Citizens for Public Schools (CPS), a 31-year-old organization dedicated to improving education for Massachusetts children, has released a new report on how those children have fared in the 20 years since the Education Reform Act was signed, June 18, 1993. The report is titled, Twenty Years After Education Reform: Choosing a Path Forward To Equity and Excellence For All.   → Read More

Citizens for Public Schools is proud and excited to be one of the organizations participating in Mass Budget’s new Kids Count blog. Here’s our first, introductory blog post, “Public Schools, A Resource Worth Funding and Defending.”    → Read More

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education plans to help corporations profit from schoolchildren’s most sensitive and confidential information. Massachusetts is one of seven states committed to participate in the development and pilot testing of inBloom, a Gates Foundation initiative. Student information—including your child’s name, home address, email address, test scores, racial identity, economic and special education status, and possibly even detailed disciplinary and health records—will be stored on a data “cloud” and shared with for-profit corporations, without any guarantee that the information will be safeguarded.

For more on this and what you can do to protect sensitive student data from being shared with corporations, click here to visit the action page at the web site of our partner the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.   → Read More

The Joint Education Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature will have a public hearing on Tuesday, May 7 at 10 a.m. in room A-1 at the State House (Just inside the entrance through the garden on Bowdoin Street).

Four bills that make important, positive changes regarding charter schools will be heard.  You can come and testify or submit written testimony in support to the Education Committee: The State House, Room 473G, Boston, MA 02133…

These are the four priority bills.

HB 491, SB 258 – An Act relative to charter schools, filed by Rep. Frank Smizik, Senator Marc Pacheco. Requires local approval of any new Commonwealth charter school applications in order for funding to come from the local school district. Commonwealth charter school applications approved by the board of elementary and secondary education that do not receive local approval shall be funded by the board, but not from chapter 70 or other funds designated for local school districts.   → Read More