The troubled state of the Boston public schools is Mayor Tom Menino’s Achilles’ heel. The woeful performance of the schools has surfaced over and over during the mayoral campaign, including at Tuesday’s final debate at Faneuil Hall, where challenger Michael Flaherty hammered the mayor repeatedly on the issue.
But the real knock on Menino’s record isn’t actually the dismal performance of the city’s schools; it’s his lack of a plan for fixing them that has the ambition and sweep to match the size of the problem. Add to that the fact that a call for bold change at this point would look like the mayor is running against his own 16-year record, and it’s easy to see why the four-term incumbent has often leaned heavily on a mix of cheerleading, obfuscation, and denial.
In the school debate, that has led Menino to sugar-coat the situation as much as possible, even if it means playing loose with the facts, chalking up shortcomings to some sort of vague the-deck-is-stacked-against-us unfairness, and most recently, in what has been the mayor’s most ambitious feat of fabulation, claiming that the same problems are seen everywhere, including places like Weston and Wellesley. Anyone buying that one would, as the saying goes, be a good target for those marketing swampland in Florida
In previous debates, Menino claimed repeatedly that Boston’s high school dropout rate had dropped by a third under his watch, though it hasn’t, in fact, really budged at all, as explained here and here. The latest squishy school stat being peddled by the mayor: “75 percent of our kids go on to college.” It’s an impressive figure, but it’s only true if the mayor doesn’t consider the legion of Boston students who have dropped out to be “our kids.”
The statistic, which the mayor repeated a few times in Tuesday’s debate, refers only to graduates of Boston public schools. Boston’s four-year high school graduation rate is just 60 percent. Seventy-five percent of 60 percent is 45 percent, a figure that more accurately represents the proportion of “our kids” going to college. Layer over that the devastating report issued last year showing that only a third of all Boston public schools graduates who went to college actually earned a two- or four-year degree within seven years. Factor that finding and the dropout rate together and it means just 15 percent of Boston ninth-graders went on to earn a two- or four-year college degree, meaning 85 percent wound up without a credential that is nearly indispensable to making it in today’s knowledge-based economy.
The mayor has also decided to combat Flaherty’s repeated claims that 100 of the city’s 145 schools are failing by suggesting similar criticisms can be leveled at schools in the state’s toniest suburbs. The claims are based on how schools stack up on state reports measuring “adequate yearly progress,” an achievement benchmark that is part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. The reports assess how schools are performing overall and among population subgroups, such as special education students, English language learners, and students from low-income households. It is true that a single school in both Weston and Wellesley was cited recently for not meeting the benchmark among a population subgroup. But 79 of the Boston schools cited — more than half of all schools in the district — failed to meet the benchmark for their overall school population in either math or English.
Trying to paper over real challenges facing the Boston schools by suggesting some sort of common plight with schools in Weston and Wellesley is plain silly. A more relevant statistic comes from the recent Boston Globe poll on the mayor’s race, which found that fully half of all respondents with children said they had considered moving out of the city because of the schools. What might the comparable number be in a poll of Wellesley residents?
Despite the campaign trail happy talk, Menino knows the real deal. He knows plenty of people who have left the city in search of quality schools. He knows the dropout rate remains a persistent problem. He knows that many Boston students who go on to college struggle and fail there. And the mayor has sometimes shown an admirable willingness to grapple with these big challenges. He appeared at the press conference last fall where the Northeastern University study of college completion rates was released, and committed the city to developing strategies to double the college completion rate of Boston public school grads. And with his call earlier this year for “in-district” charter schools, he finally seems to have acknowledged that there are lots of schools that are making no progress, though the fate of that proposal in the Legislature is far from clear.
But too often Menino’s approach to school improvement looks like the education equivalent of football legend Woody Hayes’s strategy of “three yards and a cloud of dust.” While the scope and depth of the achievement shortfall in Boston schools cries out for bold change, Menino, who has been loathe to take on the teachers’ union, settles for incremental progress. Speaking broadly of his administration’s record in Tuesday’s debate, he told residents it was all about “making your life a little better.” That can work when it comes to tweaking the municipal recycling program or bettering city parks, but it’s not nearly strong enough medicine for what ails the schools.
Early in Menino’s tenure, as one of the first cities to adopt mayoral control over schools, Boston looked like a national leader on education reform issues. Today, however, it is places like New York and Washington, DC, that are pushing the envelope. The mayors and school superintendents there have been far more willing to acknowledge just how far behind their students are precisely because that forms the rationale for challenging the status quo in big ways over things like teacher tenure and evaluation systems, reforms increasingly viewed as central to bringing dramatic improvement to urban schools.
A more honest reckoning with the sobering facts of Boston’s school performance would be a good start. The real difference, of course, would come from then being willing to do something big about it.
