An Unlikely Spot at the Head of the Class
Top honors for the once maligned Boston schools
A year ago, Lyndsey Jones ran to her principal in tears: A friend had been arrested, and his prison sentence was rumored to range from 10 years to life. "I was telling her, 'I feel like I lost him'-like, society lost a great feature. He has so much to offer. He's so smart," Lyndsey says.
The Boston public schools used to be like that: littered with stories of good kids lost to bad circumstances. Jones's high school was no exception. In 1999, 82 percent of 10th graders at Boston High School failed the state's math test, and 71 percent failed the English exam. Districtwide, 26 percent of high school students dropped out before graduation, budgets were never balanced, and superintendents, ambitious though they were, came and went.
But today, the stories filling the hallways at Boston High are more likely to feature kids like Lyndsey, a 16-year-old African-American who has her heart set on the Ivy League and who is likely, judging by her academic performance, to get there. The school, now known as Boston Community Leadership Academy, sent 86 percent of its students to college last year (one acceptance is a prerequisite for graduation). And the district, once distinguished by violent antibusing riots, has become a national model. Student-teacher ratios stand at 12 to 1, and 71 percent of high school graduates now attend a two- or four-year college-compared with 67 percent nationally. Those accomplishments have not gone unnoticed: Last week Boston Public Schools was awarded the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education, an honor that comes with $500,000 in scholarships and is based on a rigorous review of performance data.
To be sure, the district has its problems. The dropout rate is troubling at 21.6 percent, and test scores still rank in the bottom 10 percent of the state. But thanks to a new reformist regime, led by a committed mayor and a forceful superintendent, "there are real signs of hope," says David Trueblood, spokesman for the Boston Foundation, an advocate for school reform.
The transformation began in 1993, when Democrat Thomas Menino won the mayor's office promising to fix the public schools, then granted a new superintendent an unprecedented five-year term. Having run four other school systems, Thomas Payzant was certainly qualified. But he was also lucky. Menino increased education funding by 8 percent each year, allowing Payzant to offer higher teacher salaries and better benefits to get what he believed was necessary: among other things, a 6
Bottom up. Payzant set out to reform Boston schools from the bottom up. He set standards high, provided schools with a clear road map for how to reach them, and let them loose. Some teachers and principals thrived; others were fired. When Payzant wanted to close a Roxbury school, parents said he was out of line, a charge that the Boston Teachers Union would echo in the years to come. BTU President Richard Stutman says Payzant's goals were worthy but his style was autocratic; he didn't talk enough to the teachers his policies affected.
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