Mayor for a New America (12 page)

But that was the last thing I wanted. With feeling in my voice, I promised parents, “I'm in this fight for your kids, not my power.”

It helped our side that Question 2 read like it had begun life in a foreign language, with a “no” vote signifying yes to the appointed committee. How could the city election department let that happen?

It helped that the “Vault,” a group of Boston employers alive to appeals from the same City Hall that assessed their property, kicked in $600,000 to finance TV ads, 235 times what the “yes” folks managed to raise. And although I want big money out of politics, I admit it helped that, on referendum questions, corporations can contribute directly and without limit to favored causes.

On Labor Day we mounted a full-court press, flooding the city with signs, holding rallies, gaining endorsements. Counting the Timilty-White fights, this was my ninth Boston election. I knew how winning campaigns felt. This one didn't feel right. By early October, the post–Labor Day momentum was draining away. “No” needed help.

I asked my friend Bob “Skinner” Donahue, with twenty-five years of experience running national, state, and local campaigns, to build a parallel field organization. Suddenly bumper stickers were everywhere. Calls from phone banks interrupted suppers. Signs sprouted on lawns.

The appearance of momentum was back. The reality would follow. That's what campaigns do.

I devoted nearly all my time to the campaign, working the phones to raise money, micromanaging tactics, motivating the troops, taking my case to the voters in neighborhood open houses. In a key battleground, Ward 20 in West Roxbury, I walked door-to-door, and on election night showed up to press the flesh at two precincts.

A poll conducted in the last week of the campaign found 44 percent for the appointed committee, 25 percent for the elected committee. But 22 percent were undecided. How would they tip?

On Election Day, Angela visited precincts all over the city. Things seemed to be going our way. “As people came to the polls, they winked, they patted me on the shoulder, they said great things,” she told me. That night, in the Eagle Room off my fifth-floor office, the “no” gang waited for the results to come in.

Donahue had compiled a list of fifty swing districts. Ward 8, Precinct 6, in Roxbury was the first to report. In 1989 it had voted for an appointed committee by 5 percent; now by 23 percent. Next came Ward 1, Precinct 12, in Orient Heights, East Boston. Against an appointed committee in '89, now it was for, 440 to 183.

I worry till the polls close. You can fall for your own campaign. Mistake campaign-generated enthusiasm for the real thing. Over Question 2, I had been on edge for weeks. As a City Hall reporter noted, “Question No. 2 is Obsession No. 1 with the mayor.” Neil Sullivan, director of the Private Industry Council and an adviser to me on the referendum, agreed: “It's become such a cause for him. . . . It's as if this intensity for schools has become part of his political identity.” So much was at stake.

The eyes of the education world were on Boston. “There's more hope around the Boston Public Schools than there has been in the 15 to 20 years I've been around,” observed Jerry Murphy from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. “You have to hope Payzant and Menino can do it.” Along with Chicago, Boston was a pioneer in mayor-driven school change. Twenty-first-century mayors and educators could learn from our successes and failures. “If it can work here, it can work anywhere,” said Murphy.

The eyes of Boston's politicians were on me. The vote would be read as a verdict on my administration. If my side lost, I'd draw a strong opponent in the upcoming mayoral election.

But now, as Skinner's bellwether wards began to fall our way, the tension eased. I punched the air with my fists, squeezed Skinner's shoulders, and whooped in victory. Just then Tom Payzant walked in to congratulate me. Ed Jesser, my longtime friend and political adviser, grabbed Payzant and yelled, “OK, you can stay in town, kid.”

By 3 to 1, the people had spoken. The kid could stay in town.

 

I was born in Quito, Ecuador. . . . At the Josiah Quincy Upper School, kids made fun of me because I was adopted and had white parents. . . . I sometimes felt like punching them, but as Martin Luther King said, “Learn to love your enemies.” Therefore I was kind and gentle. . . . Courage means to ignore the people who bother you and to love the ones you love. . . . The parents who adopted me are the ones I love a lot.

