In 2006, Boston won the prestigious Broad Prize, which each year recognizes the top urban school district in the country. It may have been the worst thing to happen to the city’s schools in years. 

The award put an official stamp of approval on the storyline Mayor Tom Menino has been pushing for more than a decade — that the Boston public schools are making huge strides and performing well. The mayor regularly bristles at critics who point to the yawning gap between the district’s performance levels and those of surrounding suburbs or who highlight the lack of confidence in the schools demonstrated by the continued exodus from the city of middle-class families with school-aged children.

Menino deserves credit for his commitment to the system, including his push for more pilot schools, which operate with more autonomy over hiring and work rules than standard district schools. But with control over the schools handed to Boston’s mayor in 1992, a year before he took office, and with Menino having famously declared that voters should judge him harshly on school performance, he has always more cheerleader than change agent, much quicker to claim victory with incremental progress than to sound the alarm over the abysmal trajectory most students are on and demand bold change. 

Until now.

On Tuesday, the mayor not only announced a complete about-face on his long-standing opposition to charter schools, he tossed overboard the slow-but-steady-progress narrative that has been his story on Boston schools throughout his tenure. Menino suddenly declared it unacceptable that Boston continues to have so many underperforming schools.  He said he was “frustrated with the pace of our progress,” and said he will seek authority to open district-operated charter schools to “get the results we seek — at the speed we want.”

Lots of factors seem to have pushed Menino’s sudden conversion, including two mayoral challengers, Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon, already out of the gate with bolder calls to lift the statewide cap on charters and a big pot of money in Obama’s education department that will be handed out to districts and states that are lifting their caps on charter schools and embracing other reforms. Menino has also been hearing the drumbeat of wider calls for more charter school in Boston. At a recent Boston Foundation forum, the CEO of KIPP schools, the country’s largest and one of the most successful charter school organizations, said KIPP would be ready to open as many as five schools in Boston if the state cap were raised.  Interestingly, Menino invited the KIPP leader, Richard Barth, back to Boston and met with him for more than hour on Monday, the day before the mayor teed up the idea of in-district charter schools.

There are lots of questions about Menino’s proposal. “What kind of autonomy will these schools have?” asks Marc Kenen, director of the statewide Massachusetts Charter School Assocation. What sort of accountability will there be for their performance, “including closure of charters when they’re not performing?  The devil is in the details, and there are no details really at this point.”

The most significant aspect of the mayor’s announcement, however, may simply be his acknowledgement that the city’s schools are failing many students.  That is something reform-minded mayors such as Michael Bloomberg in New York and Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C., have no qualms about saying.  As with a 12-step program’s approach to addiction, you have to admit the extent of the ..problem before you can fix it.