A new proposal for Boston school assignments presented Saturday by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student was essentially pushed to front-runner status by an advisory committee, as five other proposals began to fall off the table, just one month after they were unveiled.
The External Advisory Committee, appointed by the mayor, heard a presentation on the MIT proposal for the first time during a meeting Saturday morning at City Hall. Several members said it showed the greatest potential of providing equitable access to the city’s limited number of quality schools, as the panel seeks to create a student-assignment system that allows more students to attend schools closer to their homes.
Comments
The Connolly plan considers all these dynamics, but the advisory group has said little...
This committee and and these alternative proposals don't answer the original announced objective of the Mayor and the BPS: to reduce the distance students travel to school so communities of parents can work together to build up schools worth choosing. It takes a village to build a school worth choosing. Busing kids on one block in 19 different directions splinters Boston's communities. The stubborn fact is parents who live more than 1.5 miles of a school tend not to get involved in that school. Low parent engagement does little to improve school and student performance. And it makes schools and their teachers strangers to neighbors in their own surrounding community. That is what BPS has today. Boston can do better than that. And one additional benefit is to reduce what the city spends on busing and channel that into teaching and learning in classrooms. This committee seems to have forgotten all that. Who is leading this process anyway?
Peng Shi of MIT's Operations Research Center, needs the current test score data of children by neighborhood. Using the current test scores by school to define "quality" is useless and a waste of his time. Mr. Shi needs to predict the future, not reflect on the past. It shouldn't be too difficult to provide Mr. Shi this information, since it is all computerized. I would really like Mr. Shi to aggregate student test and MCAS scores by neighborhood address, and then again, by the plan he is proposing. When this data surfaces, we will immediately know where the quality neighborhood schools are located, and what schools BPS will have to target for extra support. The test scores of the children who live in the neighborhoods are the data; the "quality of the school" will travel with them. Barbara Fields is correct, and I agree, "The devil is in the details!"
If Bostonians want "quality" schools for all, and I believe we do, it is time for Boston Public Schools become a "Unified School District" and drop the "portfolio of schools" model which has bitterly proven to create a "haves and haves not" school system. It is unfair, it doesn’t work for all our kids, and it is time to drop it. When schools are on a level playing field, equity can be addressed; and we can target those schools "in need" with extra support. Then traditional neighborhood schools, like the Marshall School, won't be targeted, and purposely set-up to fail, so that a start-up ed vendor, charter schools, like UP Academy, can swoop in and grab the building; leaving our neighborhood schools with one less choice.
Remember, its state law, BPS will still be paying for busing charter school students citywide, long after we return to neighborhood schools. The point is to reduce the busing expense, and use that money to improve all our neighborhood schools, not move this money over to charter school vendors so they can cherry pick and bus in students from around the city.
Odd article...it appears that the problem being addressed is NOT the primary issue. It seeems that attacking the UnderPerforming Schools issue will make the assignment issue go away. However, I'm not familiar with issues in Boston School System and understand that simple solutions may not be so simple.
No mechanical plan is going to help Boston public schools. The only plan that will ever make real sense is a plan to make them all into "good schools." Mr. Vaznis ought to seek out people who want to do that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We learned about Boston public schools from Jonathan Kozol's book, Death at an Early Age [Houghton Mifflin, 1967], and from a friend who spent a year teaching at the Mary E. Curley (then) Junior High School in Jamaica Plain. That was long before a manufactured crisis in public schools and the testing craze that has followed since, but you didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We visited schools in the late 1960s and spoke with teachers, parents and students--harder to do now. If you had a choice in where to send children to school, no part of Boston was going to be it. We were lucky to be able to settle in a nearby suburb, where the youngest students went to neighborhood schools and where there was a strong movement to make all of them "good schools." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those days were rarely without problems, but unlike the situation in Boston there was hope and progress. Visiting Boston schools once in a while and talking with friends in Boston make us think some things are a little better now than when we were starting a family, but only a little. Boston schools have driven up housing prices in nearby suburbs so much that if we were starting today we might not be able to afford them.