The state of education in Boston
Each came into his job roughly a decade ago with a similar task: Fix the problems and help a Boston educational institution make a bigger mark.
For Thomas W. Payzant, his challenge was to improve Boston Public Schools. For Richard M. Freeland, his goal was to raise the stature of Northeastern University.
In June, after 11 years on the job, Payzant will retire as Boston's superintendent; in August, Freeland, who started at Northeastern as president in 1996, will end his reign over the private urban university.
Searches are underway for their successors.
Payzant, 65, came to Boston after leading school systems in San Diego, Oklahoma City, and Eugene, Ore., and working as an assistant secretary in the US Department of Education. Prior to Northeastern, Freeland, 65, had been vice chancellor for academic affairs at the City University of New York, but spent the bulk of his career working in the University of Massachusetts system.
In an interview with education editor Linda K. Wertheimer, they spoke about the past, present, and future of education in the Boston area.
Q. A decade ago, when you started your jobs as superintendent of Boston Public Schools and president of Northeastern respectively, what was the state of the institutions you were about to lead? What were the biggest challenges?
PAYZANT: I would say it was a school district that was stuck, and wasn't going to go anywhere without some major changes. The other thing is that it was very clear that the expectations of the School Committee were aligned with mine, because I wanted to see if you could take a mid-sized urban school district and improve a whole system of schools, not just have the result of my leadership be a few more good ones. And at that time, in the mid '90s, that was not the major conversation.
FREELAND: What I walked into at Northeastern was a 100-year-old institution that had served the city and served higher education very well . . . as a locally oriented, commuter, access-oriented, scale-oriented institution. . . . Essentially, over the years, Northeastern had evolved into a quasipublic institution, in a state and a city where public higher education was underdeveloped. But as public higher education grew in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the kinds of young public school graduates that historically relied on Northeastern increasingly were going to UMass-Boston or into the state colleges or to the community colleges. My charge, coming in 1996, was to reposition Northeastern as a more regional and national, more residential, more selective, more academically ambitious private institution.
PAYZANT: It's been very dramatic to see what has happened, and you can see it in terms of just walking around the campus. The campus is a very different place. And there've been some dramatic changes in terms of what has happened inside. Northeastern's been one of the key partners in connecting to the schools.
Q. In higher education and education, a buzz term for years has been K-16, referring to creating a seamless transition from high school to college. In Massachusetts, how strong is the connection between school systems and higher education?
FREELAND: There is a huge structural issue across the country in articulation between the K through 12 system and the higher-ed system. School districts in different cities around the country have approached it in different ways. When I was the vice chancellor back in the City University of New York, for example, we developed a policy of setting out clearly what our expectations were of high school graduates when they entered freshman year in college. We don't have anything quite that clear in the Boston area and Massachusetts.
PAYZANT: In the last several years, [in] the Boston Public Schools, we've been talking very clearly about the goal being to graduate all students with a high school diploma that, in effect, says that they are ready to continue some kind of post-secondary education. That's a dramatic shift, and it's based on the reality that a high school diploma doesn't provide much in the way of opportunity and in terms of a career and a good life. So you have to ratchet up the expectations. When I came back in the middle '90s, the attitude was, well, if you're going to go to college, you'd better get into an exam school if you're in the Boston Public Schools. . . . The graduation requirements have changed so that more and more students are going through to calculus, and Advanced Placement programs are in virtually all of the high schools now, and courses are being added every year.
Q. Boston, to many, is considered the best place in the nation for higher education, largely because Harvard, Northeastern, and so many other universities are here. How well does it live up to its reputation?
FREELAND: In terms of the number and diversity of institutions, the richness of educational opportunities, there isn't any other city in the country, and probably any other city in the world that can compete with Boston for the sheer density of academic institutions. In that sense, Boston does merit the claim that we make of being the national leader in higher education. That said, those are laurels on which Boston and Massachusetts sometimes rest much too comfortably. What has happened, during the last 30 or 40 years, is that other metropolitan areas all over the country have invested tremendously in their systems. . . . We can no longer make the kind of claim to preeminence. There are great centers of research all over the country, competitive with Harvard, competitive with MIT in discipline after discipline after discipline.
Other places are doing a better job, quite honestly, in terms of access. If there is an embarrassment in Massachusetts in the area of higher education, it is the consistent failure to invest in our public system of higher education, and make advanced learning accessible to large numbers of young people. Massachusetts ranks near the bottom among states in terms of investing in public higher education.
PAYZANT: I've worked in five different states as a superintendent, obviously here, but also Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, and California. I was astounded coming back to Massachusetts after 30 years that there is not the support for public higher education here that exists in any of those other states. In terms of access, the community college system in California is incredible. There are all kinds of incentives for students to be able to transfer to the state system or the University of California system, and it's affordable.
FREELAND: I am hopeful in this respect. I think our political leaders are beginning to understand in a serious way that two things are true. One is that there's a huge regional competition for economic strength and that Massachusetts is in a fight for its life with other regions around the country. I think public leaders are beginning to understand that just because we've always been great and just because Boston has always been a center doesn't mean that we will continue to be over time.
Q. Ten years from now, what do you think really will have changed in terms of education and higher education in Boston? Will we still be talking about the achievement gap between black, Hispanics, and other groups?
PAYZANT: The achievement gap is real, it's pervasive. The first thing that has to happen, which I think we have done in Boston in the last 10 years, is get over the finger pointing. . . . That is, if parents would only send us better kids, we as educators could do better jobs in the schools. That is not acceptable. We have the obligation, in public education, to take a child where he or she is and provide value added from September to June. We can't take 100 percent responsibility for gaps that may exist based on other circumstances in that child's life, but we can be responsible for some percentage. So how will it be different in 10 years? The laser-like focus and more progress on our piece of the action will be evident. The question is, is the larger society going to address some of the other issues?
FREELAND: Ten years out, will we still be able to say that Massachusetts and Boston are the education mecca for the country? I think the jury is out on that. I think we have been losing ground, and it's going to require a mobilized effort involving education leaders, private and public, and political leaders and civic leaders to think how we can maintain our leadership in this area. . . . The good news is, we're doing a much better job graduating all students, and students of color, but we haven't really closed the gap.
PAYZANT: On the gap, we want to close it. But at least we've got this trajectory for both. As long as we keep this trajectory for both, we're still going to be saying that black and Latino young people are a lot better off than they were 10 years ago.
FREELAND: The work of education never ends.
PAYZANT: It sure doesn't.
