Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius recommended closing Mission Hill K-8 in Jamaica Plain at the end of this academic year following an independent 189-page report on misconduct and academic failures released Wednesday.
“It strikes me as a gross, gross negligence all along the way,” former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville said on Boston Public Radio Friday. “It's every parent's nightmare, every grandparent's nightmare.”
The report, which independent investigators began compiling in September, details years of concerns over physical and sexual assault, as well as concerns over use of force by staff, a lack of adequate special education services, mishandling of bullying and more. In August, Cassellius put the school’s co-principals on administrative leave.
Mayor Michelle Wu called the report “the stuff of nightmares” on Thursday, and said the city is working on matching current students with other schools.
“It sounds like a situation in which a school was given a lot of autonomy and the leadership of that school chose to look the other way year after year for inexplicable reasons,” Reville said. “But you have to ask the question, how did this go unattended? Not just within the school, but within the system?”
Reville thinks part of the answer comes from the district’s size and school autonomy. Mission Hill is a pilot school, which gives it more independence from the district.
“There's a lot of vulnerability in a large public school system like this, and particularly if you're in an administration ... encouraging schools to have autonomy and to define their own values and operating procedures,” he said. “It speaks deeply to what kind of accountability we need, both as a state and as, individually, a school system.”
"It's a barrage of one story after the next of systemic failure at some level."
The Mission Hill report is just the latest in a series of challenges within the district. In January, Cassellius announced she would create a team to review three underperforming schools. In February, she said she would be leaving at the end of the school year after less than three years on the job, a move that raised concerns about a revolving door of superintendents and prompted some to call for state intervention through receivership.
“I think we're getting to a tipping point, particularly in terms of just the general public's perception of what's going on in the Boston public schools,” Reville said. “It's a barrage of one story after the next of systemic failure at some level.”
But Reville does not think state intervention will help, either. "There are no silver bullets here,” he said. “A lot of people are looking for a new superintendent to walk on water and fix all these things overnight. That's not realistic. That's not going to happen, nor is it necessarily the case that the state could move in and turn this around.”
Despite the string of problems coming out of the Boston Public Schools system, Reville thinks some of the problems reflect the state of education in the United States more broadly. He pinned the failures to reform public education on “inertia and complacency.”
And for any who might forget, Reville emphasized that the stakes for offering a rigorous education are high. “You talk about the correlation between educational attainment and achievement, socioeconomic status,” he said. “That has nothing to do with ability. It has everything to do with opportunity.”
Reville is the former Massachusetts secretary of education and a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he also heads the Education Redesign Lab. His latest book, co-authored with Lynne Sacks, is “Collaborative Action for Equity and Opportunity: A Practical Guide for School and Community Leaders.”
