In the face of massive parent and teacher and student opposition, the state board of education in Massachusetts deferred a decision about a takeover of the school district.

State Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley hammered Boston Public Schools for its “bloated” central office and “unconscionable” transportation failures in his first public comments Tuesday on a new state review of the district, but held off on recommending any takeover of city schools, saying he remains “hopeful and optimistic” that the state and city can reach agreement on a plan for urgent improvement.

Addressing the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education at its monthly meeting, as dozens of people protested outside and dozens more were turned away from the packed meeting room, Riley said he will give Mayor Michelle Wu a chance to respond to his initial proposal for next steps. Details of that plan have not been released to the public...

For now at least, the state’s approach appears to be gentler than some had feared. Board members — who would need to vote to approve a state receivership — appeared in no hurry to call the question. Several acknowledged the passionate opposition to receivership voiced by students, parents, teachers and elected officials who testified at the meeting, and some expressed doubt that a full state takeover could work in the face of such aversion...

Josiehanna Colon, a student at New Mission High School who testified Tuesday, said she has felt the impact of state oversight. Too much of her education has been centered around standardized testing, she said; further intervention would likely bring more emphasis on tests and less diverse curriculum. “I’m angry that our voices may be ignored,” she said, “and that again and again we care about a test score instead of a child.”

The meeting, which lasted more than four hours and included a detailed presentation on the contents of the report as well as lengthy public testimony, was originally scheduled to take place in the auditorium at Wellesley High School, which seats 700 people. Leaders in the suburban district asked state officials to move the gathering elsewhere after learning that attendance would be high and protests could be held, potentially disrupting their school day.

Relocated to a government building in Boston, the much smaller meeting room could not accommodate all attendees, dozens of whom sat on the floor in a hallway outside the room, watching the livestreamed meeting on their cellphones. Several parents in attendance said they were denied the opportunity to speak at the meeting after submitting formal requests; two speakers chose to split their time with others who were shut out.

The fact that state takeovers have a dismal record of failure was apparently never considered. If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.

The state of Massachusetts appears ready to take control of the Boston Public Schools at its meeting tomorrow, despite the fact that state takeovers have failed everywhere. The state does not have a special reservoir of knowledge that is lacking at the local level, and if they did, they could provide it without taking control of the school district and ending local control.

This morning, as a seeming prelude to takeover, the state released a “blistering” report about the condition of BPS.

Boston Public Schools is largely stuck in “entrenched dysfunction” and its failure to achieve systemwide change on a number of fronts is causing thousands of students to languish in their classrooms, even as school district leaders have taken initial steps to help remedy some of the problems, according to a blistering state review released Monday.

”The district has failed to effectively serve its most vulnerable students, carry out basic operational functions, and address systemic barriers to providing an equitable, quality education,” the review states. “The problems facing BPS are abundantly clear.”

And the report makes the case that state Commissioner Jeffrey Riley and the state Board of Elementary and Education will take action, although the report doesn’t state what specific steps will be taken. The state education board is scheduled to discuss the report’s findings at its monthly meeting Tuesday...

The new review paints a devastating portrait of the state of BPS, but gives outgoing Superintendent Brenda Cassellius and the school system credit for launching several new district-wide initiatives that show promising signs for boosting student achievement.

Among them: Raising high school graduation standards to align with entry requirements to the state’s public universities, adopting a new literacy curriculum and higher-quality instructional materials, and expanding the diversity of its teaching staff. But full implementation has not been realized yet, and the report raised concerns that the efforts could be thwarted by the district’s lack of a strategic approach to training staff and setting clear expectations and deadlines for schools to embrace the changes.

Despite these improvements, takeover is on the horizon.

The Boston Teachers Union plans a rally tomorrow to protest the state takeover:

As announced last week– we are attending the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) meeting tomorrow to say NO to receivership! 

BESE just announced a location change for this meeting. The meeting will now be at 1 Ashburton Pl, Boston, MA 02108 (NOT Wellesley HS). We will meet in front of the State House at 8am and walk over to the meeting together.

You can drive and meet us there but parking is limited and expensive in that area. You can also take the T to Park Street. Or we’ll still have two buses leaving at 7:30am:

• Boston Teachers Union in Dorchester (180 Mt. Vernon St. 02125. Be sure you go to the address in Dorchester, not downtown). Lots of free parking.
• St. Stephen’s Youth Programs in the South End (419 Shawmut Ave, 02119). Limited parking.

