Scot Lehigh, whose political acumen is a sharp as any newsperson in the state calls the LG race as he sees it and makes the great case for Andrea Silbert for Lt. Governor in today’s Globe…
“Goldberg’s candidacy took a home-town torpedo last week when the Brookline Tab endorsed Andrea Silbert — and accused the former selectwoman of exaggerating her role in Brookline’s governance.
Judging from the debates, as lieutenant governor Murray and Goldberg would dedicate themselves to tending to the needs of the state’s cities and towns. When it comes to ensuring adequate local aid, his conscience simply wouldn’t allow him to keep quiet, Murray told CBS4’s Jon Keller.
By my count, with 40 senators and 160 representatives regularly doing the same thing, we’d then have 201 public officials committed to that task.
And that’s why I’m impressed with Silbert. As cofounder of the Center for Women & Enterprise, a nonprofit training center for entrepreneurs, she’s done something different, and as number two she would try to do something different: focus on job creation. What’s more, she actually seems to know something about it.
Further, she’s the only candidate iconoclastic enough to support lifting the cap on charter schools.
Now, I don’t expect busy voters to endure the arduous LG triathlon.
But check out even one of the events and I think you’ll conclude that Andrea Silbert is the real star in this field.”
Ah, yes. The heart and soul of Lehigh’s affection is always the privatization of public education.
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Forget about local aid. Forget about cities and towns. Forget about the people who answer the phone when you dial 911. Forget about the 20% cut to local aid when Romney walked into the corner office. Let’s devote government to giving the goodies to entrepreneurs, including the charter school industry which is filling Silbert’s campaign coffers.
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Don’t we already have a Lieutenant Governor who is in the tank for privatization? I thought this election was about change, not about Republican emulation.
Pablo, I don’t think you and the Murray folks want to get into a pissing contest about which LG candidate is in the tank with special interests given Murray’s lobbyist, PAC and other interest donations. Your specious attempts to smear the cleanest statewide candidate we’ve had in a decade is laughable. Your knowledgeable on education issues, fight an above-board fight. It’s what the candidates are doing.
… when the same bullies who have been beating up public schools in the Republican administrations start to take root on our side of the street. Don’t you hear what I am saying? I want a CHOICE in November. I don’t want the same bad policies from the Republicans and the Democrats.
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Romney and Healy need to go. But why go through the effort to get rid of them, only to have their replacements tied to the same failed policies???
Tell the parents of the young Dorchester woman I’ve tutored for two years who is thriving in a charter school and is going to a four-year college that these policies have “failed.”
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Hope is a priceless thing, and after decades of racist suppression of our educational system, it’s these tired, shortsighted ideas that keep these kids from breaking out of their shell and blossoming into the future leaders of our nation. This is our time to lead, and we must rise to the challenge by working to make public, charter, pilot and magnet schools work for everyone, instead of just going back to the bad old days of neglect and cronyism.
You want to talk about hope? Let’s get past one kid who is well served in one school, and talk about policies that impact on most of the children in our schools. Raise the anecdote to the highest platform, while the entire system crumbles from disinvestment.
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Let’s talk about children in Framingham, where their elementary school was closed, and they were forced to crowded classrooms in other schools because a charter middle school came into town. Nobody in Framingham decided their top priority for local education was a charter school. Someone in Malden made that decision, and while the parents at the charter are probably happy with the decision (they get all the goodies), what do you say to the kids in the Framingham Public Schools who have more crowded classes and less of everything as a result.
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What has hurt parents and children across the Commonwealth is the massive disinvestment in public schools in the past four years. Over 100 districts are getting less state aid now than they did when Jane Swift was governor. Oh, we had bad financial times. Public schools had to share the pain. Reading teachers, art teachers, classroom teachers were cut. High schools offered less classes, forcing kids into study halls.
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While kids across the state were “sharing the pain,” the people who grant charters were working at an brisk pace. Never mind that we couldn’t afford new programs, the schools were forced on host communities that were making cuts in their K-12 programs.
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The aid hasn’t been fully restored. Charter schools continue to expand. Cities and towns continue to struggle to pay for them. So how is expanding charters, and not fixing the funding and restoring local aid, the policy that will benefit the children of this state?
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Charter schools get their money “off the top.” ANY effort to change this, to reduce the burden on local K-12 systems and place part of the funding in a legislative line item, gets fierce oppositon from the charter school industry. They don’t want to be subjected to the same fiscal pressures that hurt your neighborhood school down the street. You know, the one that educates most of the children in town.
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But public schools aren’t profit centers. They are altruistic little enterprises, filled with underpaid teachers.
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There’s money to be made in charter schools and privatized Head Start. Ask Chris Gabrieli. Ask
This is my handy cut and paste response to Pablo, who has long abandoned discourse in favor of repeating the same tired stuff. I know I should just ignore it but his canards bug me. Disclosure: I am in the tank for charters, so discount my thoughts as needed.
