Hey, there! Log in / Register
Mayor re-appoints School Committee member who objects to uppity white women
By adamg on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 11:13am
MartinezChannel 25 reports Mayor Menino has given Claudio Martinez of Jamaica Plain another four-year term on the Boston School Committee.
At a School Committee hearing on a school-closing plan in December, 2010, Martinez told a white parent from the doomed Agassiz School to shut up and sit down because if he wanted to hear from a "white privileged woman" he'd let her know.
The mayor also appointed Meg Campbell, founder of the Codman Academy Charter School, to the committee. Until recently, Boston Public Schools basically considered charter schools the enemy, but over the past couple of years, the mayor and school officials have warmed to them; in 2010, Menino made better BPS/charter integration part of his inauguration speech.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Boston Public School Committee
has nothing to do with charter schools. Charter school are not accountable to the school board.
But private investors do have an interest in charter schools. Their interest is to profit and expand the number of opportunities they have to profit from the expansion of charter schools and by consequence, the community will have fewer and fewer public schools. This process has a name, it is called privatization.
The mayor is replacing community activists with those that are involved in Charters or for profit education.
Wrong
You wrote: "The mayor is replacing community activists with those that are involved in Charters or for profit education."
Wrong. The mayor appointed the head of a non-profit, public charter school which, thanks to grants and donations, spends much more on its students than it receives from the city and state.
That's right, non-profit, public charter school.
I wouldn't have thought your comment needed a response but it got five votes so apparently someone believed you.
Is it any surprise Menino
news dumped this on 12/31 when Bostononians' attention is drawn to First Night celebrations?
Nope. It's how they play the
Nope. It's how they play the game. Glad Adam caught this.
I think the comment
about uppity white people was made to a man.
No, it wasn't
I was at the meeting in question. He was talking right to a woman who was voicing an objection to the impending vote to close the Agassiz. As soon as he said it, a woman standing with her started yelling at him about what he'd just done to this pregnant woman who'd spent 10 years working with Hispanic kids.
He said "uppity"?
The other post has him saying something like that to a "kid". It's confusing. And was he being "heckled" at the time? When people heckle guys like John Kerry, they get escorted out by security. I wasn't at the meeting, but sounds like it was a little chaotic- were people waiting their turn to speak and so forth? Where was Menino- safely in a bunker somewhere, protected from all those angry, heckling parents?
Ah, I stand corrected.
Wicked local had reported a guy said it. Thanks.
"Diverse" means different, not Hispanic!
In a Boston Globe interview reporting this story, Claudio is quoted as saying he wants to advocate "policies that foster diversity in public schools." But since Boston schools have a very large black and Hispanic population, more diverse schools would mean more white people would enroll their children. From Claudio's public pronouncements, including the one quoted here, he doesn't like white people and doesn't want them to be part of the BPS population.
Maybe he's using the word "diverse" to mean "Hispanic", the way his followers use it. I always thought the leaders of the politically correct, like Claudio, did really know that "diverse" means "all different". I guess I was giving him too much credit for understanding the words he uses.
Don't know about all that
Maybe he just doesn't want a tyranny of the minority, or a situation where (relatively) rich people commandeer a few schools for themselves while the rest of the schools, serving the majority of poor students, continue to suck. Telling people to sit down and shut up is never nice, though.
Tyranny of the minority
Yeah, I could almost see the relevancy of an insult like that if the School Committee had proposed closing the Lyndon or Kilmer in West Roxbury, which are two of the few (maybe the only two?) white-majority schools in the entire system and the woman was a parent there.
But the committee didn't have the political guts to pull something like that, so instead they went after schools like the minority majority Agassiz, which had a surplus of seats not because parents didn't like the education their kids were getting but because BPS had repeatedly refused to do anything about the school's health problems (caused by mold caused by leaks) and that scared lots of people off (of course, a few months later, BPS found the money to fix the problems when it had to play musical chairs and do something about the $35 million the state was threatening to demand repayment on because of the decision to shut Hyde Park High School).
