Citizen panelists erred on residents' unhappiness

By Calvin Hennick, Globe Correspondent

Two members of an influential citizens’ panel acknowledged Friday that they erred when they stated in a recent column that residents had grown dramatically more dissatisfied with some city services this year.

Malcolm Salter, chairman of the Citizen Advisory Group, and member Kent Portney wrote a guest column in the June 24 edition of the Newton Tab citing the ‘‘downright alarming’’ results of the city’s 2009 resident survey. They wrote that a steady erosion in the public’s satisfaction with the city’s schools, in particular, ‘‘has turned into a tsunami.’’

But they acknowledged today that those conclusions were inaccurate, drawn from a flawed reading of city data. The mistake was uncovered by the Globe in an examination of household surveys, which indicated that residents’ opinions had not changed dramatically in five years.

“I want to apologize for the fact that we had the contaminated data, and the contamination wasn’t caught until it was picked up and examined by the Globe,” said Salter, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School.

Portney, a political science professor at Tufts University, also apologized and said he was to blame for the error.

“I think I probably owe an apology to anybody who was adversely affected by this,” Portney said. “I take responsibility for that.”

The Tab’s editor, Gail Spector, said in a telephone interview today that ‘‘we’re aware that they made a mistake.’’ She said Salter and Portney have written ‘‘an apology letter that will be run prominently.’’

While the guest column stated that residents’ opinions of public services had declined drastically, city data indicated that was not the case.

For example, the survey data shows that 52.7 percent of respondents said the city’s elementary schools were ‘‘good,’’ compared to 54 percent giving the same answer in 2005. For middle schools, the results were 43 percent in 2009 compared to 45 percent in 2005; for senior high schools, results were nearly identical at 45.8 percent and 45.1 percent.

“We’re not surprised that the analysis shows that residents are pleased with the high quality of public education we have always provided in Newton,” said city spokesman Jeremy Solomon.

“I am pleased that, in fact, the public opinion polls show that the public’s attitude toward our schools remains favorable and relatively unchanged,” said School Committee chairman Marc Laredo.

The city’s data differed from the picture painted earlier this week in the guest column, in which Salter and Portney wrote, “The bad news is that many city services, including those that Newtonites usually consider to be among the most important, have declined precipitously,” Salter and Portney wrote.

Even services that, according to the column, dropped in public satisfaction “by 20 percentage points or more” were not shown by city data to have significantly declined. For example, satisfaction with health code enforcement, an area singled out by the pair, fell only 2.2 percentage points since 2005.

The explanation for the discrepancy lies in how the residents answering ‘‘Don’t know’’ to the survey were tallied.

In 2005, for example, 2.2 percent rating the city’s elementary schools answered ‘‘poor,’’ 11 percent said ‘‘fair,’’ 54 percent said ‘‘good,’’ and 32.9 percent said ‘‘Do Not Know,’’ according to city data.

But if the ‘‘Do Not Know’’ answers are stripped from the total, it appears that 3.3 percent answered ‘‘poor,’’ 16.3 percent said ‘‘fair,’’ and 80.4 percent said ‘‘good’’ — the same percentage that appears to be included on Salter’s and Portney’s charts for 2005.

The error, confirmed by Portney, inflated the previous years’ numbers and made it look as though there had been a huge drop-off in public opinion — from 80.4 percent in 2005 to 52.7 percent this year — when in fact the percentages were nearly level.

The 14-member Citizen Advisory Group was formed last year by the mayor, the president of the Board of Aldermen, and the chairperson of the School Committee to study how to make city services more effective and efficient.

In April, the group released a several-hundred page report, calling for the city to restructure its municipal and school operations, and recommending a host of new fees, including charging residents for trash pickup.

The report is so influential that two Newton groups – Citizens for the Future of Newton and Newton 20/20 – have scheduled an Aug. 26 forum for the city’s four mayoral candidates to discuss the proposals it contains.

Salter said this recent error shouldn’t raise questions about the earlier report because drafts of that report had been vetted publicly before the final report was issued.

Solomon said the resident survey was sent with census forms to each of the city’s approximately 32,000 households. This year 10,435 households returned the survey — a response rate of about 33 percent — down from the 17,004 households that returned the form in 2004.

Even those who return the surveys do not answer all of the questions. On the question rating elementary education, for example, 3,714 respondents said “good,” 827 said “fair,” 142 said “poor,” 2,364 said “Do Not Know,” and 3,388 skipped the question altogether.