The issue: Boston's public schools
Education is among the most important issues for Boston voters, and the mayoral candidates offer starkly different assessments of and prescriptions for the city schools.
The problems are clear: declining enrollment; an imbalance of resources and performance among schools; disappointing MCAS scores; lagging achievement among students of color, including a troublesome drop in minority students at the city's elite exam school, Boston Latin.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino wants to stick to his plan: continue to hire more teachers and principals, stock classrooms with more books and computers, and encourage more parents to get involved in the schools.
Councilor at Large Maura A. Hennigan wants to radically rethink the school day, turning the schools into all-day learning centers, with art and meals for children and evening classes for parents.
Both candidates sat down for one-hour interviews about education with Globe correspondent Michael Levenson.
In addition to her all-day school plan, Hennigan, a former teacher, proposed that every college student in Boston mentor a student in the public schools. She said it would break down town-gown barriers and encourage students to settle in Boston by making them feel more connected to the city.
To turn around failing schools, she proposed more power for principals to hire and fire teachers. She also wants to build more schools, asserting that a nearby public school could better compete with private or parochial schools.
Menino said the formula he helped promote when he came into office 12 years ago is working, although more slowly than he would like. And while he promoted some of the same goals as Hennigan, he refused to promise more than he said the city can afford.
Menino pointed out that he raised funds to offset what he said is meager state and federal school aid. His goal, he said, is to improve test scores and close the persistent achievement gap between white students and students of color.
What follows are excerpts of the interviews.
Mayor Menino
Q. What do you make of the declining enrollment in city schools?
A. Well, smaller families. And I think declining enrollment's happening everywhere. The parochial schools are dying, you know that. Parents aren't having three and four kids. They have one and two, and that's just about it There are more people like you and you and you (pointing at young aides). You know?
Q. So it's not necessarily an alarming trend.
A. No, I was alarmed at the trend also. I mean, you know the thing I want to do? I want every school to be recognized as a quality school. Some schools do a better job of selling themselves, and that's one of the other things I want. Better promotion of what goes on within the school buildings, because there's great things going on. We just don't promote it.
Q. You talked about the achievement gap. Do you feel like there's a problem with middle-class parents being less interested in sending their kids to the Boston public schools, middle-class parents looking more than ever toward private schools, parochial schools? White parents, parents with --
A. You've got it wrong. Maybe 10 years ago more middle-class families were looking outside. I think today that it's a different thing. People want to come to Boston public schools. A few are fighting for school locations. . . . We have our problems. No question about it. But it's about a lot of different issues.
Q. If there were a magic wand that you could wave and get some new initiative into the schools, do you have any idea of what that might be?
A. Well, I'd make sure every child has a family life.
Q. Sure. But I mean an actual policy issue.
A. A policy issue? Maybe more guidance counselors in the high schools. Helping kids.
I mean, you want me to say something that takes money. You want me to say, ''Oh, the mayor's going to promise this, promise that." I'm not like that. I'm a realistic person. I have to work within my financial means. That's why I went out and raised $23 million in afterschool money. That's what I'm about, doing real things to improve our schools.
What I want to do is continue the progress I've outlined. Continue to recruit good principals. We have 300 vacant teacher positions; we have 3,000 applicants for them, so there's something good going on in the Boston public schools.
Q. What do you think about Boston Latin School -- the demographics, obviously, have sharply changed there [with a decline in minority students]. Are you troubled by it?
A. Yeah, I'd like to see all students have the opportunity to go to one of the preferred schools in Boston.
I can remember growing up in this city. You only had one preferred school, in Boston Latin. But now you have other schools people want to go to. There's Arts Academy, the O'Bryant, Fenway. It's a different school system. But it's true, we have to figure out a system that allows the diversity of Boston into the Latin schools.
Q. Are there specific things that you can do as mayor to increase the diversity of Boston Latin?
A. Well, there's some discussions I've had with the folks in the last month or so. We will have further discussions on the issue after the election, because I don't want to make it political. Not just Latin school, but a lot of the educational issues. I said: ''Let's talk about this after the election, so it won't become part of the political discussion."
Q. Have you ever considered the idea of shutting down failing public schools, as they do with charter schools?
A. What do you do with the kids? See, the problem is it's easy to shut it down, but what are you going to do with them? Why are they failing? Was it the principal? Was it the teacher? Was it a combination of things? It ain't the kids. They're just kids, you know? We have to figure out how the system fails the kids.
Q. OK [on another subject.] What about aligning the school day with the work day?
A. I'm all in favor of that.
Q. But is that just a pie-in-the-sky idea?
Oh, no. No! No, no, no. I mean, I don't believe in 9:30 openings. I think the schools should start at 8 in the morning.
