Holy State Takeover! | EduShyster

Holy State Takeover! | EduShyster:

Holy State Takeover!

Nine state takeover takeaways (because I ran out of time before I could come up with #10)

Well that certainly didn’t take long. The official state takeover time piece barely registered two hours and the Holyoke Public Schools had officially entered a new state:taken over. If you are keeping count at home, that’s about half as long as the public hearing that preceded the vote, during which some 1,000 + Holyokesters, including some who stood for four hours, packed a hall to register their objections to the state’s takeover plans. In other words, nothing to see or hear here folks, especially, it seems, if you were one of the ten members of the state’s 12 member Board of Education who didn’t actually visit a single Holyoke school prior to casting your vote…

One Holyoke
First, can we just acknowledge the extraordinary display on state takeover eve, when residents of a city so divided that whites live up in the Heights while Latinos live in the Flats, came together to oppose the state’s plans? But where you and I saw a standing-room-only crowd and overwhelming opposition, members of the state Board of Education seemed to see something different. Board chair Paul Sagan saw a *data point,* as well as the many theoretical community members who silently supported the state’s takeover but declined to join the two actual community members who spoke in favor of the state takeover at the hearing. Note: if you are watching from the comfort of your own state-run district, you will recognize a familiar turnaround trope. As for this guy, Dennis Birks, who raised the roof with his impassioned defense of his city and its schools, I don’t think we’ve seen, or heard, the last of Holy State Takeover! | EduShyster: