just a bunch of ignorant kids duped into behaving this way.
Jennifer “Edushyster” Berkshire is covering this right now, and, based on her interviews the high school students there know exactly WHAT going on and WHY. They see that the starvation of public schools is being done to effect “failure” in the traditional public schools, then those elite forces of privatization will use that failure — that the elites actually caused in the first place — as a justification for busting the teachers union, and replacing traditional public schools with privately-managed charters that are not accountable to the public, not transparent to the public, and which do not educate all the public … and generate huge profits for the money-motivated corporate reform privatizers, which employ a cheap, untrained, or barely/poorly trained bunch of non-professional teachers.
Here’s Edushyster’s piece — the only one until yesterday that actually quoted students involved in the protest:
http://edushyster.com/as-long-as-were-silent-nothing-will-change/
However, what does the traditional media do?
Again, unlike Jennifer, they have not asked a single student for a quote on WHAT they’re protesting and WHY. Think about that. You have 2,000 – 3,000 students in the street, and not one of them gets quoted or even named.
Instead, you get articles and editorial claiming that these students have been duped into protesting, and brainwashed by “special interests” and self-interested teacher unions. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says exactly that … and of course, none of the coverage includes any quotes from any of those protesting students themselves. I mean why would a reporter or editorial writer even bother? Those kids protesting are just dupes, after all, as the title indicates:
Editorial: Boston Students Duped
http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2016/03/editorial_boston_students_duped?utm_content=buffera4c4a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
A more condescending piece of sophistry I’ve never read:
“Apparently the irony of exiting classrooms early in order to protest possible cuts to the Boston Public Schools budget that might deprive students — they fear — of more educational opportunity was lost on a lot of the kids who cut class Monday and headed for the State House.
“On the one hand student activism is refreshing. Of course, there’s no reason such activism can’t be exercised at the end of the school day rather than the middle of it. But then that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”
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As in … “Isn’t that cute and ‘refreshing’ to see the kids play-act like this? But then again, they’re mostly motivated to do this because it’s ‘much fun.’ And hey, don’t those kids realize that they’re missing school, too, so they’re ironically harming their academic futures at the same time?”
As if losing a few days school was not worth the happy outcome yesterdty — tens of millions of funds being restored to school budgets.
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Some of that new attention to students and young people could be the rise of Bernie. Clinton and establishment Democrats tend to dismiss and talk down to young people.
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Bravo to these students! I’d like to see these students demand an end to the extraordinarily expensive TESTING INDUSTRY and then the budget would balance itself. Time for public education money to go toward learning and not into the pockets of corporate public education raiders!
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Most of the under funding is the result of political manipulations designed to starve public schools to make them vulnerable to takeover. We have seen this pattern in many states and cities. Laborious standardized testing is also part of the plot designed to frustrate and burden students and staff in under funded schools, and VAM is a corporate ploy to cull the herd of senior teachers. These are all tools of privatization, and they have very little to do with improving anything.
Some parents are choosing charters because public schools have been turned into testing centers. Many parents are not “choosing” charters; they are tired of seeing their children caught in the middle of a war. They want a comprehensive school for their children, and the public schools are being whipped into submission while a balanced curriculum becomes a casualty. Parents want their children to feel relief from the stress of the endless, meaningless testing. The beat goes on with CBE, and other misguided plans that have allowed corporations to use our children as guinea pigs.
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The public school students were immediately dismissed by ed reformers as teachers union plants:
I guess it’s impossible for them to imagine anyone could actually support a public school.
Life inside the “movement” bubble, where all public schools are failing and all people long to “escape” to a charter. The scary part is many of them are actually employed by the public to run public schools.
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How much are taxpayers spending on testing?
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There’s a nice article about the student protest on boston.com and the good news is that the mayor won’t cut funding to high schools.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/03/11/how-group-boston-teenagers-organized-massive-district-wide-protest/MorhkS0a2mcLJOD1sz9hxJ/story.html
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This article comes from the parent representative on the MA state board of education:
https://t.co/EUigs1thkX
And another non MSM report:
https://t.co/U2wWWqFAo4
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The striking thing about the proposed budget cuts is that no one has made the case that they are necessary. We’re not in a time of austerity – quite the contrary! Literally thousands of luxury condo buildings are going up and taxes are flowing into the city’s treasury. Boston weathered the recession rather well, and our major source of jobs are higher ed, hospitals and tech, none of which are easily outsourced.
So why cut the school budget? Don’t want to pay for those kids’ education? (86% are not white; 46% do not have English as a first language; 20%SWD, 49% high poverty; 72% high needs – ELL’s, SWD’s low SES)
Boston’s schools are rated as a top urban system (for whatever that’s worth). But the mayor has signed onto the Gates CRPE Compact, which boosts charters at the expense of public schools. Gotta defund the real schools so the faux ones can make inroads. And we have the trifecta of mayor, governor and state DESE politically aligned for charters.
But the best thing about the schools is that the kids rock!
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This is a great follow up read: http://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/03/11/how-group-boston-teenagers-organized-massive-district-wide-protest/MorhkS0a2mcLJOD1sz9hxJ/story.html?s_campaign=bcom
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With Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt pontificating about Boston public education, “What could possibly go wrong.”
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