Mayor for a New America (11 page)

The speakers talked up Harrison-Jones's achievements—a falling dropout rate, four balanced budgets in a row, improved labor relations, and more. So why, they asked, did a School Committee member encourage her to apply for a teacher-training position in Virginia? Later that day, to a crowd of vocal supporters in a South End church, Harrison-Jones gave her answer.

She was “a victim of an unreachable standard of perfection.” Boston was notorious for replacing school chiefs—eleven in twenty years—before they could show results: “I care too much about your children to roll over and play dead because someone says I should.”

She was talking about me. Me implicitly in speaking of Boston's “peculiar fanaticism, an obsession with change for change's sake. [Officials] dart to and fro trying to find some . . . quick fix.” And me directly: “People said there is need for the mayor to have his own person. That is political. The educational decision should have been based on whether there is movement. . . . The movement is there. . . . If Boston is to take its schools seriously, it has to get the politics out of the schools.”

Substitute “accountability” for “politics” in that sentence and see if you still agree with it.

The crack about those wicked “politics” aside, Harrison-Jones made a strong case for patience. For giving the next superintendent time to follow through. She was right: There was no quick fix. School reform was steady work. Beneath her swipes at me, she was passing along earned wisdom.

Two days after the Martin Luther King Day breakfast, I was relieved to read in the
Globe
that “Boston School Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones said yesterday that she does not intend to wage a public fight to stay on after her contract expires in June, a move that appeared to defuse a budding confrontation with Mayor Menino over her future.”

In February the School Committee voted against extending Harrison-Jones's contract for an additional year. Committee chair Felix Arroyo said a lame-duck superintendent could not push through the changes the system needed.

I happened to be in Florida, which raised eyebrows. That wily Menino! “He walks away from this whistling like a Charlie Chaplin character,” said Mike McCormack, a former colleague on the City Council. “She has been surgically removed without his hand being seen on the knife.” If only I were that deft.

It's true I hated letting people go. I know what losing a job means when you have a mortgage and kids. But my vacation was scheduled in advance of the School Committee's vote on Dr. Harrison-Jones. And it was no secret that, in major matters, the committee acted for me.

From Florida I issued a statement: “I deeply appreciate all the superintendent has done for the children and families of Boston. She has demonstrated complete and total commitment and caring.”

At the Martin Luther King Day breakfast Harrison-Jones received a standing ovation. She deserved it.

 

In my case, courage meant to tell my friends about a religion that they knew little about.

On a September day in 2001 as I was walking home, I felt sadness in the air. I walked inside my house and saw my whole family glued to the news on TV. My mom walked toward me and said, “Ya, Allah (Oh, God)” and gave me a hug. . . .

I showed courage by going to school and telling every student and teacher who may think of me as “different” because I wear a scarf on my head that I am a Muslim, not a terrorist.

 

—from a prizewinning 2005 essay in the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum by Shukri Abdillahi, then a sixth-grader at the James P. Timilty Middle School

 

“
WANTED:
Boston School Superintendent. Brainless, featureless doormat wanted to revive dead school system. Short-term position. Must be willing to be buffeted about unmercifully by clueless pols.” Written by a columnist close to the African American community, that ad spoofed a perception I had to change. And do it before the November referendum on the School Committee.

My only course was to hire an outstanding new superintendent. Someone universally respected in education circles. Someone whose reputation for independence signaled that he or she would not be buffeted about by a “clueless pol” (me). Someone who would not stay in Boston if the voters brought back the old committee.

A distinguished search committee began vetting candidates who applied for the job, and I relied on their professional judgment. Then Senator Ted Kennedy called me to recommend a candidate who had not applied.

When Ted spoke, I listened. I loved the guy. I miss him. A sad moment in my life came in August 2009, when Angela and I stood in front of City Hall to watch Ted's funeral procession as the Faneuil Hall bell tolled forty-seven times, once for each year Ted served in the Senate.

Once we were both scheduled to speak at the opening of a photonics lab at Boston University. Ted leaned over to me prior to the press conference:

 

TED
: What's photonics?

ME:
How would I know? You got the grant.

TED:
What are you going to say?

ME:
Whatever
you
say, pal. I'm not going to deviate from your script.

 

Boston had no warmer friend in Washington than Teddy Kennedy. In 1994, when he was in trouble running for reelection in a Republican year, Boston had his back. The race will be won in the city, I told my people. Get out the vote for Ted Kennedy! Late in the campaign, a senior member of my administration informed me that he was voting for Ted's opponent, Mitt Romney. He could have hit me with a mallet. You work for Boston's mayor, I shouted, yet you won't vote for Boston's senator? I had appointed this guy? I ordered him to be at one of Boston's busiest traffic circles at seven the next morning. A
KENNEDY FOR SENATE
sign would be waiting for him. I expected him to stand out on that rotary holding that sign all day, and told him I'd drive by to check. But I didn't say when.

Ted's candidate was Assistant Secretary of Education Thomas Payzant. Ted's Education and Labor Committee had approved Payzant's appointment in the Clinton administration. Payzant's job was to promote school change. It seemed too good to be true.

Tom was a local boy, from nearby Quincy, educated at Williams College and at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, whose first teaching job was in suburban Belmont. A decade later, at age thirty-two, he was heading the Eugene, Oregon, school system. He stepped on toes there, transferring politically connected principals who were not doing their jobs. He moved on to Oklahoma City, where he mobilized parents to get involved in the schools. In San Diego, his last stop before Washington, he won both praise and criticism for his focus on raising student test scores.

