Central to the agita over remaking Boston’s byzantine school assignment system is a chicken-and-egg conundrum. The city wants more parents to choose schools close to home, believing that will help improve them. But many parents want to see those schools improve before they’ll send their kids to them.
Everybody agrees it would be beyond great if every kid could walk to a good school. Less travel time means more students could take part in after-school programs, and more parents could get to school events. More schools could be community hubs, like churches used to be.
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what , if you're a parent or guardian you're gonna trust what passes at city hall , it's appointees and the neighborhoods themselves for leadership? get real abraham.
Everybody agrees it would be beyond great if every kid could walk to a good school. Less travel time means more students could take part in after-school programs, and more parents could get to school events. More schools could be community hubs, like churches used to be.
1972 or 2012?
The Boston Public Schools needs to become a unified school district and drop the "portfolio of schools" model if it wants to return to neighborhood schools. The "portfolio of schools" has created, and continues to create with an influx of segregation charter schools campaigning to service BPS students, a system of haves and have not's. Yes, this will mean less "choice" for parents, but in a system with so many students in traditional schools failing MCAS, we need to unify our resources and efforts in a comprehensive way that the BPS portfolio and Boston's influx of charter schools and METCO have disseminated.
Quality schools will be determined when students who are "good test takers" are assigned to schools, but the BPS has yet to present the MCAS data of students by neighborhood! Why? The decision makers fear their plans will come to a screeching halt! Those of us who grew up and live in Boston are not afraid of the elephant in the closet. We know the District has dropped the ball for 40+ years! Show us the MCAS of BPS students by neighborhood and then show us the MCAS of students attending charter schools and METCO by Neighborhood. If charter and METCO students were returned to BPS would those communities still be in the red dot zone?
It is time BPS stops infantilizing parents and is fully transparent with ALL the student data! Then BPS can create a comprehensive plan that targets those red dot neighborhoods, where students are failing, with extra resources to get students assigned to those schools up to level and make those neighborhood schools attractive to parents. Does this mean that red dot East Zone schools will get more until they are up to level? YES! Parents in green dot schools will understand. If this happened 40+ years ago we would not be having this conversation!
Schools that are good one year, are labeled "underperforming: soon after. The whole criteria for labeling schools is utter nonsense. Do you think a "high performing" school would will be labelled such after they get an influx of low test scorers? I know not. Disaggregate the data by neighborhood - as JShore contends. We then will be able to predict which schools will be UNDERPERFORMING and High ACHIEVING. Then the city can finally realize that the schools are not the problem, but inequity and economic segregation are. The teachers are not the problem, but the "no excuses" sense of "urgency" policies that are enacted across our city, state, and country that IGNORE poverty are. Epidemiological factors are the #1 PROBLEMS facing our kids - let's deal with the violence, gangs, guns, crime, post traumatic stress, nutrition, teenage pregnancy, asthma, GLASSES so kids can SEE, and the childhood obesity that plagues our neighborhoods where kids "fail" MCAS at a higher level than less health neglected areas of the city. Get rid of the Portfolio of Schools.