[A] single courageous State may, if its citizens
choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments
without risk to the rest of the country.
-- Louis Brandeis, Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court,
New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932).
As reported in today’s Boston
Globe, Governor Deval Patrick awarded five grants totaling $50,000 to
the Pentucket Regional School District for innovative learning academies within
existing schools. Other Essex County schools also received grants, including the O’Maley Innovation Middle School in Gloucester and the Tilton
Innovation School in Haverhill.
The Commonwealth’s commitment to flexibility and
experimentation in education is one of the critical reasons why Massachusetts’
public schools consistently
rank near the top in the nation. Pentucket’s five programs will run the
gamut—from an International Baccalaureate program and visual arts to a program
focused on safety and public service.
What is most critical now is for the State to have
measures in place to objectively analyze the successes and failures of each
academy so that best practices can be shared with other districts and other
ideas can be dropped if deemed ineffective.
But experimentation is not enough to ensure that all
students have access to a quality education. Cities and towns in the
Commonwealth that have excellent schools also have a responsibility to open
their doors to students who, largely by accident of birth, do not have access
to the same high-quality education.
One such school is my alma mater—Hamilton-Wenham Regional
High School. Last
week, the HW School Committee reauthorized the School Choice program at the
Regional. There is no doubt that School Choice imposes significant financial
costs on districts that welcome students to their schools. Indeed, it is high
time that the State cast a critical eye on the amount of School Choice
tuition (paid to HW by the town of the choice student), which has not changed
since it was first set by the state legislature at $5,000 in 1991.
Nevertheless, the benefits of choice—both to the
students who take advantage of it and the broader student body—should not be
underestimated (and I don’t just say that because my sister married her high
school sweetheart, who just happened to be a choice student from Essex).
Choice students add a
diverse array of experience/perspective to a class that, for the most part,
grows up in a relatively insulated bubble from K-8. Furthermore, with demographics
data projecting fewer resident students at the high school over the next 10
years, School Choice students help the Regional maintain a critical mass of
students necessary for a robust, engaging curriculum.
As Horace Mann, the Father
of American Public Education and a Massachusetts native himself, said 165 years
ago:
Education then, beyond all other devices of human
origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of
the social machinery…[and] [t]he people of Massachusetts have…appreciated
the truth that the unexampled prosperity of the State…is attributable to the
education, more or less perfect, which all its people have received.
The Commonwealth is stronger when we all have
common experience and opportunity and I am proud that my hometown and my home
county continue to embody the principles of Horace Mann and Louis Brandeis.
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