Retired teacher Christine Langhoff reports that Boston parents are organizing to fight the new assault on public schools.”Unified enrollment” and the Gates Compact are both intended to confuse parents and put charter schools on an equal footing.
She writes:
Parents called a meeting on Sunday afternoon, organized on FaceBook, and with a few hours’ notice, some 150 people were in attendance. A previously scheduled School Committee hearing strected to 7 hours on Wednesday, as an overfilled meeting room spilled out into adjacent corridors with parents and teachers (many who are also parents) giving voice to their anger. The various excuses coming from the mayor and the superintendent’s offices have pacified no one.
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Here’s a parent’s report: https://schoolyardnews.com/parents-say-no-to-new-start-times-at-marathon-school-committee-meeting-e9489b794c94
Behind all of this is the Gates-funded Boston Compact, which seeks Unified Enrollment that would put charter and Catholic schools on the form parents must use for enrollment in public schools, and seems to be a piece of the transportation issue given as a rationale for all these schedule changes.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODfIL1gGu8DiHan87MPE2azE6IM3ynSN/view
Thomas Birmingham is credited in the lore of ed reform as the legislator who put Massachusetts on the shining path to glory with his 1993 legislation. It gave more state money to public schools, and grew out of a lawsuit about equity. It also allowed the first charters to open in the state. Now Birmingham is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Pioneer Institute, which is a proponent of directing public money to charters and religious schools. On Friday, Birmingham published an article in a Boston Catholic paper proposing that Catholic schools receive public money. He claims that because the Blaine Amendment was founded on anti-Catholic bigotry of the 1850’s, it should be overturned.
https://www.thebostonpilot.com/opinion/article.asp?ID=181036
Remember, the Catholic Church in Boston not only failed to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of its pedophile priests, but in a conspiracy that led all the way to the Cardinal, they hid the truth, allowing rape and abuse to continue as they moved offenders from one parish to another. Perhaps in an era where Betsy DeVos seeks to destroy that wall between church and state in our public schools, it seems an opportune moment to push for public funding of Catholic education. The #MeToo movement ought to be a reminder that it is not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good for the parents.
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May we have a link to the original article please. 🙂
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Very interesting. My opinion of what seems to be going on here is changing as I learn more about BPS school transportation. At first I thought, that’s nuts, obviously they can’t provide a reasonably-priced service unless it’s centralized; including multiply-located smaller schools (charters & parochials) decentralizes it. There are only 130 BPS schools (incl the Horace Mann charters) but they’re routing to 230 schools.
But according to a 5/17 wgbh.com article, something on this scale (or near to it) has been going on a long time in Boston: “The legacy of desegregation is a school choice policy where students often travel long distances to get to school.
“While the assignment system is in the process of changing to a home-based model, there are still plenty of lengthy trips. On any given morning, kids from one block could be going to schools in different corners of the city. That requires a lot of buses because officials have decided kids shouldn’t really spend more than an hour on the bus each way.”
So why now the attempt to streamline the service w/more staggered start-end times, quadrupling the number of elemsch 7:15 starts? Perhaps the addition of 70 charterschs in 20 yrs has raised costs considerably? Other reasons given by BPS don’t make much sense. True, they’re equalizing things by spreading the 7:15 misery to all income levels (before it was poor only) but that doesn’t account for jacking up the no of schools involved. And the business about letting older kids sleep in for brain health is just silly– apparently a majority of midsch & hisch studs use reduced-fare pub transit.
BPS spends 10% of its per-pupil cost on school busing. It would be interesting to know whether this is the same as it’s been for decades. Also by how much these changes would lower that. Seems like tail wagging dog, & maybe floated now due to current appetite for cutting ed funds.
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