 

—Jefferson Payne, sixth-grader at the Josiah Quincy School in 2007

 

A friend remarked that changing the Boston schools was like “turning the
Titanic
around in a bathtub.” Performing that feat was now the job of the new captain.

When Tom Payzant cautioned, “It could be years before the numbers turn around,” I groaned. How long should the kids have to wait for the schools they deserved? And I didn't have “years.” I had until 2001, when I invited voters to “judge me harshly” if scores weren't up.

Payzant set his course to 2003, when, for the first time, all high school seniors in Massachusetts were scheduled to take a graduation exam, the capstone of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). In the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, the state legislature committed hundreds of millions in state aid to improve local schools. By the late 90s, cities and towns had been spending the money for years. MCAS would measure how well. Seniors who failed to pass the tenth-grade standard would not receive diplomas. Failing schools would be exposed. Jobs would be on the line. The reckoning would come in a seventeen-hour test spread over three days.

Payzant geared everything to MCAS. “All our efforts in Boston are now focused on this challenge,” he wrote in an op-ed column. “We are undertaking massive professional development in all our schools for teachers and administrators. We are providing up to 12 months of intensive instruction and extra supports—at a cost of more than $20 million—for students behind grade level in grades 3, 6, and 9. We are aligning our curricula to the state tests. We are holding ourselves accountable for results.”

His first year on the job, Payzant substituted the more rigorous “Stanford 9” for the test taken in most urban school systems. The Stanford revealed that without dramatic progress, one-half of seventh-graders would not graduate from high school. “A tough reality check,” Payzant called the test. A Roxbury girl called it “horrible.”

For some students, high-stakes tests didn't motivate them to try harder but discouraged them from trying, period. Kids need success to succeed. But how would they know they had succeeded if they didn't pass a test? I got that. Still, no great shakes at test taking myself, testing's casualties weighed on my conscience.

Payzant's plan was comprehensive:

• Since every minute of teaching time counted in the race against MCAS, disruptive middle school students, whose acting out cost their classmates 20 percent of their learning time, would be sent to a school set up to handle them.
  
• With the typical Boston high school student absent twenty-eight days a year, Payzant moved to curtail truancy. Kids couldn't afford to lose the class time.
  
• Through social promotion, kids had been failing upward. MCAS ended social promotion. But holding kids back encouraged them to drop out. Threading that policy needle, Payzant replaced social promotion with mandatory summer school. Fifty percent of failing students in grades 3, 5, and 7 attended one summer, all eighth-graders the next.
  
• Under the “2 to 6” initiative, which I started before Payzant came aboard, more schools were staying open longer for test prep and other activities.
  

Following a Menino best practice, Payzant frequently got away from Court Street, visiting at least two of the city's 127 schools every week, and shaking hands with teachers, students, parents, and custodians. These were friendly visits. They were also unannounced. “We have got to keep the pressure on,” Payzant said, as the months marched toward May 2003.

 

I was about 2 when my brother and I went to live with my father. My father was still in high school. My mother dropped us off at my father's house; I didn't see her again for a long time. . . . My father could have sent us both to a foster home . . . but instead he asked my grandparents to help him raise us. My father . . . never quit trying to make his life better for him and for us. For example, he finished high school and went to college. He is now a registered nurse at Brigham and Women's Hospital. . . . My father is always an inspiration, and when I am feeling down I go to him and he encourages me to do my best. My father was 18 and took on the responsibility of raising two children when he was a child himself. . . . Courage is accepting responsibility for one's actions, in spite of the obstacles, and reaching for the stars!

 

—Darianna Santana, sixth-grader at the Solomon Lewenberg Middle School in 2009

 

At the Burke, I vowed to make that failing school the “pride of Boston.” Payzant's “incremental progress” toward MCAS is a two-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust story. The Burke's story is more dramatic, and more heartbreaking. It highlights the fragility of progress in urban education.