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1. The biggest ever comparison of Massachusetts charters public schools and district public schools, shows significant outperformance by charters.
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Black and Hispanic kids in charters did better than black and Hispanic kids in district schools – in 155 out of 160 comparisons over 5 years, both in math and English. Margin: wide.
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2. By contrast, examine Pablo’s [http://profiles.doe….] home district of Arlington, where he’s on the board. 2005 MCAS data from Arlington High, by race, shows a huge gap.
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Board minutes show little discussion of these children.
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Seems like someone might be slow to attack charter public schools that are measurably and significantly driving huge gains for minority kids until he was sure his preferred method was effective.
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3. Charters – Dem National Platform in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and (I guaranteee) 2008 and beyond. Godfather of American Charter Schools: Bill Clinton.
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4. Charter $ works like colleges. If a kid wins the random admission lottery to a charter public school in Dorchester, taxpayer money follows her there.
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MA, however, does have the most generous REIMBURSEMENT formula in the nation, to school districts that lose students.
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For example, a 9th grader in Boston would go to a charter high, the charter would get 10k per year for 4 years to educate the kid, 40k over 4 years. The district would get 20k in extra money to NOT educate that kid.
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So that’s unlike college. If a kid goes to UMass instead of Fram State, Fram State doesn’t get paid because it wanted to educate that kid.
You didn’t really address Pablo’s concers, which is odd given the fact that you say this is your cut and paste response. Pablo doesn’t reject the notion that charters, at this point in time, may be doing okay and a lot of them may be better institutions of learning than publics schools. However, you didn’t really address the notion that charter schools handicap the funding of public schools; charter schools take money away from the vast bulk of student bodies.
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Sure, you tried to get around that by mentioning the reinbursement program, but the statistics you gave are misleading. You can’t compare a student leaving to go to charter schools with a student who stays at the public school. Simply put, if there were no student going to charter school, the school system would be in an extra 20k (according to you numbers).
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I’m not suggesting I’m not for options. I think public education options are one of the key aspects of having a great public education system. However, there’s a reason why Republicans love charter schools: it represents the privitization of our public educational system, while it also both takes money away from public schools and “starves the beast,” forcing more money spent over all (just look at the reinbursement program), until there’s no money left to spend and therefore everything needs the slash. Charter schools, unlike other forms of public schools, are a threat to the public school system.
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I can get behind pilots, I can get behind specialty schools (be they tech/agri schools, or schools that you have to test to get in like Boston Latin, etc.). Heck, I can even get behind charter schools where the charter is a non-profit, but I’ll never support for-profit charter schools. I worked too closely with the Board of Education for too many years to trust either our Board members on charter schools or for-profit charters in general. The Board members, back when I was involved with them, were heavily in the employ of a particular charter company and a significant portion of actual Board of Education employees seriously thought the Board wanted to do serious harm to the public education system in Massachusetts – through starving the beast, charter schools and other means to get kids out of public schools, because – let’s face it – there are a lot of Republicans who don’t support public schools because, quite frankly, they aren’t going to send their kids there.
Lehigh confirms what anyone who has been watching politics in MA for a while already knows: running for office on a platorm of cities and towns is likely to fall short. It’s simply too easy for voters to remember that they already have advocates for their community on Beacon Hill – their state representative and state senator.
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While this year may prove me wrong, anyone who has read my posts knows that I’m a big fan of analyzing things through the lens of history. That perspective tells me that Jim Segel and Steve Murphy – who both ran in large part on a platform of bringing more money to cities and towns – are good touchstones this year. Good on Murray and Goldberg if one of them can pull it off.
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But as a political strategist more astute than any of once instructed: it’s the economy, stupid. And as the brilliant politician of our time once said, “the best social program is a good job.”
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Appealing to people’s hopes and their pocket books has worked in the past and I believe it will again this year.
It’s the classic, lunchbucket Democratic value that for some reason, got buried in talking about the values this party should have. It is not trickle down economics, it’s building the base from the ground up. That’s how economic justice is achieved and Andrea Silbert is the most well grounded candidate in understanding that and achieving that.
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History repeated demonstrates the success that skillful public and private partnerships bring in economic development at all levels. That success does not have a D or an R next to it, it’s simply what works effectively. Again, Andrea Silbert has the knowledge and background to see that through.
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I think of the power that a team like Deval Patrick and Andrea Silbert would bring to state government. Vision and ability to make Massachusetts on the cutting edge of new technologies and job development. If you want to see more money to cities and towns, more money to education, ability to cut taxes, you need more jobs and more revenue.
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I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Andrea and her family. Her drive is incredible; I’m guessing that being able to easily outfundraise the sitting mayor of Worcester, with an established base and the nomination of the party is not an easy thing. Well, she made it an easy thing. She had no established base, no millions in personal wealth to draw from. It was drive, and the power of ideas that work that have put her in contention in this race.