Q. OK --
A. Until maybe 2 o'clock. That's when afterschool takes over. Would I like to see schools till 5 o'clock? Yeah. Believe me. Where do you get the funding for it? That's the problem. See, I'm not going to give you a pie-in-the-sky idea. I'd love to see it. Until we have funding on the books, I can't say I'm going to do it. We'd all like to see longer school days. No question about it.
Q. What do you do about students who seem to be chronically underperforming?
A. I just had one the other day. Poor Kenny. Kenny was a kid who came here -- his mother brought him by his ear. And the mother thinks the mayor is in the office just waiting for people to come in. She came in with a wheelchair with Kenny about two weeks ago. And Kenny's a kid who ran out of school, because he couldn't get his classes.
So I sat down with the kid. I told him how we have conflicts in life. And I call the principal up and say, give him a chance, will ya? The kid's been to school every morning.
Q. So if we can get every kid into the mayor's office --
A. No, no, no. I'm saying some of these kids just need somebody to help. I'm just telling you. Don't misunderstand. Sometimes we just need to ask how do we spark that interest? Because that's the challenge.
Maura Hennigan
Q. On declining enrollment in the city's schools -- are you alarmed by that trend? Are there things you could do as mayor to help get kids and parents interested in public schools again?
A. First of all, what's very important to recognize is a number of these things are a function of a housing market. As you know, less than 30 percent of the population of our city right now has children under the age of 18.
So it's just the demographics, a function of families being unable to find an affordable place to live. And what happens is when they can't, they leave our city. So when you say, who are the parents and the children who are going to the Boston public schools? At the moment, it is for the most part, a majority poor community. Obviously, we've got to address this, so there is more housing for middle-class families.
You have to make sure that you have economic as well as ethnic diversity within the schools.
To have children who may have parents who are the heads of corporations sitting next to a child of limited means.
Q. [There's a burnout problem, with young teachers moving on after a few years in Boston.] How do you get those teachers to stay?
A. What has been the single most issue that young teachers who have been surveyed speak about is, they go in, they want to change the world, really make a difference, and they become disheartened. So we have to support those young teachers.
Q. How do you support them?
A. Well, a number of these young teachers probably don't have a lot of experience working in an inner-city environment. This is very challenging. You can be very book smart, but when you go to apply it in the classroom, it's a very different thing.
I remember my first year teaching. I remember they had a snowball fight in my room because I came in after three substitute teachers. It was right after the teachers' strike, and I was like, ''Oh, my God." So I had two teachers, who were seasoned teachers, who worked with me, who helped me. I mean, I was in that school seven years, and I would have probably still been teaching, except I got laid off under Proposition 2 1/2.
Q. So when you have a stabilizing force, you have some people who understand the dynamics of teaching in an urban school system, they can help you. And you know, young teachers love that kind of support. . . .
A. As mayor, what I am going to do is, go to the Department of Higher Education and ask that we make it a requirement for students graduating from a college or university in this city, that they mentor a Boston public school student. It will be a great opportunity for a college student to be able to make a contribution.
Q. Every single college student will have to?
A. It would not cost anything. It would benefit us in a number of ways, first of all, because the child will have a mentor, someone who they can look up to, and someone who they can see is succeeding in life and is going to a world-renown college or university.
It also will benefit the community, because one problem that you hear communities complain about with college students is, they don't care about us. They're not part of our neighborhood. So by having a college student interact with a child, the student's going to benefit. The city is going to benefit.
Q. Are there are other initiatives that you're eager to put in place, to get those feet moving back into the public schools?
A. Well, the full-day school day is a very exciting initiative. I call it the full enrichment day.
What you do is, you take the teachers, the parents, the community, and say, 'OK, what do you want your school to be?' OK, we'd like a school so parents, at 7 in the morning, they drop their kids off, and maybe via the Y or the Boys and Girls Club or some provider, would provide a nice little snack and maybe a little help with homework before school. And then maybe you'd do some financial literacy, or you'd do some art -- and then next you'd do like a regular academic course.
Ultimately, I really want to make our schools the centers in neighborhoods. And then it will take a while to get this up and going, because I have eight years to do this if they reelect me after the first time, that is -- you would even maybe provide classes for parents after school.
So the parents who come in, particularly because so many of the Boston public school parents are younger, many of them don't have advanced degrees. Many of them may not even be high school graduates.
Some of them may not even have a lot of parenting skills. So here they are, picking their children up, already in the school. Maybe they might like to take some classes.
We might have some child care there, to help with their kids. I mean, there are all sorts of possibilities to make our schools real dynamic neighborhood centers, something that people really connect with.
But right now, essentially, people aren't happy with our schools. I mean, you have a few schools, and they're high-performing, and everyone tries to get into them, but when you don't, people end up maybe not being satisfied. Poor children don't have an option but to stay there. So it's the poor that get stuck, and the affluent either move out or go to a private school. 