School reform will happen — in Boston. It is already happening, quietly, surely. Statewide, it’s not so clear — issues such as curriculum, funding and innovation cut in several directions. But let's look first at Boston.
Last year, few could have predicted that Boston school reform would proceed at all. Mayoral candidate John Connolly made "school transformation," as he called it, his big issue. As schools are by far the largest budget item in Boston, and school parents the largest identifiable citywide interest, Connolly's choice of issue at first seemed a sure winner. It wasn't, because Boston's schools aren't a single interest group. It is a sprawling behemoth: administrators, teachers, custodians, parents, school buses, a construction authority, and several types of schools mandated by state law. The complexity of school interests sliced Connolly every which way, and he lost to a candidate whose support had seemed purely sectional, his message status quo in almost all things.
For schools, the status quo meant: more state intervention in school performance, higher teachers' salaries, layers of monitoring and oversight. It meant charter schools for a few, same old for everybody else. It meant swerving from one outsider superintendent to the next, administration in conflict, budgets for squeaky wheels first, irrational school assignments. It meant the shortest school day of any major American city. It meant a teachers' union intensely opposed to any reforms but its own and a root and branch opposition — supported by some parents' groups — to the very existence of charter schools, much less an increase in their number.
The teachers' union badly misplayed its hand in the mayoral campaign. A smart, out-of-the-box move would have been to endorse John Connolly (despite past conflicts), for making education his key issue and thereby gaining an inside position in the next mayor's school policy discussion. Instead, the union backed two candidates who lost in the primary; only on election morning of the final did it send out an endorsement of Marty Walsh, who, being a charter school board member, the union had not much wanted.
The mayor has said very little about schools, but he did allocate the school department a 4 percent increase in funds; and Walsh's two appointees to the School Committee have voted "yes" to three significant steps taken by John McDonough, the "interim superintendent" who doesn't look like a reformer, but surely is.
What were those three steps?
First, laying off about 100 administrators from the department’s bloated central staff.
Second, giving each Boston school principal full authority to hire or replace every member of his teaching and support staff.
Third, using public transportation — the MBTA — to bring seventh and eighth grade students to school, thereby saving money (and acquiring a back door budget increase, as the T has agreed to transport students at its own cost). This transit move somewhat lessened the impact of the labor war between school bus drivers and the company they work for. (Who can forget the wildcat strike last fall that stranded so many students for an entire school day?)
These are significant reforms. Giving school principals complete hiring and replacement power changes the entire character of the principals' jobs. No longer are they simply high level monitors and scapegoats for bad performance. Now they can demand performance.
Using the T to transport students saves tens of millions of dollars that can now be allocated to classrooms.
Eliminating central office positions moves the burden of performance to the actual school where learning is demanded. It puts teachers and principals — not pencil pushers — in the saddle.
A career bureaucrat, a finance and management guy, is accomplishing all of this — Acting Superintendent John McDonough is not a “trained” educator. McDonough is not an arm twister. And while he has highly developed political instincts, McDonough is not a politician.
As a matter of style, Mayor Marty Walsh — before his election — touched many bases when he talked school reform, but he studiously avoided prioritizing specifics.
John Connolly took a leaf from Teddy Roosevelt’s book and stormed straight ahead, seeing reform as a series of battles to capture the summits of several hills.
McDonough is a different breed of cat. He doesn’t so much as ask his opponents to surrender. Rather, he quietly outflanks them and explains that they should all work together.
Example: At the March 26 budget vote, after two hours of "public comment" by parents and advocates enraged by the proposal to use the T to transport seventh and eighth graders — and with teachers' union president Richard Stutman sitting grimly in the audience — the School Committee voted unanimously to do just that and to approve McDonough's staffing autonomy for school principals.
"Shame on you!" shouted one activist, who then stormed out of the room.
McDonough's response? In that soft, white-haired voice of his, he applauded the parents and activists: "You're the most involved parents I've seen in forty years," he told them. "You get it."
Yup.
McDonough is also preparing city schools for the newly adopted PARCC tests (PARCC stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a state-based initiative that will be ready for the 2014-15 school year). He is implementing the Common Core curriculum standards that have generated a good deal of controversy. No one of whom I am aware is actively trying to stop him.
The controversy now attaching to the Common Core initiative is playing out principally at the State House. It comes primarily from right-wing Republicans who object to nationwide anything.
