The recent history of the BPS reveals that at best giving autonomy to schools is at best a mixed bag. Some schools have done well, others not as good. In any case, eliminating rules is not a guaranteed recipe for success. Some of the failing schools have had autonomies for seven years. Go figure. 

Just one more item as a proposal. The turnaround schools have benefitted from superior resources. We note that the Menino  plan seeks to force the autonomies on the schools WITHOUT the corresponding resources. How's that?

I tried to gift a key-ready 325 seat public elementary school to Tom a decade ago; it is now open but private. Solution is local schools, stop busing. Cost per pupil? $16,000! We could shut down BPS and put them all in private school. Forced busing is $100 million a year! Integrate and desegregate what and whom? A handful of white kids? We are not all that smart or worth the trouble. Mass. Legislature a prime example.

What the Mayor is also saying is that he disagrees with the Contract that his Superintendent Dr Carol Johnson had negotiated with the Teachers Union. The Superintendent is the one putting the Principal and Head Master that are stifling the teachers ability to educate our children to the mandated standard. Our public dollars get spread out to too many so called non profits in this city. The only real non profits are the businesses and tax payers that don't make enough due to restrictive regulations and poor urban neighborhood development under the Menino administration and the puppets on the City Council , School Committee and BRA. Stop looking at the Mayor with the rose colored glasses yes he is a nice man but he and his administration are terrible managers of our municipality.

Bashing teachers again? I think people in Newtown would disagree with that example as we all should. It's always the teachers being intractable, wanting more and more money, less time to teach - well for about 99.9% of teachers, that is total hogwash. Menino and the superintendents should think twice about this attack on teachers. Maybe a well-thought-out plan of action would be a better idea? Maybe building a couple of new schools might help - that would be a sign of hope - how long has he been Mayor and been moving schools around from an old, antiquated building to an even older, even more antiquated building? How does that make the students, teachers and parents feel? They can put in bike rentals all around the city in a minute but a new building with up-to-date facilities takes forever (what's it been, almost 20 years he's been mayor?). I don't think laying the blame on teachers is the way to go, Tom and Carol. How many of us would stand in the way of a murderer to save someone else's children?

Mayor Menino said, "We have great schools in our city, and we need to make all the schools the same quality" If Mayor Menino is complaining about not having "quality" schools in the city, he only has himself to blame. He created the problem when HE allowed Dr. Johnson to move to a "Portfolio of Schools" model instead of a "Unified Schools" model. Dr. Johnson un-resourced traditional BPS schools causing them to fail, and saturated the BPS with pilot, Horace Mann in-district charter, and innovation schools. Mayor Menio allowed the Boston School Committee, which HE “appointed, to give approval and saturate the Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan Communities with segregation academy charter (SAC) schools. These charters cherry pick and skim the best and the brightest students, which are usually students with more resources (read active parents) and take millions away from traditional Boston Public Schools that needed every available resource. At MCAS time a parade of these segregation academy students are counseled out and returned to BPS because they are "not the right fit!" These students end up bringing down the MCAS scores of the schools they are returned to. Mayor Menino does not acknowledge to the public that Traditional Boston Public Schools do not compete on a level playing field. BPS Traditional Public Schools have been purposely set up to fail by Court Street. Historically BPS has moved programs and populations of students, with a history of failure, into traditional schools around the city. Court Street did this to supplement the school system. When these schools failed, they qualified for more Federal, State, and private grants. When the grant ran out at a school, the failing program, and its students, were moved to another school, BPS would reapply for the grant, and it would begin again. Mayor Menino allowed this to go on. The English High School is a perfect example of this. Back in 2005, it was cut-up into "Small Learning Communities," (Gates & Carnegie Grants) then on the eve of being taken over by the State, it became a "Commonwealth CO-Pilot" (State Grant) that never took off. How could it, EHS had a 35% SPED population, and a 65% ELL population – the highest in the State! When that money ran out, EHS was "transformed" into a "turnaround" school that qualified for "Race to the Top" money! A more recent example of BPS manipulation is the Gavin Middle by UP Academy Charter. The agreement presented by the BPS & Unlocking Potential to the community was supposed to include "ALL Gavin School Students!" The BPS did not "reserve spots" at UP Academy for Vietnamese SIS student program, and the multi-handicapped students "remained in the building" in a newly created "district run" program! The names of these handi-capped kids are rumored to have satellited and appear on the Murphy School roll! When we see the Murphy School MCAS scores plummet and they are targeted as under-performing we will know why!