Jonathan Kozol and Boston Mayor Martin Walsh Warn About Danger of Expanding Charter Schools
Massachusetts Question 2 is the ballot issue that would lift that state’s cap on the authorization of new charter schools. The debate about Question 2 has attracted wide attention beyond Massachusetts this autumn because expanding charter schools in Massachusetts would create many of the same problems charter schools are posing in other states.
In a stunning commentary for the Boston Globe, education writer Jonathan Kozol, also a Massachusetts voter, seized next week’s vote on Question 2 as an opportunity to reflect on the public role of the state’s public schools: “Slice it any way you want. Argue, as we must, that every family ought to have the right to make whatever choice they like in the interests of their child, no matter what damage it may do to other people’s children. As an individual decision, it’s absolutely human; but setting up this kind of competition, in which parents with the greatest social capital are encouraged to abandon their most vulnerable neighbors, is rotten social policy. What this represents is a state supported shriveling of civic virtue, a narrowing of moral obligation to the smallest possible parameters. It isn’t good for Massachusetts, and it’s not good for democracy.”
Kozol continues: “This commonwealth has been an exemplar of democratic public education ever since the incubation of the common school idea at the midpoint of the 19th century. For all its imperfections and constant need of diligent repair, it remains a vision worth preserving. The privatizing forces from outside of this state have wisely recognized the powerful symbolic victory they’d gain by turning Massachusetts against its own historic legacy.”
Who are these privatizing forces? Kozol points to the New York hedge fund billionaires who have invested in Families for Excellent Schools, a dark money organization that has Jonathan Kozol and Boston Mayor Martin Walsh Warn About Danger of Expanding Charter Schools | janresseger:
