Payzant didn’t oversell the Payzant cure for the schools. Progress would be slow. He promised setbacks. Guaranteed mistakes. But he also spoke of cooperation as a force for change. Through joint effort and open communication, the teachers and staff of the Boston Public Schools would get there . . . Where? A better education for the kids. And his voice warmed when he mentioned the kids. Sure, he had a Harvard Ph.D. But he wouldn’t have got the job without that. Following protocol for federal officials, he paid for his own lunch. A small sign of integrity not lost on me.
An education reporter asked Payzant something many in Boston were curious about: Why “as a federal official who had once headed a district [San Diego] twice the size of Boston” did he want to come here? “There seems to be an unusual opportunity in Boston right now,” he replied, with the accountable mayor, the appointed school committee, and the professional superintendent all on the same team, all pulling in the same direction. “It is rare that this happens in a major city.”
Boston’s next superintendent, Payzant thought, faced twin challenges: convincing the public that “change and excellence” are “doable” and that change takes time. Those challenges defined the ten-year struggle for the schools.
On one side, school reform had to fight “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” former President George W. Bush’s phrase for the belief that “those kids can’t hack it”—that the schools can’t compensate for the injuries inflicted by poverty and racial isolation. “You can’t make gold out of straw,” said one teacher, speaking anonymously to a reporter. “We are asked to do so much, be everything, everybody. You need dedicated parents. Kids’ friends are being shot and then they come to school. Do you want to try to teach them?”
Well-meaning minority voices called Payzant’s fixation on raising scores unfair. Why make poor city kids take tests with built-in upper-middle-class bias? Lower the bar. Adjust the scale. Shield city kids, at least temporarily, from discovering how far behind suburban kids they are.
If one side was resigned to the status quo or protective of it, the other demanded change yesterday. Why aren’t scores rising faster? Why, Mr. Mayor, keep Payzant on year after year when he has produced so few “deliverables”? Why can’t those kids hack it?
Payzant took charge at Court Street on October 1, 1995. A December poll found voters “overwhelmingly” in favor of restoring the elected school committee in the referendum less than a year away.
The polls consistently predicted I was on the wrong side of “Question No. 2.” Friends advised me: Walk away from a lost cause. The voters want an elected committee. Don’t stand in their way. But the big wheel of politics was turning my way. Nineteen ninety-six was a presidential election year. Turnout was expected to be double what it was for the first referendum on the School Committee held during the 1989 City Council elections. Running as an incumbent, Bill Clinton would pull out the vote in neighborhoods that took a pass on city elections—the South End, Mission Hill, the Back Bay, Beacon Hill. Their liberal “good government” voters would respond to my case that the elected committee had been a hive of “shameless grandstanding, rampant patronage, and dirty politics.”
On the other side, champions of the elected committee advanced a superficially appealing populist counterargument: Let the voters decide. Only elites who don’t trust “the people” could be against democratic control of the schools. I bridled at that charge. I trusted the people to hold the mayor accountable for the schools. What was undemocratic about that?
Not so fast, retorted opponents like State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, who represented a minority district: “How do you get accountability for the schools? You can’t expect it when it depends on one man who’s in charge of everything in the city.” Unlike a school committee facing the voters every two years, a busy mayor serving four years would lose track of the schools.
Another black official warned minority voters that if they voted no, the Old South would rise again . . . in Boston. The white mayor, the white members of the appointed school committee, and the white superintendent overseeing the mostly minority kids in the Boston schools would succumb to a “plantation mentality.” I was lucky the circumstances didn’t invite “lynching.”
The Question 2 referendum was the critical vote of my two decades in office. I took it so seriously that I sought debates with “yes” supporters. In a televised duel held on the marble steps of the altar at Trinity Church, my opponent, City Councilor Mickey Roache, scored when he pointed out that the Burke, a symbol of failure, lost its accreditation under my appointed committee. It was the kind of moment your handlers try to smooth over: “Don’t worry, Mayor. Nobody watched the thing. Monday Night Football was on”—even if it was Wednesday.
We conducted two campaigns. One of public education. The other of political mobilization.
In the months ahead of the vote, we brought together different constituencies to hear our case. Several evenings a week, my education adviser Martha Pierce and I left City Hall and went to a nearby campaign office. There we spoke to groups of parents, teachers, principals, university presidents, and other interested parties. We also took our show on the road, to community newspapers, to senior centers, to school auditoriums, to living rooms.
The issue did not break down neatly on racial lines. Though polls in white neighborhoods indicated strong opposition to the appointed committee, some of the stiffest resistance came from minority parents. They hated to lose those four members of the old School Committee, the only black elected officials in city history. But those black members were outnumbered by conservative whites. Our appointed committee, by contrast, was majority minority. That’s why the Urban League supported us, and why a former head of the Boston NAACP had agreed to run the “no” campaign.
Another common objection to the appointed committee was that it gave me too much power. I could stack the committee with political hacks.
