L: Boston Estimates from The Way We Go to School. R: Hubert Jones, courtesy of MIT Museum
In the 1970s, strife over the Newton Public School budget intensified as the 1970 recession deepened, enrollment continued to decline, teachers gained collective bargaining rights, and the State changed educational mandates and funding. The battle moved from City-versus-School Committee to school-versus-school.
“Education as a right to be claimed, not a service to be begged”
Hubert Jones was a Newton parent, the husband of Newton’s METCO director, Katherine Jones, and the director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center in Boston. Parents at the Center came to him reporting that their children had been turned away from public schools because they “were too retarded or too disruptive, et cetera, et cetera, to be in school.” In 1968, Hubert Jones organized, chaired, and found private funding for a Task Force on Children Out of School.
The task force’s 1970 report, The Way We Go to School: The Exclusion of Children in Boston, found that thousands of children were being turned away because they didn’t speak English, were pregnant, or had learning, emotional, or physical disabilities. Public outcry “led to the groundbreaking, first-in-the-nation enactments of two landmark laws in Massachusetts designed to include previously excluded populations of children: the special education law and the bi-lingual education law.”
The Bilingual Education Law went into effect in 1971. It mandated bilingual instruction when there were 20 or more children whose native language was not English. Classes for Italian-speaking children began in 1972 at Lincoln-Eliot and Carr. The State law did not require teachers to be fluent in English.
The Special Education Law (Chapter 766) was enacted in 1972 and guaranteed a “free and appropriate public education” for Massachusetts children with special needs aged 3-21. David…