In the weeks surrounding my speech, if you had looked through the
Globe'
s obituary pages, you would have seen photographs of women who graduated from the Burke in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. A number had won scholarships to Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith, and Barnard. A few had pursued graduate study at Oxford or the Sorbonne. Wives and mothers and grandmothers, they had also been writers and scientists and educators. Named for a former school superintendent who died in 1931, and opened three years later, the Burke was their launching pad, an Art Deco palace of cultural enrichment for the mainly Jewish and Irish Catholic girls of Dorchester.

Times change. By the late 1960s, Grove Hall, the Burke's once-safe neighborhood, was gang-ridden. The school went coed in 1972, and like all of Boston's high schools in the 70s it was rocked by busing.

In 1982, when Albert Holland, an assistant headmaster at South Boston High in the eye of the busing storm, was appointed the Burke's fourth headmaster in three years, he found a school in chaos. The bathrooms were locked to prevent students from fighting or sexually assaulting one another inside. The halls reeked of human waste. Teachers locked themselves in their classrooms. One of Holland's first acts was to chain the front doors to keep out gangs.

“Nobody cared about the Burke,” Holland said later. “It was a dumping ground for all the have-nots.”

Supported by Superintendent Robert R. Spillane, Holland set out to bring back the Burke. With an infusion of cash from Court Street, he hired more staff, cleaned and painted the rooms and halls, and invited twenty social service agencies—engaged in everything from pregnancy counseling to dress-for-success coaching—to operate in the school. Importantly, he lowered the Burke's enrollment.

More money, more staff, more services, fewer kids: the formula for school success. It worked. By 1990, national magazines were hailing the Burke as one of the country's best public schools. Seventy percent of its graduates went to college. “We had kids going to Cornell, Bates, Michigan, Boston College,” Holland recalled. “We even had a dream of restoring Latin.”

Then the dream lost its subsidy. A city budget crunch in the recession of the early 90s cost the Burke its supplemental funding. Staff were laid off. Enrollment sharply increased. The formula for school failure.

Holland left in 1993. It was a promotion, to assistant superintendent. But he was also shaken: A student stabbed during a lunch period had nearly bled out in his arms. He recalled praying, “My God, don't let this child die.” The child lived. The Burke spiraled down.

Inspectors from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, weighing whether to suspend the Burke's accreditation, discovered that the school had no drinking water. Holland told Mayor Flynn that “if this was a white school in a white neighborhood, this [deterioration] would not be tolerated.”

Steve Leonard, the new headmaster, recalled the day
he
first walked into the Burke: “There was smoke in the corridors, the coke machine was cracked and its fluorescent lights were flashing like a penny arcade. [T]eachers would stand in the hallways grabbing kids they thought were salvageable and slam the doors.”

In 1996 I committed to a five-year plan to bring back the Burke . . . again. The Burke would get $5 million more a year (almost double the 1995 total) to hire more teachers and counselors and renovate the building. Enrollment was cut. Staff increased. Going forward, the maximum teacher-student ratio at the Burke would be 1 to 24, compared to 1 to 33 at other city high schools.

By 1998, under the dynamic Leonard, the Burke had regained its accreditation. That year it enrolled 671 students: 591 were black, 42 Hispanic, 20 Asian, 16 white, and 2 Native American. Twenty-four percent were bilingual. Nineteen percent were special needs—kids with learning disabilities and behavioral problems, some serious.

Leonard had picked his own staff: teachers and counselors who went the extra mile. A girl who could not live with her drug-addicted mother moved in with her ailing grandmother, who died, leaving the girl homeless. Caring staff found her a place to live with a friend of the Burke. “They've done this for a lot of other kids, at least seven seniors I know of,” the girl told a reporter.

On the academic side, Leonard wanted the Burke's students to take their place in the knowledge society. For kids who blew off higher education (“Truman didn't go to college”), there'd be no strong-back, high-wage manufacturing jobs at a Westinghouse plant in twenty-first-century Boston. What they earned would depend on what they learned at the Burke and beyond. “We just convinced them they couldn't graduate until they applied to college,” Leonard said. “We were bluffing. But it worked.”