Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  Over Carol Johnson’s six years at Court Street, the good numbers went up. Fifty-five percent of tenth-graders passed the MCAS, up from 44 percent; 38 percent of students took Algebra I (important for getting into college), up from 4 percent; 66 percent of students graduated from high school in four years, a city record. And the bad numbers went down. The dropout rate, for example, fell from 9.4 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2011. Art and music are back in the schools. Enrollment is higher than it’s been in some time. Full-day kindergarten is available for all five-year-olds.

  And a program I started my first year as mayor, sending one fifth-grade class every year to see a play downtown, still sparks imaginations. When I was a youngster, I was never exposed to the arts or taken to the theater or museums. When I reached the City Council, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to these things. Boston’s kids shouldn’t have to wait so long.

  “If it can work here, [reform] can work anywhere,” Harvard’s Jerry Murphy said way back in 1995. The Boston example shows it can. Slowly, without the dramatic gains many parents had hoped for—or, frankly, that I had anticipated from a doubling of the school budget to $775 million and an increase in per-pupil spending to more than $19,000, among the highest of any city school system in the country—slowly, incrementally, unevenly, it worked here. The arc of progress is unmistakable in the percentage of tenth-graders passing the MCAS: from 25 percent in 1998 to 86 percent in 2012.

  Reform took the kids and the teachers and administrators. It took the voters staying the course. It took Payzant and Johnson and me. It took a city.

  A month before my March 2013 announcement that “I’m not retiring but turning one page of this chapter,” Boston closed the book on a bad chapter of its history. A year ahead of the fortieth anniversary of Judge Garrity’s court order, the BPS adopted a school assignment plan that strengthens neighborhoods. If that doesn’t sound remarkable, you don’t know Boston.

  On any school day morning, if you stood at the corner of Westville Street and Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, not far from the Burke, you would have seen forty-six different buses picking up 369 different students and transporting them to forty-eight different schools. That was Boston’s three-zone school assignment plan at work. Parents had roughly two dozen schools to choose from, with a lottery deciding whether they got their top pick. (My family knew the frustrations of choosing a school: At one point my six grandchildren were all BPS students.) The crazy-quilt transport scheme was a hangover from busing to achieve racial balance. The BPS stopped that kind of busing in the late 90s, when there were too few white kids left in the district to make racial balance feasible.

  “Busing” ended. But the buses never stopped rolling, and the dollars kept pouring into gas tanks. In 2009 the district bused five thousand fewer children than it did in 1999 in only five fewer buses. On a quarter of the trips, only a quarter of the buses were full. Of ten buses dropping off students at the Mission Hill School, two carried only one passenger. Nearly empty buses padded a school transportation bill totaling $76 million a year, money subtracted from teaching and learning.

  Yet efforts to take the buses off the streets by allowing kids to attend “walk-to” schools were seen by many African American parents as a step backward. To them the “neighborhood school” did not stir memories of the good times before busing but of the racial inequity busing was intended to remedy. They feared the schools in their neighborhoods would never improve. And they resisted changing the child-scattering system of school choice played out every morning at the corner of Westville and Geneva.

  That system was destroying neighborhood cohesion. Kids living next door to each other attended different schools. They didn’t walk home together. Or share the same teachers or homework. They barely knew each other. In prehistoric Hyde Park, school-based neighborhood friendships were the norm. I wanted Boston’s twenty-first-century kids to have what we had then.

  As long as most schools were bad and only a few good, the neighborhood school had no chance in Boston. But by 2010, education reform had raised the performance of enough schools to alter the post-busing trade-off of neighborhood schools and solidarity for educational quality and racial equity. My back-to-the-future dream of Hyde Park for all was within reach.

  In my 2012 State of the City address I said that “one year from now Boston will have adopted a radically different student assignment plan, one that puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes.” Guided by the School Committee, I named a twenty-seven-member External Advisory Committee to fulfill my promise. Its task was to come up with a plan that, in a system where not all schools were good, would assign kids to a good school close to their homes.

