Turning around the Boston schools

In the summer of 1981, the Boston public school system was financially at a low ebb. As part of a severe budget crunch related to Proposition 2-1/2 (a tax cutting measured similar to California's Proposition 13), more than a thousand teachers had been given layoff notices. Despite these and other draconian cuts, estimates of the budget deficit ranged as high as $30 million, but management procedures were so inadequate that the acting superintendent couldn't be sure just how much red ink there was--or exactly how many employees the school system had and where they were placed.

In addition to these dramatic manifestations of disarray, there were several other dark clouds on the horizon: the Boston School Committee had recently fired a superintendent; the system had seen five superintendents come and go within a decade; a federal court continued to play a central role in the student assignment process in order to desegregate the schools and hold the system to compliance with more than 400 separate orders; there were widespread racial tensions among teachers and administrators, exacerbated by the question of whether to lay off teachers by seniority or by affirmative action; and, almost unnoticed among the other crises, citywide curriculum objectives had not been published in more than 15 years for most subject areas, and citywide competency standards for promoting students from grade to grade were non-existent.

"A national disgrace"

Time Magazine labeled the Boston schools a "national disgrace." It was hard for a reasonable person to disagree with this characterization.

In August of 1981 I became Superintendent of Schools in Boston, and I have not had a dull moment since. The beginning of my fourth year in office is a good time to examine what has happened since my arrival, and to pay tribute to the many fine school board members and professionals in Boston who have worked so hard to bring about a dramatic turnaround.

It is also a good time to compare what we have accomplished with the recommendations of the various national commissions and new books on school improvement. Significantly, we in Boston are implementing many of the initiatives recommended in the recent reports, but we had launched our efforts before those reports were published. I am pleased that we anticipated many of the excellent recommendations and steered clear of some of the pitfalls. Boston can be proud of itself as a model of a froward-thinking urban school system that is working to give a first-rate education to all its students.

Getting started Given the dire stratis in which I found the system, the School Committee and I had no choice but to move on several fronts at once. The first was to restore order to the fiscal and personnel situation. Without the confidence of the city government and the business community, there was little we could accomplish in the long run.

The second was to increase accountability at all levels of the system: students, teachers, principals, and central office administrators. A multitude of factors in the decade before had taken Harry Truman's famous sign, "The buck stops here," off virtually every desk in town, and especially from the most important desks in the school system-those of school principals. We had to turn taht around by setting performance standards for students, conducting thorough performance evaluations of teachers and administrators, and moving on incompetent or uncaring personnel where necessary.

The third priority was to turn the major focus of the system to instructional issues. For too long we had been obsesed with desegregation, transportation, safety, personnel, and politics, and we were paying the price in widespread curriculum anarchy, in our students' below-par standardized test scores, and in a shockingly high school droput rate.

All agreed that these were the three primary items on the agenda, but there was something else. Many educators in Boston, as in other major urban systems, had come to believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that poor children would never be able to master basic skills. The social science research of the 1960's and 70's, especially the Coleman Report and the work of Christopher Jencks and his colleagues, had seriously undermined the conviction of many urban educators that their work made a difference to students. Too many teachers and principals had come to see their work as primarily custodial, because "these children" (a code phrase for poor children) would not and could not learn. In Boston, there was widespread hearkening back to amythical bygone era of educational quality, and the process of desegregation was roundly condemned for disrupting and degrading the system's best qualities.

All children can lean

Shock waves rippled through the system when I announced that our guiding philosophy should be that all children can learn. Since August of 1981 I have repeated this philosophy and these basic messages hundreds of times: that we should not tolerate excuses for why students were not learning in our schools; that the parents of Boston send us their children and it is our job to educate them, not to wring our hands about the fact that some parents didn't read enough or buy the altest encyclopedia; that the way a school is run does make a difference to student outcomes; that teacher expectations do affect learning; that a principla's educational leadership does influence the climate of a school for the better; and that all students are educable if professionals can only find the right combination of buttons to push.