If you haven’t already, RSVP here if you can join us.

If you can’t join in person, you can watch the livestream of the meeting at https://livestream.com/accounts/22459134 and take action here. Follow the conversation on Twitter by following the hashtag #OurCityOurSchools. 

Tomorrow BESE will hear from students, parents, and educators united against state takeover! 

We used to have two rational, credible political parties in this country. Politics stopped at the water’s edge. People at the extremes were disappointed, but both parties respected civility, played by the rules, and respected the Constitution.

Dana Milbank warns us that the Republican Party has slipped off the edge into the muck of extremismism. Trump was the pied Piper, but he was preceded by other zealots like Newt Gingrich. And it has only gotten worse.

He writes:

This past weekend’s massacre in Buffalo has put a deserved spotlight on Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance and others trafficking in the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

But the problem goes well beyond the rhetoric of a few Republican officials and opinion leaders. Elected Republicans haven’t merely inspired far-right extremists. They have become far-right extremists.

A new report shows just how extensively the two groups have intertwined.

The study, released on Friday by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a decades-old group that tracks right-wing extremism, found that more than 1 in 5 Republican state legislators in the United States were affiliated with far-right groups. The IREHR (which conducted a similar study with the NAACP in 2010 on racism within the tea party) cross-referenced the personal, campaign and official Facebook profiles of all 7,383 state legislators in the United States during the 2021-22 legislative period with thousands of far-right Facebook groups. The researchers found that 875 legislators — all but three of them Republicans — were members of one or more of 789 far-right Facebook groups. That works out to 22 percent of all Republican state legislators….

The far-right groups range from new iterations of the tea party and certain antiabortion and Second Amendment groups to white nationalists, neo-Confederates and sovereign citizen entities that claim to be exempt from U.S. law. The IREHR largely excluded from its list membership in historically mainstream conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association and in pro-Trump and MAGA groups, focusing instead on more radical groups defined by nationalism or antidemocratic purposes.

I worry for the future of our democracy. I don’t think—as some do—that we are on the verge of a civil war. Only one side would be armed. But January 6 might be a harbinger of worse to come.

Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. Although he did not support Trump, he steadfastly represents a conservative point of view. However, he dissented mightily from the draft decision overturning Roe,written by Justice Alito. It is a radical decision, he writes not a conservative decision.

He wrote:

Dear Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas:

As you’ll no doubt agree, Roe v. Wade was an ill-judged decision when it was handed down on Jan. 22, 1973.

It stood on the legal principle of a right to privacy found, at the time, mainly in the penumbras of the Constitution. It arrogated to the least democratic branch of government the power to settle a question that would have been better decided by Congress or state legislatures. It set off a culture war that polarized the country, radicalized its edges and made compromise more difficult. It helped turn confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court into the unholy death matches they are now. It diminished the standing of the court by turning it into an ever-more political branch of government.

But a half-century is a long time. America is a different place, with most of its population born after Roe was decided. And a decision to overturn Roe — which the court seems poised to do, according to the leak of a draft of a majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — would do more to replicate Roe’s damage than to reverse it.

It would be a radical, not conservative, choice.

What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

This is partly a matter of stare decisis, but not just that. As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period. The fact that Casey somewhat altered the original scheme of Roe, a point Justice Alito makes much of in his draft opinion, doesn’t change the fact that the court broadly upheld the right to an abortion. “Casey is precedent on precedent,” as Justice Kavanaugh aptly put it in his confirmation hearing.

It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” Hamilton understood then what many of today’s originalists ignore, which is that the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.

Just what does the court suppose will happen if it votes to overturn Roe? Ending legalized abortions nationwide would not happen, so pro-lifers would have little to cheer in terms of the total number of unterminated pregnancies, which has declined steadily, for a host of reasons, with Roe and Casey still the law of the land.

But the pro-lifers would soon rediscover the meaning of another conservative truism: Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights. Americans are almost evenly divided on their personal views of abortion, according to years of Gallup polling, but only 19 percent think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how Americans will react to the court conspicuously providing aid and comfort to the 19 percent. You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.

And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.

Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition. The fact that the draft of Justice Alito’s decision was leaked — which Chief Justice Roberts rightly described as an “egregious breach” of trust — is a foretaste of the kind of guerrilla warfare the court should expect going forward. And not just on abortion: A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.

The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.