I have been doing a lot of writing recently about why integrated schools are essential for equity – and specifically, why sending my children to integrated schools would be good for them, their peers, and their schools. But recently, I’ve been asking whether my motives are as pure as they seem and just how much it matters.
In a blog post reflecting on her experience at “...
My name is James Noonan, assistant professor of education at Salem State University and Associate Director of Research for the MA Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment. But I’m speaking tonight as the father of two BPS children and someone who strongly supports the new exam school admissions proposal.
In 1971, before court-ordered desegregation introduced a 35 percent “set aside” for students from under-represented subgroups,...
As the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 approached 100,000—the largest country total in the world—the New York Times devoted four pages of its Sunday edition to cataloging the lives of 1,000 people who had died. Read together, the one-line obituaries amplified the fullness of the lives lost and gave voice to the vastness of the hole they...
My daughter is losing her computer teacher to a budget cut. Well, maybe. The principal tells us that the teacher is okay with it. The district tells us that in fact there is no cut. But explanations ring hollow when you’re upset and looking for someone to blame, and so the question became: in a funding fight, in a system as complex as education, who is to blame?
The issue of school segregation – particularly, the trend toward re-segregation – is once again in the news in Boston, with a Boston Globe analysis finding that 60 percent of schools were “intensely segregated” (defined as at least 90 percent students of color). This was up from 42 percent of schools two decades ago....
