Boston Mayor Michelle Wu responded to the state’s education commissioner for publicly criticizing Boston Public Schools’ progress since a state improvement plan was implemented last year.
“It’s a little bit frustrating because I know that the tenor of those conversations in our working relationship day-to-day — at the staff level with the state — has been very productive. And we are meeting the vast majority of those deadlines and metrics,” Wu said on Boston Public Radio on Tuesday in response to the criticism.
During a state education board meeting last month, Commissioner Jeffrey Riley criticized Boston Public Schools for missing deadlines and not fulfilling requirements of a state-mandated improvement plan. The agreement was announced by Wu and Riley last June in a last-minute effort to avoid state receivership for the city’s schools,
“I expect us to have a different discussion with this board starting if the buses aren’t running to great capacity in the fall, if the special education plan isn’t in place, if the agreed-upon bathrooms aren’t fully redone, if the right people aren’t hired for special education, you will be hearing more from us,” Riley said.
Last week, the Boston Globe editorial board echoed Riley, citing a lack of resources across Boston schools despite the city having one of the highest spending costs per pupil.
“We have a very different idea of what it means to work together and to have a productive relationship,” the mayor said Tuesday of the commissioner. “The ones that the commissioner has chosen to elevate himself — separately, with a very different tone than the rest of his team — in fact are not even accurate when it comes to how they’ve been conveyed,” she added.
Wu said the commission has a “hyper focus” on certain metrics like bus time performance. But she takes issue with, for instance, the fundamental way that the state requires Boston to track on-time bus arrivals. If a GPS malfunctions on a bus, Wu said it counts as a zero, whether or not it actually made it to the school on time.
“No other district around the country has to include dropped routes because of GPS technology malfunctions as a zero in their system,” Wu said. “It is meant, I believe, to create this sense of accountability and pressure. ... I will never say that we want less accountability from any entity,” the mayor said.
This metric and others were analyzed in an independent February 2023 review. The report found that BPS omits about 25% of bus route data submitted to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and that the district does not have a system to report missing arrival data from GPS malfunctions. It recommended that BPS start reporting the “potential number of missing routes” to the state to improve its data collection.
But Wu affirmed that the district is seeing success that goes “above and beyond” the state improvement plan. She cited improved teacher retention rates, higher numbers of applications for BPS staff openings and student engagement.
Many of the problems facing the school district were inherited and a result of superintendent leadership turnover, Wu said, making it difficult to make changes quickly to things like transportation, facilities and academic quality.
“We have three- to five-year timelines to basically complete an arc that is going to get at the deep systemic issues,” she said. “We want to see progress every single month, every single school year — absolutely. But there’s a little bit of a disconnect, I believe, with how we are working together most of the time with the state and then what gets elevated, sometimes, in the media.”
The narrative of a failing school district does not serve current students and teachers, the mayor said, who are working hard, winning championships in academics and sports.
“They deserve to have that full narrative and context presented,” she said.
“Of course we need to do better. I am not happy with the range of offerings that we give out at many of our schools. They need more,” Wu added. “There needs to be a sense that the district will guarantee the basics that every child deserves, and that level of basic needs to be raised up.”
While on Boston Public Radio, she also responded to questions about recent problems with the Boston City Council and whether it hurts the body’s credibility. Councilor Kendra Lara was charged with driving an unregistered, uninsured car with a revoked license when she swerved and drove into a Jamaica Plain home over a week ago, according to a Boston Police report. Councilor Ricardo Arroyo recently paid a fine for breaking a conflict-of-interest law by representing his brother in a lawsuit that was brought against him and the city.
“To be honest, I think it hurts the credibility on every issue,” she said about recent council controversies. “I will never hold myself up to be someone who is perfectly balancing everything that needs to be done and never making mistakes. ... I would never say there needs to be a standard of perfection for behavior.
“At the same time, I hear from a lot of residents that there’s great concern right now — it’s just the density of, the frequency of, different headlines that have been out there,” she continued. “And all of us are on the ballot, that is the highest form of accountability for all elected officials.”
