Letter: Education reform, with a dose of pain and suffering

"A century ago, muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell lambasted the “ruthless efficiency” of Standard Oil and its “robber baron” boss, John D. Rockefeller. Modern philanthropic agencies such as the Boston Foundation arose out of that critique, offering a more compassionate response to social inequality. It is disheartening that the Boston Foundation’s current leader seems to have taken a “ruthless efficiency” stance on the problem of school funding. Inflicting “some pain and suffering” on district schools, Paul Grogan says, is a necessary and worthy consequence of charter school expansion (“To understand the charter cap battle, follow the money,” Page A1, April 3).

Pain and suffering were all too evident at Boston Public Schools budget hearings, where students as young as 5 gave tearful testimony on the impact of school cuts. One teacher read a letter from a boy who described what the early-learning center program slated to be eliminated meant to him. “It is my happiness,” he wrote.

The charter lobby’s story of kids trapped in failing schools in a bloated bureaucracy is false. It’s not the Boston school system that is off course, but rather the moral compass of leaders willing to cut and close programs and schools that mean educational happiness for tens of thousands of children.

Mary Battenfeld

Jamaica Plain

via GlobeOpinion