Boston schools not yet Grade A

14 January 2005

Twelve years ago, Boston's schools were in shambles. Today, Mayor Thomas Menino says they deserve a second look.

"We have transformed the Boston Public Schools," he said in this week's State of the City speech. "Whether you live in Roxbury or Roslindale, your families will have access to an excellent education."

That overstates the case. Boston's schools may indeed be better, but they're hardly excellent. And while education has improved significantly for students from lower-income circumstances, a long- held goal - creating a system that retains middle- and upper-income families - remains largely unfulfilled.

Menino and the school department point with justifiable pride to the recognition they have received. Forbes magazine last year said Boston's "urban public school system is among the best in the nation." In October, Superintendent Thomas Payzant won the Richard R. Green Award in Urban Excellence. The Council of Urban Boards of Education just lauded the Boston School Committee as tops in the United States. And while Boston has never won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education, over the last three years it's been one of a select group of finalists.

The city recites an impressive list of accomplishments. District high schools - long the most nightmarish part of the system - have been restructured into smaller schools within schools. Kindergarten is available to all 5-year-olds; Menino vowed this week that within five years 4-year-olds will have it as well. MCAS and SAT scores have improved rapidly. And 69 percent of graduates from the class of 2003 went on to four- or two-year colleges, meaningfully higher than the national average of 64 percent.

At the same time, however, Boston's MCAS scores remain well below statewide averages (math is 74 percent passing vs. 85 percent statewide; in English, it's 77 percent vs. 89 percent). SAT scores are also well below state averages (434 in verbal vs. the statewide number of 516, and 453 in math vs. 522). And, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 57 of Boston's 139 schools are in trouble under a measure called Adequate Yearly Progress, the key standard the feds use to evaluate school quality.

These numbers get muddied by another phenomenon, however - the exam schools. In Boston, the best and brightest compete for slots in three elite schools: Latin School, Latin Academy and John D. O'Bryant. The two Latin schools are among the best in the state, if not the country; a stunning 100 percent of their students pass the MCAS. But their excellence masks the disappointing results at the city's non-exam schools. Subtract out the performance of the elites and Boston's high schoolers perform woefully on the MCAS and SAT.

Menino also argued this week that city schools offer the unique opportunity of "learning side by side with kids from other countries and backgrounds." In fact, however, while Boston's population is half white and half non-white, its schools are 86 percent non- white. Subtract out the exam school students and it's even worse; almost 90 percent of the rest of the system - including all elementary schools and district high schools - is non-white.

So what's it all mean? The schools overall clearly are better than they once were. But much of the effort over the last 10 years has concentrated on fixing the worst of the system's schools. As a matter of social justice - focusing on those who are most at society's margins - this arguably has been the right thing to do.

Yet Menino came into office committed to keeping Boston a middle- class city and understanding that schools attractive to the middle class were critical to making that happen. Nevertheless, the number of white students in the schools has declined over the last decade (I know I use race here as a proxy for middle class; regrettably, that's still largely the case). Unless their kids are in one of the exam schools, middle-class families (whites as well as, anecdotally speaking, middle-class minority families) end up shunning the system, attending private or parochial schools, using the METCO program or simply moving to the suburbs. Menino's hopes notwithstanding, that doesn't seem to be changing.