Hard lesson: too many schools

BOSTON'S school system is heavy with bricks and mortar, but much of it doesn't support academic excellence. A better structure should emerge this week when School Superintendent Carol Johnson offers her recommendation to shutter five or six of the system's 143 schools and consolidate several others.

The targeted schools are scheduled to be named at a School Committee meeting. In a system with more than 5,000 empty elementary seats, most or all of the schools on the list are likely to serve K-5 students. There is no extra capacity in East Boston or West Roxbury, according to Johnson, so none of the elementary schools in those neighborhoods is likely to be affected.

Declining enrollment is the main problem. The 56,000-pupil system has lost more than 4,000 students during the past four years, due to a combination of city demographics, a troubling dropout rate, and competitive pressures from charter and parochial schools. But Johnson, wisely, is not focusing solely on cutbacks. She sees an opportunity to give parents more of what they want, including more K-8 schools and two or three new pilot schools that offer longer days and more flexible curricula. The city's Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods would be especially well-served by an expansion of K-8 schools.

Johnson may need to ride out some protests to build a stronger, leaner system. Parents have been known to embrace school buildings that haven't earned the affection. In 1996, then superintendent Thomas Payzant devised an intriguing three-part plan to close the underperforming Wheatley middle school in Roxbury, then transfer a special-needs school to that site from a South End building, and finally site an arts high school in the South End facility, which is near the heart of the city's cultural district. But he bungled the plan by giving the Wheatley parents too little notice. Johnson will need to make a better case and provide smoother transitions for parents at a series of public meetings in October.

Her best argument is that she is proposing the closings and reconfigurations at the same time that she is pushing a series of ambitious performance goals for 2012, including raising the pass rate on the third-grade English MCAS exam to 100 percent, increasing the four-year graduation rate from 60 percent to 80 percent, and bumping up average SAT scores. "We need to provide high-quality schools," says Johnson. "That's what builds stronger communities."

Some parents will need to look beyond the buildings to see these goals.