Breaking up a popular, high-achieving neighborhood elementary school because it doesn't have enough white students, even though the suburban black parents who send their children there are pleased with the school. Trying to shut down charter schools, though they cost less to run than traditional public schools, their students' performance may be superior, and they have long waiting lists. Giving parents the runaround when they try to transfer their children out of schools classified as failing. What do these real-life scenarios have in common? They're all examples of the uncanny instinct of the Massachusetts education establishment to resist anything that threatens its hegemony. Jeff Jacoby skewers the hydra that controls public education in a hard-hitting column that appeared last week in the Boston Globe.
"Assault on school reform," by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, February 13, 2003