Some teacher groups are also critical.
Many teachers are critical of the significant instructional changes that Common Core standards entail. They especially dislike that Common Core's testing is said to overwhelm classroom instruction.
In Boston, at the moment, much of the rancor about school change has come and gone. "We have had some difficult conversations,” said McDonough blandly. “Change is difficult. This is not about public schools versus charter schools. It's about making all schools better."
That these words were almost exactly what John Connolly said during his mayoral campaign is not lost on me. It’s telling that Walsh's two appointees back McDonough. All things considered, it’s impossible to argue that Walsh doesn’t have McDonough’s back.
Speaking of John Connolly, he has had little to say since his November loss; but on April 9, he made an appearance at that night's School Committee meeting, on behalf of his fellow Trotter School's parents, who, as Connolly eloquently told the committee, are upset about losing their families engagement coordinator, a Mr. Alward, who, as Connolly said, “makes the school work.”
Mr. Alward is one of the 230-odd school personnel being cut in this year’s department budget — cuts that McDonough said “involved tradeoffs.”
Schools are losing coaches, teacher aides, even, at the Curley K Through 8, a school nurse. And several families engagement coordinators. Few of these have available a spokesman as eloquent — or as committed — as the veteran former city councilor.
Said Connolly: “We’re a turnaround school, the Trotter. Level four to level one. We’re now one of the best schools in the city, we knock the socks off those tests. That’s not going to happen if can’t keep families engaged — if we whittle away what works!”
Connolly clearly spoke for many families who saw their schools marked for cuts. His words were echoed by Heshan Weeramuni, of the Curley School parents group: “We’re losing school staff even as we’re gaining more students.”
Weeranmuni isn’t that impressed with the 4 percent budget increase provided by Walsh. “Over the years, as we’ve lost Federal funds and thus state funds,” he said, "we’ve actually seen a 10 percent cut in funding, not an increase."
Weeramuni is active with a Boston school parents group led by Karen Kast of Roslindale, who worked the Mayor election for candidate Rob Consalvo, and, after Consalvo was eliminated, managed city council candidate Marty Keogh’s campaign.
Kast is an imaginative advocate for what parents call “full funding.” A symbolic “$61 million bake sale” that she helped organize recently drew much attention, as it took place on the back side of City Hall, across the street from iconic Faneuil hall.
Kast is a leader in Boston Truth, a parents-and-teachers coalition militantly opposed to state legislation increasing the number of charter schools authorized in Massachusetts. A bill to do that sits stalled (as of this writing) in the legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, chaired by Wellesley state Rep. Alice Peisch and by Jamaica Plain state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz. The proposal — submitted by Boston state Rep. Russell Holmes — seems unlikely to be enacted in its present form. Nor should it be. Titled “An Act To Further Narrow the Achievement Gap,” the bill calls for increasing the number of charter schools in “under-performing districts” — but not elsewhere. Yet the principals of underperforming schools get, by this legislation, exactly the powers that John McDonough has already established in Boston.
The bill also proposes a reimbursement formula, compensation to Boston for students who choose to go to the additional charters, of IRS-like complexity.
For Boston, the proposed bill is otiose in one respect, contradictory in the other: Why give a principal power to create the school that she wants, only to take away the effect of that power by putting more charter schools in competition? Either the legislation wants underperforming school districts to do better, or it wants them to lose students. Which is it?
I'm not sure the state's administrators can answer that question. Certainly their takeover of two underperforming Boston schools, the Holland and the Dever, after these schools had already undergone a full year and more of McDonough-led "turn-around," suggests that the proverbial one hand doesn't know what the other is up to.
Almost all of the state’s GOP, and many Democrats too, want more charter schools. That, in itself, is not a bad idea. The greater the availability and diversity of innovative schools, the better it should be for all the public schools. But many who advocate the loudest for more charter schools do so as a means of breaking the power of teachers’ unions.
If Massachusetts is to expand the allowed number of charter schools, it must be done generally — never only in “under performing” districts, for that is to guarantee, even aggravate, their under-performance — and the expansion must benefit the performance of all schools.
Until the legislature can forge an achievement gap-narrowing bill that sets forth a path to this end, without detours into special interest pleading, the Joint Committee on Education should defer to act. Flawed legislation is always hard to repair, especially enactments that misdirect an institution as flex-averse as public education.