The school system will provide what is akin to the curriculum. “But people don’t get to remove texts or add. “The balance is really giving parents enough information to make decisions,” she said in an interview. And while Nolan told GBH News she welcomes parent engagement, she is firm that district school officials will have the final say. She is expected to lay out how she will balance the competing demands of parents: those who are - in the name of greater academic rigor - pushing efforts to scale back diversity and social justice programs, and those who see them as key to the city’s decades long effort toward racial, ethnic and economic class integration.Ĭurricula, programming, library policies and DEI education initiatives will be on the table. Into this cauldron of dissent, Anna Nolin is stepping gingerly in her first year as Newton school superintendent.Ī veteran with 27 years of experience as an educator, Nolin will present findings next month to Newton’s school committee about the status of the city’s public schools. The new statement declares that “All members of the NPS community must actively dismantle structures rooted in racism and replace them with systems and structures that lead to more equitable outcomes for all students.” That includes changing the Newton Public Schools’ official “Statement of Values and Commitment to Equity.” It was a statement first adopted by the district in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, when more than 500 white alumni of Newton’s schools implored the city to make the schools more welcoming to students of color.Įarly last year, the district amended it to explicitly call for racial equity, not just equity. She is part of a group that is trying to reshape the city’s public-school curriculum and approaches to issues of race and diversity by pushing for changes large and small. “I think this whole conversation about politics and DEI is distracting from the real work that we need to do in schools,” she said. ![]() ![]() “Where does it end? When is equitable and equitable enough that you're not going to have anything?” said Jany Finkielsztein, a Newton resident whose children attended private school and who thinks Newton public schools have gone too far. And they are drawing from the rhetoric of national far-right groups that have sprung up in the past few years to push an “anti-woke” agenda that’s being highlighted in the Republican 2024 presidential campaigns now taking flight. A small but vocal group of parents are spreading the idea that declines in standardized test scores in Newton are the result of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programming in the schools. In this liberal enclave, more than 80% of voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump for president in 2020.īut even here, in one of the top school districts in the nation, divisive politics has crept into the realm of education. Newton, Massachusetts, is not the kind of town where the messages of far-right parents’ rights groups would seem to find a home.
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