  The panel studied the issue for a year, holding over seventy public meetings. While panelists and parents debated the options, Peng Shi could often be seen in the back of the room. An MIT graduate student from Kunming, China, Peng was practicing the Menino method—listening.

  Eventually he spoke up: “What I’m hearing is, parents want close to home but they also really care about quality. I’m working on something to try to meet those two goals.” He cranked up MIT’s computers and they spat out an algorithm. It gave each family a list of six schools to chose from, starting with the two closest high-quality ones, then the next two closest of medium quality. Peng’s list combined geography and quality. Just what the parents wanted.

  The panel had many plans to choose from. In February 2013 it picked Peng Shi’s. Unanimously. The vestiges of the school assignment plan that fueled the busing crisis will soon be gone. Busing will no longer break up community in Boston.

  This is the most difficult job I’ve ever had in my life. . . . The highs and lows come daily. When I haven’t been successful at managing the classroom, when I am talking about something I care about, like the civil rights movement, but the students don’t share my enthusiasm . . . Ooh, it is a time for pain, a time for crying. . . . There is incredible pain working with students who at times come to school with such great deficits. But the rewards, the affirmations that I belong, come in unexpected ways. After one particularly difficult class, a student wrote me a note that I will save until the day I die. It said: “Miss Powell, we are listening. We are learning. Thank You.”

  —Yvonne Powell, teacher at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School. With degrees from Brown, Harvard, and MIT, and a corporate career in finance, planning, and recruiting, the fifty-four-year-old Powell began teaching U.S. and African American history in 2000.

  All good. But what about that symbol of my twenty-year commitment as Boston’s “education mayor”? Had the “incremental progress” of the schools reached that school?

  “There was a real crisis at the Jeremiah Burke,” I told the press as early as 1998, when the Burke regained its accreditation. “We had to put extra resources there, and we did. We’ll wean them eventually. Now we’re putting extra resources into Dorchester High.” Which was in danger of losing its accreditation. Tom Payzant spoke more bluntly: “The Burke is enriched now beyond other high schools in the city. Not that that’s not great, but we can’t afford it.” Except in unusual cases like the Burke’s loss of accreditation, Payzant followed a “formula of equality.” All schools would be treated alike. All have the same ratio of staff to students.

  Headmaster Steve Leonard hoped that “wouldn’t be the last word” on extra help for the Burke. Payzant, he said, didn’t “want to believe that this school requires a whole lot more resources than the formula says.” To Leonard it was clear that “every time this school gets above . . . a certain number of students, it falls apart.”

  Two thousand one was the year the Burke sent all its graduating seniors to college. It was also the year that Steve Leonard moved on and funding was cut back to pre-crisis levels. Staff laid off. Enrollment increased.

  “Comeback School Holds Its Breath,” read a Globe headline in November 2002. The story told of rising violence at the Burke. Three teachers had been assaulted. A female stud
ent was sent to the hospital after another student “used the heel of her boot as a weapon.” Two mothers of feuding students were arrested for fighting with knives in front of the school. “There are a lot of fights,” a sophomore boy said. “It’s just the way it is.”

  It was not the way it was a year earlier, when the Burke had nearly two hundred fewer students and twelve more staff to patrol the halls.

  In 2006 the Burke was closed for two years for a $49 million reconstruction. A nearby branch library also was due for renovation and expansion. I ordered plans for the separate projects scrapped. Start over, I said. Put library and school together. Architectural Rec­ord named the reborn Burke, designed by the Boston-based firm Schwartz/Silver Architects, one of its “Schools of the Twenty-first Century.” “The new wing facing Geneva Avenue,” it wrote, “gleams like a beacon of possibility in its rugged environment of auto-repair shops and vacant lots.” It was the first new facility in my Community Learning Initiative, a citywide program to promote lifelong learning. In 1982 Al Holland, padlocked the doors against the neighborhood. “Today, we reopen the doors to one of the centerpieces of the Grove Hall community,” I said at the Burke in 2008, welcoming students and staff to their new building on the first day of school.

