Boston Schools at a Crossroads (MA)
November 1, 2010
NEARLY EVERY major issue facing Boston’s public school system — educational quality, excess building capacity, parent satisfaction, staff morale, and budget challenges — ricocheted around the auditorium of English High School Tuesday night during a turbulent School Committee meeting. With so much stuff flying around, some people were bound to get hurt.
Ostensibly, the meeting was about school superintendent Carol Johnson’s recommendation to close three poorly performing elementary schools and two high school programs. But it was more about the long-term survival of the Boston schools. Boston can’t afford to keep dozens of small, inefficient schools in operation while it faces a roughly $60 million budget shortfall in the next fiscal year. The system supports 135 schools for just 56,000 students. Roughly 5,000 seats are empty, a number that is sure to rise as high-performing charter schools prepare to serve an additional 5,000 students.
Still, many parents don’t want to hear it. In Boston, academic achievement has become so elusive that it is often enough for a school to provide a safe environment. Small schools like the Emerson in Roxbury and the Clap in Dorchester — both on the list for closure — earn top grades from parents for caring. But they receive consistently poor grades from education officials for performance on the statewide MCAS exams.
One Clap parent at the school board hearing became so overwrought about the prospect of losing the “warm and loving care’’ of the school that he needed to be literally wrapped up in a protest banner and guided away from the microphone. At oth er schools, male staffers stand in for missing fathers. “Our families feel safe with us because we love their children,’’ testified Guy Bushfan, a “surround-care-paraprofessional’’ at the East Zone Early Learning Center in Dorchester, which is also on the closure list. “I am (like) a father to over 100 children.’’
School committee members would have to be stonehearted not to be moved by such testimony. But they would have to have rocks in their heads not to see that warmth alone can’t close the achievement gap between minority students in Boston and their white counterparts in the suburbs. And it’s time that closing that gap became the overarching goal of the city’s schools.
The best charter schools in the city, which operate independently of Boston’s central office and teachers union, will turn the world upside down to ensure that their kids outperform the suburbs on statewide tests. They extend the school day to eight hours or more, as opposed to Boston’s contractual 6.5 hour school day. And poor teachers at effective charter schools either get up to speed quickly or are shown the door.
Boston parents certainly deserve a clearer explanation about why their individual schools are slated to close when they appear to perform as well in some subject areas or grades as schools not on the list. And it’s time for superintendent Johnson to present the city with an overall plan for school closures instead of dribbling out the bad news. But if Boston is to thrive — or even survive — as an urban school district, parents need to look beyond the good intentions of school staff and demand effective teaching and leadership.
In September, the Gavin middle school in South Boston is in for some tough love. The Boston school department has selected the 480-student, poorly performing school to become an in-district charter school u nder a tough new provision in state law. Teachers will need to reapply for their jobs, and it is likely that many will not return. Unlocking Potential, the nonprofit school management program that is taking over at the Gavin, is single-minded when it comes to academic performance. In 2005, company founder Scott Given took over the failing Excel charter school in East Boston, where he removed 80 percent of the staff and introduced rigorous reforms in the classroom. Three years later, Excel was the top scorer in the state on the MCAS exam.
“Success to me is when the achievement gap is closed,’’ said Given. Currently, only about one quarter of Gavin students score advanced or were proficient on statewide math and English tests. The goal of the school, which will be renamed UP Academy, is for three-quarters of students to score in those top ranges within four years.
During poignant testimony on Tuesday night, current Gavin principal Alexander Matthews described the deep dedication of his teachers who show up at school as early as 5:30 a.m. It was painful to watch as he apologized to the school committee for his school’s poor performance on statewide English exams. (He also pointed proudly to gains in math.) Yet Matthews’s days at the Gavin are numbered. And if Boston is to become a great urban school system, the city will need to steel itself to many more such scenes.