Our pushback was to remind people of the checks and balances written into the enabling legislation passed in 1991. It vested the power to nominate School Committee members in a board of prestigious figures from education, business, and nonprofits. The board had thirteen members; nine were chosen by the governor and a committee of the legislature, only four by the mayor. I couldn’t pack the School Committee with hacks even if I wanted to.
But that was the last thing I wanted. With feeling in my voice, I promised parents, “I’m in this fight for your kids, not my power.”
It helped our side that Question 2 read like it had begun life in a foreign language, with a “no” vote signifying yes to the appointed committee. How could the city election department let that happen?
It helped that the “Vault,” a group of Boston employers alive to appeals from the same City Hall that assessed their property, kicked in $600,000 to finance TV ads, 235 times what the “yes” folks managed to raise. And although I want big money out of politics, I admit it helped that, on referendum questions, corporations can contribute directly and without limit to favored causes.
On Labor Day we mounted a full-court press, flooding the city with signs, holding rallies, gaining endorsements. Counting the Timilty-White fights, this was my ninth Boston election. I knew how winning campaigns felt. This one didn’t feel right. By early October, the post–Labor Day momentum was draining away. “No” needed help.
I asked my friend Bob “Skinner” Donahue, with twenty-five years of experience running national, state, and local campaigns, to build a parallel field organization. Suddenly bumper stickers were everywhere. Calls from phone banks interrupted suppers. Signs sprouted on lawns.
The appearance of momentum was back. The reality would follow. That’s what campaigns do.
I devoted nearly all my time to the campaign, working the phones to raise money, micromanaging tactics, motivating the troops, taking my case to the voters in neighborhood open houses. In a key battleground, Ward 20 in West Roxbury, I walked door-to-door, and on election night showed up to press the flesh at
two precincts.
A poll conducted in the last week of the campaign found 44 percent for the appointed committee, 25 percent for the elected committee. But 22 percent were undecided. How would they tip?
On Election Day, Angela visited precincts all over the city. Things seemed to be going our way. “As people came to the polls, they winked, they patted me on the shoulder, they said great things,” she told me. That night, in the Eagle Room off my fifth-floor office, the “no” gang waited for the results to come in.
Donahue had compiled a list of fifty swing districts. Ward 8, Precinct 6, in Roxbury was the first to report. In 1989 it had voted for an appointed committee by 5 percent; now by 23 percent. Next came Ward 1, Precinct 12, in Orient Heights, East Boston. Against an appointed committee in ’89, now it was for, 440 to 183.
I worry till the polls close. You can fall for your own campaign. Mistake campaign-generated enthusiasm for the real thing. Over Question 2, I had been on edge for weeks. As a City Hall reporter noted, “Question No. 2 is Obsession No. 1 with the mayor.” Neil Sullivan, director of the Private Industry Council and an adviser to me on the referendum, agreed: “It’s become such a cause for him. . . . It’s as if this intensity for schools has become part of his political identity.” So much was at stake.
The eyes of the education world were on Boston. “There’s more hope around the Boston Public Schools than there has been in the 15 to 20 years I’ve been around,” observed Jerry Murphy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “You have to hope Payzant and Menino can do it.” Along with Chicago, Boston was a pioneer in mayor-driven school change. Twenty-first-century mayors and educators could learn from our successes and failures. “If it can work here, it can work anywhere,” said Murphy.
The eyes of Boston’s politicians were on me. The vote would be read as a verdict on my administration. If my side lost, I’d draw a strong opponent in the upcoming mayoral election.
But now, as Skinner’s bellwether wards began to fall our way, the tension eased. I punched the air with my fists, squeezed Skinner’s shoulders, and whooped in victory. Just then Tom Payzant walked in to congratulate me. Ed Jesser, my longtime friend and political adviser, grabbed Payzant and yelled, “OK, you can stay in town, kid.”
By 3 to 1, the people had spoken. The kid could stay in town.
I was born in Quito, Ecuador. . . . At the Josiah Quincy Upper School, kids made fun of me because I was adopted and had white parents. . . . I sometimes felt like punching them, but as Martin Luther King said, “Learn to love your enemies.” Therefore I was kind and gentle. . . . Courage means to ignore the people who bother you and to love the ones you love. . . . The parents who adopted me are the ones I love a lot.
—Jefferson Payne, sixth-grader at the Josiah Quincy School in 2007
A friend remarked that changing the Boston schools was like “turning the Titanic around in a bathtub.” Performing that feat was now the job of the new captain.
When Tom Payzant cautioned, “It could be years before the numbers turn around,” I groaned. How long should the kids have to wait for the schools they deserved? And I didn’t have “years.” I had until 2001, when I invited voters to “judge me harshly” if scores weren’t up.
Payzant set his course to 2003, when, for the first time, all high school seniors in Massachusetts were scheduled to take a graduation exam, the capstone of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). In the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, the state legislature committed hundreds of millions in state aid to improve local schools. By the late 90s, cities and towns had been spending the money for years. MCAS would measure how well. Seniors who failed to pass the tenth-grade standard would not receive diplomas. Failing schools would be exposed. Jobs would be on the line. The reckoning would come in a seventeen-hour test spread over three days.
Payzant geared everything to MCAS. “All our efforts in Boston are now focused on this challenge,” he wrote in an op-ed column. “We are undertaking massive professional development in all our schools for teachers and administrators. We are providing up to 12 months of intensive instruction and extra supports—at a cost of more than $20 million—for students behind grade level in grades 3, 6, and 9. We are aligning our curricula to the state tests. We are holding ourselves accountable for results.”
His first year on the job, Payzant substituted the more rigorous “Stanford 9” for the test taken in most urban school systems. The Stanford revealed that without dramatic progress, one-half of seventh-graders would not graduate from high school. “A tough reality check,” Payzant called the test. A Roxbury girl called it “horrible.”
For some students, high-stakes tests didn’t motivate them to try harder but discouraged them from trying, period. Kids need success to succeed. But how would they know they had succeeded if they didn’t pass a test? I got that. Still, no great shakes at test taking myself, testing’s casualties weighed on my conscience.
Payzant’s plan was comprehensive:
Since every minute of teaching time counted in the race against MCAS, disruptive middle school students, whose acting out cost their classmates 20 percent of their learning time, would be sent to a school set up to handle them.
With the typical Boston high school student absent twenty-eight days a year, Payzant moved to curtail truancy. Kids couldn’t afford to lose the class time.
Through social promotion, kids had been failing upward. MCAS ended social promotion. But holding kids back encouraged them to drop out. Threading that policy needle, Payzant replaced social promotion with mandatory summer school. Fifty percent of failing students in grades 3, 5, and 7 attended one summer, all eighth-graders the next.
Under the “2 to 6” initiative, which I started before Payzant came aboard, more schools were staying open longer for test prep and other activities.
Following a Menino best practice, Payzant frequently got away from Court Street, visiting at least two of the city’s 127 schools every week, and shaking hands with teachers, students, parents, and custodians. These were friendly visits. They were also unannounced. “We have got to keep the pressure on,” Payzant said, as the months marched toward May 2003.
I was about 2 when my brother and I went to live with my father. My father was still in high school. My mother dropped us off at my father’s house; I didn’t see her again for a long time. . . . My father could have sent us both to a foster home . . . but instead he asked my grandparents to help him raise us. My father . . . never quit trying to make his life better for him and for us. For example, he finished high school and went to college. He is now a registered nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. . . . My father is always an inspiration, and when I am feeling down I go to him and he encourages me to do my best. My father was 18 and took on the responsibility of raising two children when he was a child himself. . . . Courage is accepting responsibility for one’s actions, in spite of the obstacles, and reaching for the stars!
—Darianna Santana, sixth-grader at the Solomon Lewenberg Middle School in 2009
At the Burke, I vowed to make that failing school the “pride of Boston.” Payzant’s “incremental progress” toward MCAS is a two-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust story. The Burke’s story is more dramatic, and more heartbreaking. It highlights the fragility of progress in urban education.
In the weeks surrounding my speech, if you had looked through the Globe’s obituary pages, you would have seen photographs of women who graduated from the Burke in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. A number had won scholarships to Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith, and Barnard. A few had pursued graduate study at Oxford or the Sorbonne. Wives and mothers and grandmothers, they had also been writers and scientists and educators. Named for a former school superintendent who died in 1931, and opened three years later, the Burke was their launching pad, an Art Deco palace of cultural enrichment for the mainly Jewish and Irish Catholic girls of Dorchester.
Times change. By the late 1960s, Grove Hall, the Burke’s once-safe neighborhood, was
gang-ridden. The school went coed in 1972, and like all of Boston’s high schools in the 70s it was rocked by busing.
In 1982, when Albert Holland, an assistant headmaster at South Boston High in the eye of the busing storm, was appointed the Burke’s fourth headmaster in three years, he found a school in chaos. The bathrooms were locked to prevent students from fighting or sexually assaulting one another inside. The halls reeked of human waste. Teachers locked themselves in their classrooms. One of Holland’s first acts was to chain the front doors to keep out gangs.
“Nobody cared about the Burke,” Holland said later. “It was a dumping ground for all the have-nots.”
Supported by Superintendent Robert R. Spillane, Holland set out to bring back the Burke. With an infusion of cash from Court Street, he hired more staff, cleaned and painted the rooms and halls, and invited twenty social service agencies—engaged in everything from pregnancy counseling to dress-for-success coaching—to operate in the school. Importantly, he lowered the Burke’s enrollment.
More money, more staff, more services, fewer kids: the formula for school success. It worked. By 1990, national magazines were hailing the Burke as one of the country’s best public schools. Seventy percent of its graduates went to college. “We had kids going to Cornell, Bates, Michigan, Boston College,” Holland recalled. “We even had a dream of restoring Latin.”
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