Meeting between mayor, BLS teachers ends badly

...will welcome our first female mayor...and am damn thankful Linehan isn't the council president.

... largely because of his ties to groups favoring (in essence) privatization of public schools. As it turned out, Walsh (after getting elected) made it clear that he was, in fact, also a big fan of charter school expansion. Nice little bait and switch Walsh pulled there.

I was at a community event a few weeks ago when His Honor arrived, and no one really gave much of a hoot. They had to repeatedly ask people to come over on the PA system so he could give a few words, when no one really wanted to.

But again, could be the echo chamber.

As irrational as most of us are. If you need an example, here's 2- the race for the White House this year and the quest to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat.

technology as the conduit not the Constitution.

... what makes no sense is your slamming of BLS's teachers as being "creating" the current situation. The people creating and manipulating the situation have had the BLS teachers as targets from the start (not diverse enough, fire a bunch and then hire the right kind of teachers in their place).

during Summer.....someone get Tito on the phone.

... are really good at educating people who gravitate towards academics. The curriculum is more or less designed to train future professors, which is kind of funny given how few college graduates go into academics as a career. This has bugger-all to do with running an urban school system.

Yep, just get those teach for america youngsters in there and turn it all around, right!?

If they're any good, hire them back for when you reopen.

Sir.

Or compare labor relations, collective bargaining tactics and a Mayor as former representative for collective bargaining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_bargaining

... for public schools in Roxbury and Mattapan not telling students about the availability of free ISEE prep classes? My understanding is that these schools don't want to "lose" their own best students to BLS. Possibly due to the legislatively-mandated test-mania that would ultimately punish the schools for preparing a lot of students well enough for them to move on to BLS (thus lowering future test scores at the prior schools).

The demographic of BLS should be compared to the demographic of Boston instead. The population of BPS in general not representing the city at large is also part of the problem, and should also be addressed.

Estimated 2013 demographics for Boston as a whole: White: 52.9% (and dropping), Black: 24.1% (and dropping); Asian: 9% (and rising); Hispanic: 18.8% (and rising).

Compared with BLS demographics, the problem is what again? That Asians are taking seats away from Blacks and Hispanics? The white kids have been here all the time; they're just returning to the public system.

Institutional racism has a lot of different effects and manifestations; one of these is suppression of white participation in BPS outside of BLS. Pretending that this aspect of institutional racism doesn't exist, as one does when talking about BLS demographics only in the context of the skewed BPS demographics, is a method of preserving it.

Maybe if BPS could provide an elementary education that resulted in minority students achieving Latin entrance at rates closer to their participation in the general population, BPS could also provide an elementary education that more than a small minority of white parents want to send their kids to.

But that would cost more, and it seems like a key aspect of BPS' savings scheme is to provide such a crappy service that few people with a choice take advantage of it. More than a quarter of the kids in this city don't go to public school; if half of them came back, it would be a fiscal emergency.

This is something that universal pre-k would help address. I hate that video that is going around touting how kids in Finland start school later and do as well or better than us. Their socio-economic situation is very different from ours and those kids are more likely to be getting learning at home. Let alone that Finnish is a language which has spelling that matches the pronunciation so it isn't nearly as confusing to learn as English. That's according to an old friend who is from there, he said that there is no such thing as spelling tests in Finland because once you learn the basics "if you can say it you can spell it"

The kids at BLS, black, white, brown, magenta, are focused on learning about the actual Cicero and translating his works, as well as everything else.

For god's sake, Let's not make what happened at BLS a reflection of the entire history of the US. PS - The wealthiest kid in my 8th grade English class at BLS was black and moved to Weston for high school.

Once again - Not every black kid is poor and unprepared and not every white kid comes from a stable home and has a vacation place to run to on the weekends.

It is incredibly disingenuous that you don't account for the hard work done by the young men and young women there regardless of the color of their skin. Your assumptions that all non-white people have been given the shaft from the get go makes you an outstanding race baiter and your comments meritless.

... were disproved (like the teacher supposedly addressing a student as "my nigger") -- and BPS even sent out a press release -- which the press apparently completely ignored.