14 years after a new law authorized the state to take control of underperforming school districts, Holyoke is poised to become the first takeover district returned to local hands.
Holyoke
Posted inEducation
Boston, Holyoke go very different ways in great middle school debate
MORE THAN 15 years ago, Robert Gaudet, then a senior policy analyst at the University of Massachusetts’s Donahue Institute, who had extensively studied school performance across the state, offered a pronouncement that was jarringly blunt, but backed by plenty of evidence. “Middle schools are the great disaster of the education system,” he said. US school […]
Posted inOpinion
Morse letter seems dictated by political calendar
Below is a statement from Sen. Julian Cyr of Truro regarding allegations that Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse abused his power in pursuing sexual relationships with college students at UMass Amherst. Morse said he did not have relationships with students he was teaching as a guest lecturer, as recently as 2019. He also says the relationships […]
Posted inEducation, Opinion
Holyoke’s school challenge
THIS PAST TUESDAY, after a careful review of the Holyoke Public Schools, Commissioner Mitchell Chester recommended that the state Board of Education take a vote on whether to place our district under state receivership. His recommendation came after months of vigorous, passionate debate on the local level about the costs and benefits of this action, […]
Posted inEducation, State House News Service
Holyoke students being shortchanged
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER Mitchell Chester is not ready to recommend that the Holyoke Public Schools be put into receivership, but he has not ruled it out either. Low performance among Holyoke students is “persistent and pervasive,” Chester told members of the Massachusetts Board of Education during a meeting Tuesday. “These kids […]
Posted inEducation, The Back Story
Is state takeover of Holyoke schools coming?
IN 2012, THE chronically low-performing Lawrence school system became the first district put into state receivership under a 2010 education law that gives the state sweeping new powers over struggling schools. Will Holyoke be next? That question now looms over the Western Massachusetts district of 5,500 students, where achievement has long been low and dropout […]