Education

City Councilors Annissa Essaibi-George, Kim Janey and Michelle Wu held an Education Committee hearing last week to discuss Madison Park’s admissions policy, funding and partnerships.

There must be an organized effort to encourage the most promising black students to prepare for the exam school test. Academic success will inspire the young to begin the arduous search for their purpose in life.

Mayor Martin Walsh announced last week that his office will devote $15 million to a universal pre-kindergarten program that would provide free, quality pre-K education to all 4-year-olds in the city in the next five years.

The White House’s FY 2020 proposal cuts Education funding by $62 billion compared to that of FY 2019. Even worse, as the cost of higher education continues to climb, federal student aid would be seriously slashed while other programs would be totally eliminated.

City councilors in Boston are working to put a full-time nurse and full-time social and emotional support professional in every public school in the city. At a hearing Monday evening, councilors heard testimony from members of the Boston Public Schools administration and the public in support of their effort.

Commentary on the failure of a reasonable number of black students to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan has not yet reached the point of declaring that there is a deficiency in black culture that fails to motivate youth to pursue academic excellence.

In an hours-long hearing at the Massachusetts State House on Friday, more than 100 people testified before the state Legisture’s Education Committee that public schools around the state need more funding.

African American parents often advise their children that they will have to work much harder than whites in order to achieve. That is the older generation’s way of preparing their progeny for the unfair treatment they will encounter in society. Consequently, the scandal of bribery admissions to select universities came as no surprise to blacks, but the brazenly fraudulent strategies to enter colleges has shocked many middle class whites.

While Boston Teachers Union leadership is in the midst of negotiations over pay raises and other matters with Boston Public Schools officials, outside the Bruce Bolling Municipal Building teachers and school staff rallied last Wednesday for more resources for the schools in which they teach.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling was dead wrong when he said that, “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy.” He had just announced the multi-count federal indictment of a bunch of celebrities, professionals, and businesspersons in a college admissions scam. But the wealthy white college scammers just cut a little extra corner in trying to get their kids into the top colleges, no more. The checklist of ploys, schemes, angles, and even well-established programs for wealthy whites to cut academic corners is boundless.

First-generation, low-income college students who attend well-resourced institutions may be embarking on a path of upward mobility, but that path is fraught by social and cultural barriers, often reinforced by the schools themselves. Anthony Abraham Jack studies and researches this phenomenon in his book, “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students,” published last week by Harvard University Press.

For the first time since its beginning in 1966, the voluntary school desegregation program Metco will select students by lottery, rather than by the first come, first served system that in has operated under for nearly 53 years.