Mayor for a New America (10 page)

It was a new job for a Boston mayor. For over a century, an elected school committee had run the schools—run them into the ground.

Under the elected committee, Boston operated two school systems, black and white, separate and unequal. It spent less on black students than on white, less for textbooks in black schools, and nearly a third less on health care for black kids. A state law passed in 1965 required racial balance in all public schools on the grounds that “racial imbalance represents a serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity.” Yet thirty-five of Boston's schools had a black student enrollment of 65 to 95 percent. For a decade the School Committee took desperate steps, like counting Chinese students as white, to reduce the number of schools classified as racially imbalanced.

School Committee members won elections by resisting integration, not by improving the schools. As the quality of education deteriorated, they blamed the kids. “We have no inferior education in our schools,” said one chairman. “What we have been getting is an inferior type of student.” The schools weren't a priority for the Irish American pols who dominated the committee. They were in it for the jobs. They “took care of their own,” as evidenced by the sixty-eight Sullivans, sixty-one Murphys, forty McCarthys, thirty O'Briens, and twenty-five Walshes on the School Department payroll in the 1960s.

As late as 1976 a panel of educators concluded: “Friends, neighbors, and relatives of School Committee members ask for and get special consideration for jobs. Who you know often counts more than what you know. . . . Job and employment questions pervade and poison the entire operation.”

Turn-of-the-century reformers advocated elected school committees to “take the politics out of the schools.” In Boston that worked, for a while. But after Maurice Tobin rose from the School Committee to mayor, governor, and then secretary of labor in Harry Truman's cabinet, members saw the committee as a ladder up in politics. Only a saint could resist pandering to the white electorate by promising to preserve their “neighborhood schools.” But saints were rarer on the committee than Italians (two in seventy years).

Fanning the protest against busing, the court-mandated remedy for racial imbalance, committee chairs like Louise Day Hicks and John Kerrigan encouraged the belief that Judge Garrity's order could be resisted, though as lawyers they knew better. Their deceived supporters eventually turned them out of office.

The elected committee never recovered its prestige from the likes of Hicks—and especially Kerrigan, who, outside Judge Garrity's courtroom, once lampooned a black TV reporter by imitating a chimpanzee. Two mayors in a row, Kevin White and Ray Flynn, called for replacing this discredited elected body with one appointed by the mayor. But with support from whites protecting their jobs and from a black community defending the beachhead of its four seats on the thirteen-member committee, it survived into the early 1990s.

In 1991, when I was still on the City Council, I toured the shuttered Longfellow School in Roslindale with Brian Mooney of the
Boston Globe
, then running a five-part exposé of waste in the school budget. In the empty auditorium we found a grand piano. In the basement sat a $480,000 double boiler installed just weeks before the school closed in 1989. In a nearby room, eighty thousand sheets of paper rotted in puddles of water. Gesturing toward the paper, chalk, paints, and other supplies left behind, I said, “These are the things teachers tell us they buy out of their own pockets.” How could the School Department just abandon them?

Court Street, shorthand for the city's school bureaucracy, had overspent eleven of its last thirteen budgets, boosting outlays 87 percent in a decade. In just four years, salaries for bus drivers had shot up 433 percent. Administrators were generous to themselves, too, taking half the department's fifty-two-car fleet home with them every night. Here, I told Mooney, was proof that “the dollar we give them isn't precious to them. The school budget is like a hole you can't get to the bottom of.”

The elected school committee could not plug it. Instead, while planting their feet on the ladder of office, members argued over trivialities like whether the ad for a new superintendent should read “earned doctorate” or “earned doctorate preferred.”

Ray Flynn had had enough. He held an advisory referendum on replacing the elected committee with a seven-member appointed one. The voters passed it, but by less than 1 percent. On that thread of support, in 1991 Flynn lobbied the state legislature to pass home-rule legislation creating an appointed school committee. The legislature attached a condition: The measure must pass a second referendum to be held in five years. The elected school committee was history.

Going out the door, in virtually their final act, the members signed a new school superintendent to a four-year contract. Flynn had wanted to appoint his own person. But he was stuck with the committee's choice. So was I.

Before the struggle for the schools could be joined, I had to clear three hurdles.

I had to settle the touchy issue of whether to renew Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones's contract, which had nearly two years to run when I became mayor.

I had to find a superintendent who shared my sense of urgency about the schools. Boston, I feared, would turn into a city of the rich and the poor unless the middle class could be persuaded to trust their kids to the public schools. The 1990 census revealed a doubling in the number of residents in the upper income brackets since 1980
and
an exodus of middle-income families of all races. Boston risked becoming Manhattan.

I wanted the Boston of the 90s and beyond to be a multiracial, multicultural version of my beloved Hyde Park of the 50s, a city of stable middle-class neighborhoods. Instead, it was increasingly a city of transients. Young couples moved in, stayed for five years, and when their kids reached first grade moved to the suburbs.

Finally, I had to persuade the voters not to restore the elected school committee, something polls showed 7 in 10 of them ready to do in a referendum scheduled for November 1996.

 

It was torture every day to stay on top of my homework. I was sobbing every time I was doing math. The frustration was like a nightmare. My friend supported me by cheering me up in my desperate times. . . . I passed fourth grade, but I wasn't on my feet the next year. I got better, but still not enough to feel successful. I didn't pass fifth grade, but I was making progress in math. I no longer felt like an inept person. . . . At the end of fifth grade I got an award for the most improved in math. It felt like a dream. Obstacles are walls that can be broken.

 

—Every year, as part of the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum honoring an eleven-year-old Boston boy who died of leukemia in 1991, students submit essays on the meaning of courage. This passage is taken from an essay by Claudia Amador, a sixth-grader at the Patrick Lyndon Pilot School in 2007. It won a prize and was reprinted in the Boston Globe.

