After Years of Promises, Boston Vocational School Still Struggles

More than 100 students walked out of Madison Park High School in December to protest their headmaster's suspension.

Bianca Vázquez Toness is the Managing Editor and Correspondent for K-12 Education at WGBH Radio. She has covered everything from technology to immigration to presidential elections, but keeps coming back to stories about kids and schools. She's worked for Minnesota Public Radio, WBUR and Bloomberg News. She was a 2016-2017 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

January 22, 2018

Updated July 31, 2023

Last month, about a hundred students walked out of Madison Park High School in Roxbury. They held signs and chanted their headmaster’s name.

“McCaskill! McCaskill! McCaskill”

They poured into Boston Public Schools headquarters and met with central office staff. They demanded to know why Kevin McCaskill had been placed on leave earlier in the week. This was just the latest leadership upheaval at a school the state labeled failing three years ago.

“It’s just so frustrating to see somebody that made a difference in the school,” Madison Park junior Carla Barros told BPS officials. “He actually put effort. He tried.”

Barros and the other students that day described a headmaster who was moving the vocational school in the right direction. Since he arrived more than two years ago, MCAS scores are up. Many students said they like him and described him as a father figure.

Now McCaskill is back at work after more than two weeks leave and a district investigation. The school district never explained why they suspended him or what they were investigating. What is clear is that he’s still got a big job ahead of him.

Problems Persist

The school still has poor attendance. Madison Park Students miss an average of 23 days a year compared to 13 days for other students in the district. Only 59 percent of students graduate in four years, lower than the city average.

These problems persist despite years of promises to turnaround the school. As Massachusetts tries to step up its vocational training to prepare young people for the jobs of the future, Boston is still struggling to get its main vocational high school on track.

“There have been a lot of different plans here,” former Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman said. He was involved in different efforts to reform Madison Park High School. There was an intervention team, then the state stepped in with a turnaround plan that focused on improving MCAS scores.

Stutman said McCaskill and his predecessors have been given lots of room to make changes.

“It’s been able to select its own staff,” Stutman said. “Kick out people it doesn’t want. Bring new people in. Change the curriculum. It’s had all of those different authorities that some people tout as the end all and be all and the school hasn’t been able to turnaround.”

Part of the problem has been inconsistency, in Stutman's opinion. He said the school needs to pick a strategy and stick with it for five years.

But he also questioned the city’s commitment to the school. He’s not the first person to do so.

Boston’s former interim superintendent, John McDonough, wrote in a 2014 memo, “The school, including its leadership, has not been adequately supported by the district, despite many attempts and promises for years.”

Stutman suggested an inherent bias against vocational education exists.

“I think it has something to do with a mistaken notion that, the trades are inherently inferior," he said. "And you’re better off going to college under any circumstances.”

Blow up the school

At the same time that Massachusetts and other states are ramping up vocational education, a prominent Massachusetts vocational leader in 2014 urged Boston to shut down Madison Park if it had not improved graduation rates, students attendance and academic performance by last year.

Charlie Lyons ran Shawsheen Valley Technical School in Billerica for nearly three decades, and was a member of an intervention team that in 2014 recommended something drastic for Madison Park. “They have to blow it up,” he said in a recent interview, and reopen another vocational school independent of the Boston public schools.

“If you keep trying to fix things that are broken and they keep breaking, you need to come up with a different solution,” Lyons said. “They need some independence from the bureaucracy of the Boston public school system.”

In an emailed statement, Boston Public school officials say the district “is fully committed to Madison Park High School.”.

That commitment will be tested in the coming years. So too will be Kevin McCaskill as he tries to keep the school on the course he’s set.

Our coverage of K-12 education is made possible with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.