Mayor for a New America (13 page)

By 2001, the Burke was one of three high schools nationwide recognized by the College Board for sending all of its eligible seniors to two- or four-year colleges. All 154. Everybody but the fourteen in jail and the four undocumented immigrants barred from college by their status. “Now we have proof to show people what we can do,” said one young graduate on her way to a summer session at Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at the University of New Hampshire.

The Burke was back! And the five-year time limit on the extra resources I had steered to the Burke since 1996 was up.

 

Courage is simply living today in this society. There are too many crazy people that can hurt you. . . . I think it takes a lot of courage just to get up every morning and go outside your door and go to school. . . . It takes a lot of courage to go to the store not knowing what may happen to you while you are just trying to do an errand for your parents.

 

—Jemaro Reheem Strictland, sixth-grader at the Woodrow Wilson School in Dorchester in 1994

 

In 2001, an election year, I had run out of time.

I had no opponent in 1997, a twentieth-century first. The
Globe
gave me a dishwater endorsement: “He is essentially a sound, second-tier mayor who had the good fortune to ride the development, investment and job growth crests of a strong national economy during his first term.” Luckily “[Menino] had the good sense to make the most of them.” I quoted the bad so I could quote the good: “No mayor in America . . . has gone further in accepting personal accountability for the quality of public education.”

My opponent in 2001, City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen of South Boston, had nerve running. She was facing allegations that she had underreported her income on her 2000 taxes; failed to file her tax returns for 1998 and 1999; made false statements on two applications to the Massachusetts Bar; hired a chief of staff who ran afoul of the residency requirement for city employees; and bypassed a waiting list to get her twin sons into a desirable pilot school program. These revelations broke over her campaign in less than two weeks. The few who contribute to candidates in city elections gave nothing to her. And the preliminary election fell two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon created a local media blackout on the campaign. Mike McCormack, the former city councilor, didn't overstate my chances when he said, “I don't see anything that would threaten the mayor, absent being taken by aliens.”

Davis-Mullen made the schools an issue, urging voters to hold me to my bold words. “This is the same mayor who said judge me and judge me harshly if I haven't made progress on education in 2001, and he most emphatically has not,” she charged. “The kids who took the MCAS last year, you have 84% failing the math portion. . . . How many headmasters have been replaced? I don't see any real accountability. . . . I would make a very strong commitment to making sure kindergarten for 4-year-olds exists. I would like to see us reduce class size.”

My record got a more mixed assessment from two education writers. On the one hand, test scores had “inched up,” the city had spent millions “repairing decrepit schools,” and seniors were attending college “at higher rates than six years ago and above the national average.” On the other, the dropout rate was “stagnant,” the gap in test scores between the races was as wide as ever, and “reported crimes on school grounds” were rising, including thirty-eight assaults on teachers in one school term. Overall these beat reporters judged me harshly: “Mayor Thomas M. Menino's record is one of painstaking change delivered in small steps, not the radical restructuring many had hoped for.”

I could quibble with that. But always believe an objective source over a politician. I do.

 

School chiefs in big cities don't last more than two or three years. Parents have no patience with change. Mayors and school boards are reluctant to ask them to wait. Their kids are in school now. They want results now. Blame for the slow pace of improvement and for the shakiness of progress in resource-limited school systems that must rob Peter to pay Paul—that blame falls on the superintendent of schools.

I took the heat for my superintendents. Tom Payzant stayed eleven years; Carol Johnson, his successor, six. They could do the steady work of change shielded from the politics of impatience.

Payzant cleared the 2003 hurdle. Boston's kids came through. They worked hard. It paid off. In 1998, only 35 percent of Boston fourth-graders passed the MCAS for the lower grades. In 2005, 60 percent of fourth-graders and 75 percent of tenth-graders passed. And the 25 percent who didn't had two more years to meet their graduation requirements. In 2006, the Broad Foundation named the Boston Public Schools the best city system in the country. A report for the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy described Payzant's achievement this way: “Suddenly education advocates were demanding to know why so few students were scoring in the proficient and advanced categories. Payzant had transformed the system from one where failure was assumed to one where merely passing was not good enough.”

Until her husband's illness forced her retirement, Carol Johnson built on Tom Payzant's foundation. She breathed human warmth into the statistical language of education. If I'm supposed to have met half of Boston's residents, Carol must have hugged half of Boston's sixty thousand students. Besides emotion, she brought values and vision to the cause. “Public education can transform lives and end intergenerational poverty,” she wrote. “The education of our children is a moral endeavor so central to our purpose that, should we fail, our very existence will be in peril.”

Her life story would make an uplifting movie. Her mother, a rural Tennessee schoolteacher, spent her summer vacations pursuing graduate study at the University of Michigan. Her father ran a barber shop and billiards parlor in Brownsville, sixty miles northeast of Memphis. It was the segregated South, and Carol and her eight siblings learned early what separate and unequal meant. The white schools offered kindergarten, but the black kids had to wait until first grade to enter the black schools. The white schools got the latest textbooks; the black schools, hand-me-down old ones from the white schools. “People didn't dwell on that,” Johnson reflected decades later. Discrimination “wasn't an excuse not to read, not to write, not to perform.”

Carol's parents met at Fisk University; so did Carol and her husband, Matthew. Both became teachers. Carol taught third grade in the Washington, D.C., schools, paying for paper and crayons out of her own pocket. Veteran teachers told her not to smile until November. History doesn't record how long she made it. My bet is the second day of school.

Minneapolis was where she first made her name as a school leader. The
Star Tribune
dubbed her the “superintendent with a halo” for her calming influence on a troubled system. Memphis wooed her away. For her work
there
she was named Superintendent of the Year by the Tennessee Parent-Teacher Association. Boston wooed her away from Memphis.

