Eric Henry couldn’t believe what the 5th-graders at his triplets’ school were being assigned to read. On Jan. 31, the electrical engineer and Navy veteran fired off an email to a group of fellow parents and activists in the Boston suburb of Malden. “Remote learning has given us added insight into what stands for instruction based on American Culture!” Henry wrote. “The banning of this text from the curriculum should be a plank in our platform.”
The book in question was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain’s 1876 classic of American literature—a work approved by the state of Massachusetts as part of the public-school curriculum. But when Henry’s missive reached an employee at the agency that oversees Mystic Valley Regional Charter School, the official agreed with his complaint.
“This is horrible,” wrote Olympia Stroud, a program coordinator at the Massachusetts department of elementary and secondary education (DESE). “How long have these books been in the curriculum?” Stroud forwarded the concerns to a supervisor, Benie Capitolin, who called the matter “heartbreaking.” “If our system can’t protect Black and brown students from unsafe environments,” Capitolin wrote, “how can it possibly educate them?”
For 23 years, Mystic Valley’s academic record has been undeniable. Its students are disproportionately lower-income kids from communities of color, yet its test scores and graduation rates routinely rank among the state’s best. Charter-school rankings place it in the top percentiles nationally. The school’s 1,500-person wait list is nearly as large as its K-12 enrollment, and attrition is so low that few students are admitted past kindergarten.
Under Massachusetts law, charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, are supposed to be…
Source : time