"Political guts"
Which, for an unelected board, I guess would mean doing something that could potentially disturb or irritate Menino? Aren't these people all just puppets?
Seems to me that giving the
Seems to me that giving the mayor sole authority to appoint school board members is a surefire way to make the appointments political, and therefore less likely to make it a board capable of addressing the problems Boston Public Schools face.
We have world class educational institutions in Boston and many experts in elementary, secondary and inner city schools. Someone should look at Menino's appointments in that light.
Actually, a lot of work was
Actually, a lot of work was done on the Agassiz. But once a building gets a bad reputation, it can never shake it off. This has happened over and over again, where 'sick' buildings have been totally rehabbed, and as soon as the workers get back inside, they start complaining. In this case, people complained so much about the Agassiz that they got it shut down. Great job.
This guy is disgusting.
This guy is disgusting. Supremacists of all sorts are equally disgusting, and this guy will have his downfall like all of them one day. I will do anything I can to see it happen ASAP.
Only the Kilmer
is majority-white. The Lyndon is under 50% white:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx...
Welcome to the BPS
Martinez' attitude probably didn't even register among his peers. I've heard from principals and administrators that they aren't terribly worried about the few white kids who go to BPS. It's like the concern shown for kids who finish the year's material early - they are no longer of concern to the teachers and can take care of yourself. If you're a "white, privileged" person, you can send your kids somewhere else, so why should they worry about you? Fewer students means a larger budget for the kids who remain, which means bigger bonuses for administrators.
Fewer students means less money
I thought the amount of money a school received was based on enrollment, so if the white students leave, it's a lower student count, so is less money for the school. Right?
Not necessarily
The amount of money a school receives tracks not just student enrollment, but student special needs. So getting rid of "white, privileged" kids will increase the amount of money the school gets if enrollment stays the same. But, more importantly, falling enrollment means less money to schools but not less money to the district.
Imagine running a hamburger chain where your gross was the same no matter how many customers you had. You'd be going out of your way to tell them to fuck off... just like Martinez and his cronies.
The correlation isn't as high as you think
Yes, there are more kids living in poverty who receive special education than kids who don't experience poverty (poorer healthcare, less early teaching going on in homes generally, etc.) but there are certainly plenty of kids from middle-class and upper-class families who have disabilities. A lot of disabilities just happen regardless of genetics or environment.
Also, the middle-class kids with special needs aren't attending private schools at anywhere near the rate of middle-class kids without special needs, because private schools generally don't provide special education services. Of the kids I work with who are eligible for special education through BPS, probably half are from families who, before it was apparent that the child had a disability, planned to do something other than BPS.
The way that BPS budgets money now
is by student. The money goes with the student. So, if they leave the school, the budgeted money goes with them to another public school or another charter school. The more needs the student has (English Language Learners, special ed, etc...), the larger the budgeted amount per student is.
The money only goes so far
If the student "leaves the district" - goes to a private school or homeschools - the money doesn't go with him. It stays with the district. The surplus doesn't come from chasing kids to another BPS, it's from chasing kids out of the district.
Countdown until a BPS administrator uses the argument that it's socially irresponsible for white, privileged people to send their kids to BPS because they'd be using up money that less privileged kids really need.
Menino has done the math
When you add it all up it costs on average about $21,000 per student to send a kid to BPS for a year on average. Sending a kid out to a charter only costs the city what we pay for a regular ed student ($13k-ish now I think plus/minus)
We should have seen the school budget go down substantially over the last several years for two reasons - thousands fewer students in the system and a much higher proportion of students in Pre-K/Kindergarten (lower level teachers are much cheaper than higher level teachers plus you generally need fewer resources). However, if you check - the school budget goes up about the same as the overall budget (3-4% per year). Bottom line - the mayor has the flexibility to hire more people or pay existing employees more/maintain benefit levels.
