CIVICS TEST
Eric Henry couldn’t believe what the fifth-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 judged solely on their academic success, faithfulness to their charter and organizational viability. But Mystic Valley’s future as an institution is now in doubt because of an approach to teaching that has fallen out of fashion. The school’s educational mission focuses on “the fundamental ideals of our American Culture,” with an emphasis on the nation’s founding documents. As set out in its state-approved charter, it aims to “embrace the melting pot theory by highlighting our citizens’ and students’ commonality, not their differences.”
Yet to avoid perpetuating racism, many educators, administrators and parents now believe it’s insufficient to ensure that everyone is treated the same. A few years ago, as national debates about racism and history intensified, DESE added a new “cultural responsiveness” standard to its evaluation of charter schools, defined as “an approach to viewing culture and