Our search committee put her name at the top of the list. The School Committee chair, Elizabeth Reilinger, seconded their recommendation. Reilinger and I and another committee member, Reverend Gregory Groover, met with her in Memphis. “They spent many hours being persistent and very persuasive,” she said. Being obnoxious was probably more like it.

The Memphis School Board greeted the news with this statement: “Boston saw we had a jewel, and they're taking it away from us.” Phil Bredesen, the governor of Tennessee, called her: “I told her congratulations—and that I might forgive her in the next few years.” She'd launched a media campaign with the theme “Every Child, Every Day, College Bound.” At a farewell ceremony held in a school auditorium, Carol kept her composure until a fourth-grader reached this point in his speech: “I am a member of the graduating class of 2015. Until then, we will remain College Bound.” Then tears streaked her cheeks, and she wrapped the boy in a hug.

I witnessed the local sorrow. As I told reporters, “I never saw a city rally and work so hard to keep a superintendent of schools.” I was afraid she'd respond to pleas to run for mayor of Memphis.

 

“I expect to hit the ground listening,” she said about her new job. She heard an earful. In Memphis she could fire failing school principals. She couldn't do that in Boston, the teachers' union told her. She wanted teachers to stay in school at least an hour longer after the bell rang. No, the union said, not unless teachers received higher pay. That's not possible,
I
told her. Tax revenues had fallen in the slowing economy, and $33 million had to be cut from the school budget.

Some ideas about raising student achievement await proof. Not the longer school day. Consider the evidence from Lawrence, among the poorest cities in Massachusetts. Several years ago the state appointed a receiver to run its failing schools, vesting him with the power to bypass union work rules. The school week was extended seven hours. Lawrence kids receive an extra hour of small-group tutoring four days a week and two and a half hours of “enrichment”—yoga, theater, athletics, cooking—on Fridays. One K–8 school rose from Level 3 on the MCAS to Level 1 in a single year. What changed? According to the principal, “Students have more time for learning than ever before.” The longer day “makes the impossible possible.”

Boston has one of the shortest school days in the country, an hour shorter than in cities like Charlotte, Nashville, and Austin. I wanted a longer school day to make the impossible possible for Boston's kids, but the union put the kids second. The voters want the kids put first. They are fed up with the conflict between teachers' rights to collective bargaining and students' rights to a first-class education. (In fairness, some of the things the union demands for teachers—smaller classes, up-to-date textbooks, healthy school buildings—also benefit their students.) They are fed up with a 255-page Boston Teachers Union contract that bars flexibility in hiring, permits burned-out teachers with seniority to “bump” better teachers out of their jobs, and protects teachers who aren't performing.

Public willingness to pay for the public schools is eroding. This trend can only hurt teachers' pocketbooks. That is the handwriting on the wall. Will union leaders read it before even Democratic politicians take up the cry to privatize education?

 

The new superintendent favored charter schools. I was cool to them.

Under state law, children attending charters take with them a slice of the state aid sent to their local school districts. I persuaded the City Council to hold Boston's schools harmless by covering that loss. In 2002, for students attending the city's ten charter schools, it came to $14 million. A decade later, the city's public schools lost over $80 million in state aid to two dozen charters.

My objection to charters goes deeper than money. Charters aren't inclusive. They don't take everybody. Boston's public schools take everybody.

They take the kids—from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Somalia—who can't speak English. The kids with learning disabilities. The kids who get their only good meal at school. The kids who act out. These kids need every break. Their schools need every dime. But charters drain money and, as important, motivated students from them.

Forget practice; that's wrong in theory. Charter schools are not compatible with the ideal of the common school handed down by the Boston town meeting of 1784—“that the Children of all, partaking of equal Advantages and being placed upon an equal Footing, no Distinction might be made among them in the Schools.” Notice those big words: “all” children, “equal” advantages. Not the few gaining at the expense of the many.

However, two elections persuaded me to give ground on charters. The first was the 2008 presidential election. The new Obama administration proposed to divide $4 billion among states that could demonstrate “innovation in education,” code for charter schools. The second was the 2009 Boston mayoral election campaign. When two candidates running against me gained traction by calling for more charters, I recognized that the voters wanted change.

 

Governor Deval Patrick was pushing a bill to considerably increase the number of charter schools in the lowest-performing districts. It empowered the state's Board of Education to remove bad teachers, change curriculums, and extend the school day. I was for the reforms but against the charters. So I filed a bill to create charters that met my concerns over fairness. Local school committees would control these “in-district” charters. Unlike traditional charters, they would not drain state money from the regular public schools and they would take everybody. The governor agreed to splice my bill with his.

The teachers' union opposed in-district charters because they would operate free of collective bargaining constraints, and it had paid to elect many state legislators. It was time to remind these Democrats to put kids first. Especially after the House, caving to the union, dropped the in-district charters passed by the Senate. I was in a rehabilitation hospital with a bum leg. But that didn't stop me from haranguing members over the phone. I put on my hot-under-the-collar act. Hanging up on one rep, I told my press secretary Dot Joyce, “I'll bet I gave
him
brown pants!”

My lobbying helped sway the House to restore in-district charters. But the first education reform bill in sixteen years passed because as much as $300 million in federal aid was at risk if it didn't.

The
Globe
rated inclusion of the in-district charters “a major victory . . . at the expense of the teachers union . . . for Mayor Thomas M. Menino.”

I wanted to run an experiment. Could the longer school day and other reforms in the law convert a failing school into a successful one? The testing ground was the Patrick F. Gavin Middle School in South Boston, a last resort for students who'd been unable to get into the schools of their choice. With the same students, could a new in-district charter show big gains?