Our reader Christine Langhoff writes about the current crisis in public education in Boston:
To use the common idiom, Boston is “woke”!
Parents, teachers and allies of public education protested on a frigid January night outside the mayor’s State of the City address. A few days earlier, 350 teachers, parents and students attended an informational town hall during the evening, as the issues of the hidden McKinsey report were publicly aired. There was another rally on February 17, during school vacation week.
Some 3400 students walked out of their classes on March 7 and went to City Hall and the State House to demonstrate after rallying on Boston Common. Some of them testified at the State House against the lifting of the charter cap. This was a student led and organized protest, which the mayor tried to dismiss with the classic “outside agitators” line. On March 17th, a group of parents, following the students’ lead, demonstrated outside City Hall, demanding the release of the report.
There have been a series of public hearings on the city’s budget, all of which are very well attended. A coalition of parents, educators and students are all on the same side of this argument, and though progress has been slow, we are not discouraged. Up next is walk-in day on May 7.
Much of this is organized on social media. In addition to the parents’ group QUEST, BEJA, Boston Education Justice Alliance http://bostonedjustice.org and the student groups YOUNG and BSAC http://www.youthonboard.org as well as Citizens for Public Schools are working together to keep our schools. The Boston Teachers Union has taken a page from our fellow unionists at the Chicago Teachers Union, allying with and supporting all these groups.
The question that has not been answered is why cuts to the budget, decreasing services to our SWD, and diminishment of offerings for students (closing high school libraries!) is necessary. Boston is in the midst of an unprecedented building and real estate boom; tax receipts are up by $95 million this year alone. (Massachusetts weathered the 2008 catastrophe pretty well.) We’re ranked number one (for what it’s worth) in urban school systems. What pretext is there for closing 30-50 schools? None.
But here’s the scenario we’re up against:
No elected school board, appointed by the mayor (since 1993)
The mayor founded a charter school
The superintendent is a Broadie
More parasites from TFA, TNTP, StudentsFirst are being hired at the school department
86% of our students aren’t white; most of them are poor and nearly half have English as a second language.
The governor wants more charters
The state board of ed is appointed by the governor
The state board is a cabal of privatizers from HGSE, the Pioneer Institute, New Schools Venture Fund
The former PARCC chairman is the state Commissioner
Walton is pouring money into the city
DFER sponsored successful candidates in the most recent election
Boston is a signatory to the Gates CRPE contract
The mayor and superintendent want One Enrollment
It’s an uphill battle and we can’t afford to lose.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Diane.
The latest development in this saga is the following directive from the MA DESE, whose chair, Mitchell Chester, is the past chair of PARCC: test or be punished. If parents opt their children out of testing, the schools will be designated as ripe for takeover.
“Hold Harmless Policy for Scores, not Participation:
As a follow-up to the On the Desktop ESE sent to superintendents on April 1, 2016,ESE would like to clarify a point about students’ participation in statewide standardized tests. Massachusetts’ accountability system is set up to encourage high participation rates (if it weren’t, the school’s results would not reflect school-wide achievement). If fewer than 95 percent of a school’s students take the statewide assessment, the school cannot be designated a Level 1 school. If fewer than 90 percent of a school’s students take the assessment, that school, regardless of its test scores, can earn a designation no higher than Level 3. This is true whether a district takes PARCC or MCAS. The state’s policy of holding schools harmless based on PARCC results in 2015-16 does not apply to cases in which participation falls below 95 percent. This is a change from last year, which was considered unique as the state’s first operational year of PARCC testing.”
http://www.doe.mass.edu/commissioner/?update=4/29/2016
LikeLike
Are they as bad about media coverage in Boston as they are in many other places? (I am hypersensitive about St. Louis). I did a search “Boston Globe, Diane Ravitch” and “Boston Globe, Peter Greene”. They did offer a sports report by someone named Peter Green.
LikeLike
The Boston Globe is basically a PR arm of corporate reform. The “opinion” columnists left & right publish regular puff pieces on charters and attacks on a monolithic teachers union who are to blame for all education problems. The voices of students and parents are generally ignored.
LikeLike
“What pretext is there for closing 30-50 schools? None.”
In 1970, there were a total of 96,696 children enrolled in Boston’s public schools.
In 2016, there are approximately 62,000 children enrolled in Boston’s public schools; 54,000 in BPS and 8,000 in charters (I’m not familiar with Boston’s schools and don’t know whether charters are entitled to space in BPS facilities, co-located or otherwise).
The McKinsey audit says that more than half of BPS’s schools are operating at less than 68% of capacity. Enrollment is projected to continue to decrease, and it is highly unlikely that the school-age population of the city will ever rebound to an extent that an appreciable percentage of the now-unused capacity would need to be utilized.
I understand that school closures are difficult for neighborhoods to accept. I know it first-hand, actually! My first elementary school was closed due to a consolidation necessitated by a drop in enrollment. But it is only the size and scale of BPS that have permitted it to operate so many half-empty schools for so long—a leafy suburban district would have “right-sized” decades ago.
Maybe you think that 30-50 closures is too many. Fine. Can you admit that BPS should close *some* schools?
LikeLike
You need to read the report again, Tim. What the McKinsey reports says is that at current levels of student/teacher ratios, BPS is at 90% capacity. The only way they justify the statement that we are under enrolled is IF THEY CHANGE STUDENT/TEACHER ratios. In other words, they would have to increase class size and shove more students into the classrooms.
BPS has had grown in enrollment in the last 8 years. Anyone who goes into any of schools will see how ridiculous it is to say we are at 50% capacity. We are teeming with students.
The CFO of BPS was asked in a city council hearing today to name one BPS school that was at 50% capacity. She couldn’t name one. Because they don’t exist, and the city is getting clued into this.
I was at a “Monday with Marty” meeting with the mayor this evening where several parents confronted him about the McKinsey report. He deferred to Supt. Chang. I was very pleased to hear Supt. Chang acknowledge that the McKinsey report did not take into programmatic space – only physical space.
LikeLike
But Mr. Chang did not really say much of substance at that meeting, more or less backpedaling and saying it was just one of several “tools.” That tool cost $660,000. It gave specific recommendations, such as sell schools in real-estate rich neighborhoods, sell or lease underperforming schools (guess where they are), among other recommendations. The report shows no methodology; it took a parents’ group FOIA or it to be released. For shame.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, make special ed class to teacher ratios HIGHER. Guess who is getting laid off this year? You know it.
LikeLike