Jean McGuire, who in 1981 became the first Black woman elected to the Boston School Committee, is 90 now. She’s vibrant and chatty on a recent morning in her kitchen, eating sweet potato pie before her daily swim. But when the conversation turns to how she lost her school committee seat in 1992, her tone grows steely.
That’s when then-Mayor Ray Flynn successfully led the charge to take control of the Boston school committee by making it an appointed body and knocking out of office every elected member, including rising Black political voices in the days following court-ordered desegregation.
“The whole idea of giving up any vote for anything, [even if] it's dog catcher,” she said with bewilderment, “you don't give it away. That's power!”
That blow to Black political power in Boston has not been forgotten. Two Boston city councilors, Ricardo Arroyo and Julia Mejia, are mustering support for a return to an elected school committee, calling it a matter of righting past wrongs. The councilors also say a shift might help fix an ineffective body that has allowed Black and Hispanic students to fall behind their white peers for decades.
The question of how to structure the committee has also become an issue in this year's mayor's race, with the major candidates split on their views.
Boston University American history professor Mary Battenfeld, who has studied race and leadership in Boston’s schools, says how the next mayor approaches school committee control is critical.
“The stakes are high,” she said. “They go fundamentally to who we are as a city, and who we are as a country that allegedly believes in democracy and governed by democracy.”
In the late 1980s, more than a decade after a federal court order to desegregate Boston schools, the city’s school committee was more diverse than ever, with a handful of Black members. It was also chronically mired in conflict over how to fix deplorable conditions in some schools, how much money could be budgeted to address those problems and who should lead the district as superintendent. Members were also at odds with a largely white Greater Boston business community that wanted to exert influence over school decisions in an increasingly diverse city.
Flynn, then mayor, argued that city elections were not producing a quality board and put a referendum to voters. White parents rallied, going door to door as part of the effort, and complained that the school committee’s gridlock was not serving the city’s children.
The majority of School Committee members didn’t support the change and called it a power grab by the mayor. Member John Nucci and other members of the committee acknowledged the committee’s dysfunction, but defended an elected board. “You don’t improve democracy by throwing it away,” he said in 1989.
The non-binding referendum passed anyway. Black voters in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester overwhelmingly rejected it. It also passed the City Council over the objections of its Black members, Bruce Bolling and Charles Yancey.
In June 1991, when Massachusetts legislators finally voted on the question, it passed at that level too. They "abolished" the elected school committee over the opposition of the Black caucus, including State Senator Bill Owens. He said in news accounts that he was angry that a small group of Black ministers showed support for the change giving the perception that they represented the larger Black community.
“I think it's a disgrace that some of the ministers in the city of Boston chose to go with the power structure, for whatever reasons they chose to go with them, and they helped to disenfranchise our community and that's a disgrace,” he said.
Governor William Weld signed the change into law. Four black school committee members, including John D. O’Bryant, the city’s first Black School Committee member in 75 years, as well as Gerald Anderson, Juanita Wade, and Jean McGuire were gone. O’Bryant, for whom one of Boston’s exam schools is named, called it “a sad day for the city.”
The GBH television show Say Brother produced a 30-minute segment on the loss.
“The right of the people to vote for members of the Boston School Committee no longer exists,” the announcer noted somberly.
Flynn accepted community nominations for a new seven-member board, eventually naming two Blacks, two Hispanics, two whites and one Asian to the School Committee. Flynn, who still lives in Boston, did not respond to requests for comment about the new effort to return to an elected school committee.
But Brown University political scientist Kenneth Wong, who has studied the elected-versus-appointed issue for decades, agrees it’s time to revisit the political implications of how the move to appointed members overlooked marginalized groups.
Members of those groups have been named to the committee under the current structure, but all owe their position to the mayor who appointed them. Voting against that mayor's interests can lead to their not being reappointed, as happened with Regina Robinson in 2018 when she voted “present” on a controversial vote under former Mayor Marty Walsh. School committee members voted unanimously on nearly every vote in 2019, according to a Boston Herald analysis that raised questions about whether they acted as a rubber stamp for the mayor.
The vast majority of school districts around the country have elected boards, including every community in Massachusetts except Boston. But like Boston, about 20 large cities retain an appointed structure. Returning to an elected board has come up in Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland, while Chicago recently voted to phase in an elected committee.
“I think the system ought to find ways to accommodate and make it meaningful for all parents to participate and voice their concerns about issues that they care a lot about in the public school system,” he says.
Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia, who cosponsored a petition to return to an elected school committee, says that’s exactly the problem with the current one. It has not helped close achievement gaps between Black and Hispanic students and their white peers, despite decades of trying.
“I just feel like people don't feel heard or seen,” she said, in a district serving more than 80 percent students of color.
“At a time when we're screaming for accountability and transparency and representation, what better moment than now than to be able to fight to reinstate an elected school committee?” she said.
Mejia's and Arroyo's proposal awaits a hearing before a city council committee. Ultimately, the home rule petition would need approval from the legislature to make the change in the school committee's structure.
But as Boston sits on the verge of electing its first mayor who is not a white male, the power to appoint a school committee might not disappear so fast, depending on which of five major candidates wins.
City Councilor At Large Michelle Wu, a frontrunner, says she supports a majority elected school committee but also wants to appoint members to ensure diversity and expertise. Another candidate, John Barros, said he would consider a hybrid school committee. District Councilor Andrea Campbell said she would do the same but give new nominating power to the council.
An all-elected school board can still include racists, Campbell said, as Boston’s did in the '60s.
“I think there's no guarantee, for example ... as you go through an elected process that you're going to get folks who truly will put students and educators first,” she said.
Acting Mayor Kim Janey supports a hybrid model, adding that it is “absolutely essential that a direct line of accountability to the Mayor be preserved.”
City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, a mayoral candidate who is a former Boston teacher, said she would keep the appointed system, but allow the mayor and city councilors to nominate members.
“When we have an elected body, it creates this opportunity to put the blame somewhere else,” she said. “As mayor, I want that responsibility. As mayor, I want to be held accountable.”
Back in her Roxbury kitchen, McGuire says she doesn't care much for a hybrid school committee.
“I don't understand that to this day, that a place with Harvard and BU that’s the capital of Massachusetts doesn't have a vote for the one thing everybody has their children [in],” she said, referencing the schools. “I don't believe it. We had some of the first public education in Massachusetts. And we gave up the voice?”
If and when an elected board comes back, McGuire, entering her tenth decade of life, vowed to run for a school committee seat once again.
This story has been updated to include acting Mayor Kim Janey's view on a hybrid school committee.