I called Payzant to encourage him to apply. He sounded up for it. We were both scheduled to be in New York on the same day. So we met for lunch at the Carnegie Deli. I didn't hire by résumé. I always loved that part, “references will be furnished upon request.” Who ever gave a bad reference? You give your mother-in-law, your wife, your three kids. I went more by my gut. I didn't interview candidates for jobs. I met them. We talked. Usually about everything other than the job—the kids, where they lived, their other interests. When we didn't click, it was like you threw a ball and no one was there to catch it. Tom Payzant caught it. One of my aides sat with us until we tucked into our corned beef sandwiches. When he came back an hour or so later, we were talking like old friends.

Payzant didn't oversell the Payzant cure for the schools. Progress would be slow. He promised setbacks. Guaranteed mistakes. But he also spoke of cooperation as a force for change. Through joint effort and open communication, the teachers and staff of the Boston Public Schools would get there . . . Where? A better education for the kids. And his voice warmed when he mentioned the kids. Sure, he had a Harvard Ph.D. But he wouldn't have got the job without that. Following protocol for federal officials, he paid for his own lunch. A small sign of integrity not lost on me.

An education reporter asked Payzant something many in Boston were curious about: Why “as a federal official who had once headed a district [San Diego] twice the size of Boston” did he want to come here? “There seems to be an unusual opportunity in Boston right now,” he replied, with the accountable mayor, the appointed school committee, and the professional superintendent all on the same team, all pulling in the same direction. “It is rare that this happens in a major city.”

Boston's next superintendent, Payzant thought, faced twin challenges: convincing the public that “change and excellence” are “doable”
and
that change takes time. Those challenges defined the ­ten-year struggle for the schools.

On one side, school reform had to fight “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” former President George W. Bush's phrase for the belief that “those kids can't hack it”—that the schools can't compensate for the injuries inflicted by poverty and racial isolation. “You can't make gold out of straw,” said one teacher, speaking anonymously to a reporter. “We are asked to do so much, be everything, everybody. You need dedicated parents. Kids' friends are being shot and then they come to school. Do you want to try to teach them?”

Well-meaning minority voices called Payzant's fixation on raising scores unfair. Why make poor city kids take tests with built-in upper-middle-class bias? Lower the bar. Adjust the scale. Shield city kids, at least temporarily, from discovering how far behind suburban kids they are.

If one side was resigned to the status quo or protective of it, the other demanded change yesterday. Why aren't scores rising faster? Why, Mr. Mayor, keep Payzant on year after year when he has produced so few “deliverables”? Why
can't
those kids hack it?

Payzant took charge at Court Street on October 1, 1995. A December poll found voters “overwhelmingly” in favor of restoring the elected school committee in the referendum less than a year away.

 

The polls consistently predicted I was on the wrong side of “Question No. 2.” Friends advised me: Walk away from a lost cause. The voters want an elected committee. Don't stand in their way. But the big wheel of politics was turning my way. Nineteen ninety-six was a presidential election year. Turnout was expected to be double what it was for the first referendum on the School Committee held during the 1989 City Council elections. Running as an incumbent, Bill Clinton would pull out the vote in neighborhoods that took a pass on city elections—the South End, Mission Hill, the Back Bay, Beacon Hill. Their liberal “good government” voters would respond to my case that the elected committee had been a hive of “shameless grandstanding, rampant patronage, and dirty politics.”

On the other side, champions of the elected committee advanced a superficially appealing populist counterargument: Let the voters decide. Only elites who don't trust “the people” could be against democratic control of the schools. I bridled at that charge. I trusted the people to hold the mayor accountable for the schools. What was undemocratic about that?

Not so fast, retorted opponents like State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, who represented a minority district: “How do you get accountability for the schools? You can't expect it when it depends on one man who's in charge of everything in the city.” Unlike a school committee facing the voters every two years, a busy mayor serving four years would lose track of the schools.

Another black official warned minority voters that if they voted no, the Old South would rise again . . . in Boston. The white mayor, the white members of the appointed school committee, and the white superintendent overseeing the mostly minority kids in the Boston schools would succumb to a “plantation mentality.” I was lucky the circumstances didn't invite “lynching.”

The Question 2 referendum was
the
critical vote of my two decades in office. I took it so seriously that I
sought
debates with “yes” supporters. In a televised duel held on the marble steps of the altar at Trinity Church, my opponent, City Councilor Mickey Roache, scored when he pointed out that the Burke, a symbol of failure, lost its accreditation under
my
appointed committee. It was the kind of moment your handlers try to smooth over: “Don't worry, Mayor. Nobody watched the thing.
Monday Night Football
was on”—even if it was Wednesday.

We conducted two campaigns. One of public education. The other of political mobilization.

In the months ahead of the vote, we brought together different constituencies to hear our case. Several evenings a week, my education adviser Martha Pierce and I left City Hall and went to a nearby campaign office. There we spoke to groups of parents, teachers, principals, university presidents, and other interested parties. We also took our show on the road, to community newspapers, to senior centers, to school auditoriums, to living rooms.

The issue did not break down neatly on racial lines. Though polls in white neighborhoods indicated strong opposition to the appointed committee, some of the stiffest resistance came from minority parents. They hated to lose those four members of the old School Committee, the only black elected officials in city history. But those black members were outnumbered by conservative whites. Our appointed committee, by contrast, was majority minority. That's why the Urban League supported us, and why a former head of the Boston NAACP had agreed to run the “no” campaign.

Another common objection to the appointed committee was that it gave me too much power. I could stack the committee with political hacks.

Our pushback was to remind people of the checks and balances written into the enabling legislation passed in 1991. It vested the power to nominate School Committee members in a board of prestigious figures from education, business, and nonprofits. The board had thirteen members; nine were chosen by the governor and a committee of the legislature, only four by the mayor. I couldn't pack the School Committee with hacks even if I wanted to.