Very informative article, for one who couldn't be there. I am encouraged that Ms. Dajer is asking the to see the effect on admission patterns of an elimination of the walk zone preference. As a couple of people in the article make clear, that preference serves no purpose. The 10 zone plan, with the addition of the walk zone is a double-whammy...unnecessary and counter-productive. Equal access to qualiity public education is a right of every child in Boston. I love sending my sixth-grade daughter to a school that she can walk to, but that is my preference, not my right. Public policy needs to treat my neighbor's right and my preference differently. In Boston, public policy is in danger of confusing the two...giving even more importance to my preference than my neighbor's right. I (or others who live very near great schools) might like that, but it's not good public policy. 

"How to shrink the geographic areas from which families can choose schools in a city where there are too few good schools, particularly when many are clustered in certain neighborhoods."

Or NOT clustered in the communities that make up Boston’s East Zone due to the saturation of charter schools! The Mayor is just now realizing that the Charter School Network, living and leeching in the kingdom all these years, are cherry picking the orchard bare and don't have to answer to the Mayor of Boston who is signing their checks!  

With all the "transparency" brought to light by External ­Advisory Committee (EAC), Mayor Menino, the man who would be king, has come to realize that he has been caught with no cloths on. The EAC all but told him so when the student assignment plans suggested grandfathering and then sibling preference for families already attending BPS schools they were invested in. 

Mayor Menino created the problem when HE allowed his appointed school committee and Dr. Johnson to move to a "Portfolio of Schools" model instead of a "Unified School District" model.  Dr. Johnson un-resourced traditional BPS schools causing them to fail, so they could be taken over, and saturated the BPS with Commonwealth Charter, Horace Mann in-district charter, pilot, and now "innovation schools" where parents and teachers, who are in direct service to students, have no voice, and those that do speak up, have no job the following year!

In traditional Boston public schools, parents and teachers are decision-making bodies on the School Site Council.  Members are responsible for approving the Whole School Improvement Plan (WSIP) and most importantly the budget.This was negotiated in the mutual BPS/BTU Teachers contract back in 1993, so that ALL voices in a school community can be heard and have the power to be taken seriously. 

Parents do not have a "decision making voice" at charter schools or BPS in-district charter schools; any parent voice at all is "advisory" at best.  Charters have a "governing board"  and "the board" approves or disapproves the decisions made by the principal. It is after the fact, one voice makes the decisions and "the board" rubber-stamps them.  "Coffee hour" with the charter principal who promises to take parent concerns to "the board" just reeks of big daddy paternalism and not the change that parents might want to see.

Now Mayor Menino is trying to legislate the ball he dropped!  He is trying to regain the Boston school kingdom he gave away to the rightwing corporate conservatives who see charters as a way to end public schools in Boston and every other urban school district in Massachusetts.  Look and see who is on the boards of these charter schools!  Google their names!  They are not concerned with urban children!  These corporate poverty pimps know that someone has to serve the Latte in the world-class City of Boston, and they are not looking toward the children living in Weston and Wellesley to do it!