Cassandra shrieks

Hardcore readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun (and by hardcore, I mean readers who took the time to pore through my oeuvre in the archives of the Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College) will recall a column your favorite blogger penned waaaaaaaay back in 2002 about the Unz Initiative, a ballot initiative which essentially eliminated bilingual education in Massachusetts. As you can tell from my righteously indignant rhetoric (I was able to squeeze in "the voters of Massachusetts fell victim to clever sophistry and a willful manipulation of facts" and accused the fair people of this Commonwealth of perpetrating "an anachronistic display of nativism"), I wasn't a big fan.

Six and a half years later, it appears that the facts are starting to back me up. This isn't an "I told you so" post. Rather, it's meant to make you think, once again, about why we still make decisions on matters as hefty as the education of our children in the same way as we decide the new color of M&Ms.