 

In my 1994 inaugural address I noted that “for the first time since 1977 no African American holds a city-wide post.” I pledged to “be especially responsive” to minority concerns. It was the least I could do. Blacks supported me in the election by nearly 4 to 1.

In 1990, when all but one of the white members of the School Committee voted to fire Boston's first African American superintendent of schools, Dr. Laval Wilson, the four black members walked out in protest. A prime minority concern was the future of Boston's only minority official, Wilson's successor, Superintendent Harrison-Jones.

She had a rough time of it in Boston. Ray Flynn sniped at her. The
Boston Globe
editorialized against her. She got off on the wrong foot with me.

It happened when I was still a city councilor. I was being interviewed by a television reporter in City Hall. Harrison-Jones was passing by. Hearing me mention a threatened strike by school bus drivers, she stopped in her tracks. Why are you asking
him
about
that?
she asked the reporter. He doesn't know anything about it . . . After that introduction, I bet she hoped that Jim Brett would beat me for mayor in the '93 election.

Little more than a month after the election, new tensions arose between Harrison-Jones and me.

On his way to a Dorchester Christmas party, Louis Brown, a fifteen-year-old straight-A student who dreamed of being the first black president, was killed in a gunfight between gangs. He was carrying a Secret Santa gift for a friend in Teens Against Gang Violence, the group holding the party, when he was shot in the head and dropped to the pavement, still holding the gift.

I drove out to Louis's house. Walking up the stairs, I remember thinking,
What can I say?
I rang the doorbell and Louis's mother, Tina Chéry, came down to see who it was. “I'm here to help,” I said, and sat with her that night, listening to her stories about Louis. Consoling the loved ones of murdered children is part of a mayor's job in gun-saturated America.

The next day I attended Louis's funeral at St. Leo's Church. During the service, teenagers wearing black
STOP GANG VIOLENCE
sweatshirts stood in front of the wooden casket. In his sermon Bishop John Patrick Boles, Cardinal Bernard Law's representative, honored their cause when he spoke of Louis Brown as a “gentle young man who saw that opportunity could only be realized in a city of peace and hope.”

I had to respond to Louis's murder and the contagion of gang violence. I proposed a twelve-month “boot camp” for fifty troubled (and troublemaking) teens recommended by school principals. I discussed it with the sheriff of Barnstable County on Cape Cod, who pioneered the state's first boot camp for adult offenders. The sheriff would run it, an in-the-woods experience to instill self-discipline. After boot camp, to reinforce the character they had found in themselves, the kids would be matched with long-term mentors. I had read a remark somewhere that D-Day was won in the CCC camps that FDR started during the Depression. Dispirited boys came out of the woods proud young men. I wanted that transformation for Boston kids tempted to seek self-esteem in gangs.

To me the boot camp was a matter of public safety. “It's an alternative program for these kids to get them back in the mainstream,” I said. “It's better to do this than spend $50,000 . . . putting them in jail.” Harrison-Jones saw it as an education issue—and met with me privately to complain that I had not cleared the idea with her. In the leak about our meeting that appeared in the press, “sources said she strongly register[ed] her disapproval.”

 

Despite “the chilly winds that have blown between 26 Court Street and City Hall,” I invited Superintendent Harrison-Jones to join my cabinet. The
Globe
applauded this “powerful statement of the mayor's commitment to educating the city's children.” As I explained to reporters, this was “my way of reaching out. If we don't do something in the next two years, the schools are gone.”

In a speech to business leaders in August 1994, I called the coming school term a “test year in which our commitment to carry out our agenda for change will be closely scrutinized.” I had prodded the City Council to approve a $5 million increase in the school budget. A new teachers' contract offering greater flexibility in the classroom would be in place. Through the summer, more than one hundred teachers, administrators, and parents had drafted a new curriculum to raise student performance, partly through training parents to teach study skills at home. Five elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools were gearing up to try it. Their principals were reportedly displaying “high enthusiasm” for the experiment. All systems were go.

So I was disturbed to find out that because of “differences” between Court Street and the director of the Curriculum Renewal Team, the new curriculum would not be tried after all. There would be no test in the “test year.” Remedial classes would not be ended. Foreign language requirements would not be doubled. Algebra would not be introduced in the eighth grade. Parent activists would not be present in classrooms. The team director's reassignment just before the opening of school was what one school-watcher called “a terrible blow” to the project.

It was also a blow to a teacher whose proposal to require courses in African and African American history had been approved by the curriculum team. In words that stung me to read, he told a reporter: “The project was nothing more than a political statement to the public about making change. A lot of people were very excited about this project. It seemed a new era was developing.”

My aides needed no prodding to leak the news that Harrison-Jones “has fallen out of favor with Menino.” I expected that item to draw comment from African American politicians quick to defend Harrison-Jones. Mel King, a former state legislator who had run for mayor against Ray Flynn in 1983, went there: “We won't allow her to be lynched.”

In the days leading up to the annual Martin Luther King Day breakfast held in the Marriott Copley Place ballroom, I braced myself for George Wallace comparisons.

David Nyhan recorded the moment: “The biggest needles of the day were reserved for Mayor Thomas Menino, who sat stoically through the 2½ hour extravaganza, whilst being on the receiving end of considerable advice that he rehire the Boston school superintendent, Lois Harrison-Jones, who sat at a floor table near Menino's end of the head table.”

I was in a grim mood. Backstage, I'd exchanged hot words with Gareth Saunders, the city councilor from Roxbury. I don't take accusations of racism well.

I glanced at Governor Bill Weld sitting beside me, his face frozen in a “there but for the grace of God go I” mask. Weld's cuts in social services made him a target for this crowd. But not today; not with the bull's-eye painted on my back.
Thanks, pal
, I thought.