Shipping Up to Boston
Submitted by The Boys and Schools Blog
I used to be a waitress. I think there’s some kind of law about having to be a waiter/waitress at some time in your life in order to balance your cosmic karma. Anyway, one of the things that you notice when waiting tables is how much people seem to prefer complaining to praising. In general, people are much more likely to ask to see your manager to complain about how you forgot to bring them extra ice than they are to praise what a great job you did. This is not meant to open a discussion on how huge a crime it is to forgot one’s extra ice or how many jobs there are that are worse than waiting tables, or even how some days the world seems to be full of complaining jerks. My only point is that sometimes we (and I do mean all of us–or at least myself) are too apt to criticize and too slow to praise.
So today I want to praise the vision and ambition of the Carol Johnson, Boston’s new Superintendent of Schools, who recently announced a sweeping series of changes that she hopes will help Boston’s public school students and address achievement gaps. Not only is she proposing initiatives that would allow high school students to take some college classes and allow parents to enroll their children in Montesssori classes, but she acknowledges the need to address achievement gaps, including the gender gap. Heck, I’m just thrilled that she acknowledges the existence of the boys’ achievement gap. The fact that she wants to address it in part by introducing a single-sex program has me over the moon. By and large, she seems to be approaching her job with the kind of flexibility and innovative thinking that we’ve been calling for since the creation of Boys and Schools. Now we just need to clone her.
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