Gateway to a better future

ONE PRODUCT of New York City that rival Bostonians should be quick to embrace is the Gateway program, which prepares low-income and minority students for high-level careers in medicine, science, and engineering. In Boston, school officials are expected to announce Monday that the program will be ready come fall for 50 ninth-graders at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury.

Gateway, which operates at 14 sites in New York City, is a runaway success. Roughly 13 percent of Gateway grads attend medical school, according to a recent survey of alumni. Nearly all of the 3,000 students who graduated from Gateway programs since 1990 enrolled in four-year colleges. And Gateway's minority students breeze through New York's tough regents exams in biology and chemistry, easily closing the achievement gap between white and minority students.

The Gateway program typically involves extra instructional periods, after-school tutorials, and internships with science-based institutions. In Boston, 20 research centers, hospitals, and colleges in the Longwood Medical Area will provide hands-on learning opportunities for Gateway scholars. The Legislature has authorized $1.5 million over four years to support the program.

The O'Bryant School, one of the city's three exam schools, is often overshadowed by the more prestigious Boston Latin School and Boston Latin Academy. But the Gateway program is almost certain to elevate O'Bryant's status. And the school's appeal should increase even more with plans to introduce engineering courses co-taught by MIT faculty members along with computer science courses in conjunction with UMass-Boston.

It takes only a few minutes to walk from parts of Roxbury to the Longwood Medical Area. But it can be a fruitless trip for job seekers who arrive without technical and scientific knowledge. For O'Bryant students who pass through the Gateway and similar programs, the rewards should be substantial.

Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston is surrendering in stages on the city's sensible residency requirement for roughly 8,000 municipal workers. The outcome of this submission over time is likely to be a city with a weaker middle class.

Despite more than a decade of rhetoric about Boston jobs for Bostonians, the Menino administration put residency on the table in its recently concluded contract negotiations with the Service Employees International Union and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Under the new agreements, employees are allowed to move out of the city after 10 years of employment. It is a good bet that the police and fire unions will walk away with a similar, or even more lenient, deal.

The Menino administration sees the loosening of residency as a trade-off for getting municipal employees to pick up a greater share of their premiums for medical coverage. Such concessions may appear to cost nothing in real dollars. But residency requirements are a time-tested means of ensuring economic diversity, especially in cities like Boston that lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s. City workers should be looked upon as urban gold. They provide essential services, pay property taxes, spend money in local business districts, and send their children to public schools. Instead, the Menino administration undervalues them as residents.

Menino says residency is becoming an "issue of the past" because some workers who are exempt from the residency requirement, including many AFSCME members, still opt for Boston over nearby suburbs. And housing prices are not appreciably lower within a 20-mile radius of Boston, says the mayor. The mayor is too sanguine. The surge in foreclosures across Boston suggests that the city is in no condition to take any of its solid earners for granted.

The bottom line is that the Menino administration pitches hard for new businesses to locate in Boston, even those with just a few employees. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers who draw salaries directly from Boston taxpayers will be leaving by the back door.

Boston teachers overwhelmingly embraced a new contract this week that gives them a roughly 13 percent salary boost over four years, in addition to their normal step raises based on seniority. No one doubts that the school department will deliver on those raises as promised. But Bostonians shouldn't feel as confident that the teachers will make good on their agreement to participate in the creation of at least seven new pilot schools.

Pilot schools offer a way for principalsand teachers to provide flexibility in budgeting, scheduling, staffing, and governance. The structure is similar to state charter schools, with the notable exception that the local district retains both the students and the per capita cost of educating them. Yet recent attempts to create pilot schools in Boston have met with interference on the part of teachers union officials who look with suspicion on any model that weakens union work rules.

Staffers at the Kennedy School in Jamaica Plain voted to become a pilot school last October, but their plans were dashed when union president Richard Stutman invoked a murky bylaw that forced a new and unsuccessful vote. Stutman vetoed another pro-pilot vote at the Gardner School in Allston in 2004, although that project eventually went forward. Current contract language that smoothes the way for new pilot schools is pointless if the union's top leaders remain intent on finding new ways to beat back each proposal.

In lotteries earlier this month, education-minded parents of roughly 6,000 children sought 1,000 seats in state charter schools, including 13 schools in Boston. These families see charter schools as a road to educational attainment and prosperity. The potential for similar support exists for pilot schools in Boston -- provided the union stops undermining a reform it has endorsed on paper.