public education

“We need more money,” says Milly Arbaje-Thomas about Massachusetts’s only school desegregation program. She’ll visit Beacon Hill this week to ask the legislature to appropriate $33 million for the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity.

Last month, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education heard MCAS scores trended down. Better data was expected following a recent cash infusion kicking-in and the end of the pandemic.

In 1985, journalist J. Anthony Lukas published “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families,” a nonfiction book exploring the busing crisis in Boston.

As part of the first education plan put forward by a candidate in the 2022 gubernatorial race, democratic hopeful and Massachusetts State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz has laid out what she calls a “plan for quality, debt-free, universal public education from birth into adulthood,” which includes sweeping reforms across all levels of schooling.

President Joe Biden gave his first address to a joint session of Congress on April 28, promising billions of dollars for infrastructure improvements and education support as well as immigration and civil rights reforms. The president’s proposed initiatives received mixed reactions from community leaders in Massachusetts, who are counting on federal aid to fund projects that are essential to COVID-19 recovery.