There are two keys to getting re-elected in this city - a) control real estate development because that is where most of your donations come from (developers, architects, lawyers and trade unions) and b) keep the city employees happy because most of them and/or a relative live in the city and dominate the electorate. Often conflicts with what's best for the city and the majority of the residents, but it's a simple formula for a job for life.
Except that
More than half of the kids in K0 and K1 are special education students, so their services cost more. All kids with a significant disability get a seat as soon as they turn three, but BPS doesn't provide universal K0/K1 (it's by lottery).
Yes but how much more
It costs over $20k per head to send a kid to BPS (average with everything counted except real estate). It's not 100% savings, obviously, but in a system that claims perpetual brokitude we can't be spending $20,000 a year on 4 year olds, even with special ed. $10k per kid - certainly - but $20k? even after deducting busing and overhead you'd need a teacher and about 5 paraprofessionals in every class. I'd estimate we are looking at 2-4% savings systemwide by shift to serving a younger student population - not huge, but it should have fully offset a year's worth of budget increases over the past 10 years. (and as I've stated before - I'm fully in favor of K0 and K1 services - actually rather than saving that money I'd rather have seen it go into expanded offerings at that grade level - but apparently the money has been spent elsewhere in the system).
Pay for daycare, much?
Not recently, I see. Even daycare for a neurotypical kid in a typical center is $15K a year now.
Ah, reality!
No comparison
Public school and daycare are very different financially.
Private daycare typically has:
a) fewer kids per adult
b) private insurance (BPS can self insure, or piggyback the city's, either way - enormous economies of scale and I believe some other protections minimizing the amount the city can get sued for)
c) real estate (probably the biggest expense after labor - and school real estate by city/state accounting costs effectively zero)
d) other economies of scale - BPS has 2500 kids in K0 and K1 - even a multi-location center will have a tiny fraction of that.
e) private daycare has to make a profit, BPS does not
If you want to make the comparison then you start at $15k and go south, not north. Again - $10k a kid I can buy, max $15k and that's extraordinarily generous. That still only gets you to about $35 million on $50 million savings - annually.
Other services
In a BPS autism classroom, you have 6 kids and 2 teachers. Then you might have kids with a 1:1 staff person for safety. The kids are also all getting OT and speech, so those therapists are in the room a lot. It's not uncommon to have as many adults as kids in the room.
Oh, and the sped figures are an AVERAGE. If a child uses a ventilator, his/her school expenditure includes having a nurse within arm's length at all times. This is even more expensive than a 1:1 who is a paraprofessional. So this bumps up the average.
The 1%
That level of severe disability - throughout the system is 1% (fewer than 500 kids citywide- or about 35-40 per grade level). Unless these kids are magically moving elsewhere when they turn 5 - that means there should be in the range of 50-75 kids max in that severely disabled category in K0 and K1 and that assumes EVERY 3-4 year old disabled kid in the city is in K0/K1. (BTW - I've never seen a line item for individual nursing in the school budget - can you tell me where it is? My friend has a severely disabled SPED child and the state covered the nursing costs, not the school).
Another roughly 7% have substantial SPED needs and another 11% or so have moderate needs - even if EVERY SPED kid in the city were enrolled in K0/K1 (and assuming ALL these learning and behavioral disabilities are present, diagnosable and treatable at that young age) that's not going to increase the budget to the systemwide average as it's still going to be FAR cheaper for 3-4 year olds than for older children.
Either BPS's numbers are seriously wrong or yours are and my money is on BPS. That's not an opinion or an observation - it's arithmetic. The level and number of disability would have to be higher virtually by an order of magnitude just for the city's 4 year olds in order for you to be correct and every single one of them would have to be enrolled in K1, and then a huge number of them would have to be "cured" by the time they enter BPS. Then this would have to repeat itself, year after year after year.
Oh, and
depending which sped budget you're looking at, it could also include kids who the city is paying to send to a different type of educational facility, like kids who are taught inside a hospital or are at a school for kids with severe disabilities where a lot of special equipment is being used.
they should have let him go....
they should have let him go....
So basically Menino appointed
So basically Menino appointed an admitted racist to the school board.