IN HIS January inaugural address, Mayor Menino telegraphed that his fifth term would not be business as usual. In a major speech yesterday to the city’s business leaders and at a subsequent press conference, Menino explained just how different it might be.
“We get so set in our ways that we fail to see the world around us change,’’ Menino told a gathering of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. “We fail to adapt.’’
Adaptation could be jarring, starting with the schools. Each new speech brings the five-term mayor closer to the charter school movement. Menino said he is now prepared to turn over the management of some of city’s worst performing schools to high-quality charter schools. It’s a prod to the city’s teachers union and its many supporters who bristle at losing students and funding to the state-approved charters. Menino and school superintendent Carol Johnson prodded more deeply a few hours later when they announced that teachers will be required to reapply for their jobs at six of the city’s worst performing schools. That’s in addition to a major shake-up of principals at failing schools.
Not everyone will go quietly. But the mayor appears more focused on raising student achievement than positioning himself for a run for a sixth term.
For months, Menino has been promising to shape the city’s school, library, and community centers systems into full-service “circles of promise’’ in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. It was starting to sound like a lot of gum flapping. But not recently. Last month, library director Amy Ryan said she was prepared to lop off some of the city’s weaker library branches in order to beef up programs and collections in others. Menino said the same thing yesterday about the city’s system of 46 community centers, some of which are poorly managed and poorly attended. Now Menino needs to make sure that overall services are so good, and that his consolidation of centers is based on fair and reasonable considerations, that some people will forget about losing a neighborhood institution. Otherwise, the circle of promise becomes just a slick way to disguise a budget cut.
Menino has a lot of explaining to do about his fifth term priorities. Yesterday was a strong start.
