Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Circulation: 90,000
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
by Charles Chieppo and Jamie Gass
In Federalist #10, James Madison wrote that regulation of competing interests like labor and management is the “the principal task of modern legislation.” The framers of Massachusetts’ landmark 1993 education reform law understood this, which is why the law calls for the commonwealth’s education standards to include America’s Founding Documents and “the history of working people and the labor movement in the United States.”
With Labor Day upon us, it’s unfortunate that current state policy makers are ignoring the words of the education reform law and Madison’s wisdom that has endured for well over two centuries. Today, history is a shrinking part of the curriculum in Massachusetts schools because the commonwealth has indefinitely postponed making passage of an MCAS U.S. history test a high school graduation requirement.
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