  That was the good news for the Burke. It had a new school library, cafeteria, kitchen, and gym. It had a performing arts studio, a family center, and renovated science and computer labs. The bad news was that, two years after its award-winning reconstruction, the state’s Board of Education found the Burke among “the worst of the worst” schools in Massachusetts. It was threatened with a state takeover. The headmaster was gone and the staff had to reapply for their jobs. Many would not get them back.

  I issued a lame statement about the latest crisis in what the Globe termed this “barometer of Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s effectiveness in improving the city’s schools over the past 16 years.” What could I say? That I knew how to bring the Burke back but the city couldn’t afford it? That it was a question of national priorities? That if the Pentagon would only outspend the next ten countries combined instead of the next fifteen, the Burkes in every American city could work wonders? That we had hit on a formula and proven it twice and just needed the resources to apply it? That’s what I should have said.

  “There was an earthquake at my school” was how a senior described what happened at the Burke. The wholesale shedding of staff seemed all wrong to him. “When I saw who lost their jobs, it didn’t make much sense to me,” he told a reporter. “A lot of them were some of the best teachers. . . . What really got to me, though, was that no one, in this whole process, bothered to ask us, the students, what we thought. . . . We know who stays late. We know who calls home, talks to our parents, makes sure we’re doing the work. We know who cares about us.”

  He called Court Street. “I talked to a lady. She was an assistant superintendent or something like that. She said they had a process and everything was done properly, but she said I made a good point about the students being ignored. She said, ‘I’ll pass on the information and get back to you.’ Well it’s been two weeks and nobody’s called me. I guess they don’t care what we think.

  “They’re looking in the classroom, but they really need to look in the home,” he said, surfacing a hard truth about the struggle for the schools. “A lot of the kids who have problems at school have problems at home. But they can’t reassign the parents, so they reassign the teachers.”

  A young woman, also a senior, “was shocked that the Burke was listed as underperforming. I thought, so what does this mean for me? That I am not prepared for college?” Echoing the cheerleader in 1996, at the start of the up-and-down story of the Burke, whose hopes for a scholarship crumbled when the Burke lost its accreditation—echoing the same anxiety about her future as that cheerleader, she asked, “Will the college admission people think twice before accepting me?”

  A sign on Tom Payzant’s desk read, “What have I done for children today?” The answer is: Not enough. We did not do enough for that young woman. We did not do enough for the young man. It would be small comfort for them to know that we—the people of this rich and powerful country—wanted to do more. We just didn’t want it enough.

  “I’M NOT A FANCY TALKER”

  That was the first sentence I spoke as mayor in January 1994. I was following Tip O’Neill’s advice to hang a lantern on your troubles. I couldn’t hide my speech troubles if I wanted to.

  I’m not unique in American politics. I once read a parody of President Eisenhower delivering the Gettysburg Address that begins, “I haven’t checked the figures, but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered eastern areas . . .”

  Among mayors, Chicago’s Richard J. Daley was a gaffe machine who once praised “Alcoholics Unanimous” and for “tandem bicycle” said “tantrum bicycle.” Stan Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy, milked a career of laughs from doing that: “suffering from a nervous shakedown.”

  “Shakedown” is a “malapropism,” for “Mrs. Malaprop,” a character in an English comedy who uses the wrong word in place of the right word with a similar sound. I’ve been called “Mayor Malaprop.”

  In private conversation I’d usually speak clearly. But put a microphone in front of me and I might say things like “The principal reserves the right to install mental detectors” or “He’s the best public service I know” or “We can’t just sit in our hands.”

  “Fred Flintstone. Barney Rubble. And ‘Mumbles’ Menino makes three,” columnist Dave Nyhan once wrote, capturing my voice. In my thick Boston accent “Mayor” was “May-uh,” “Commonwealth” “Cawmulth.” And I talked out of the side of my mouth. So even when I spoke correctly, I sounded wrong. When I called the lack of parking spaces in Boston “an Alcatraz around my neck,” I sounded like Stan Laurel. People didn’t feel cruel laughing at me for these howlers because I laughed at myself.

  Over my twenty years in office, Boston’s teams won three World Series, three Super Bowls, one NBA championship, and one Stanley Cup. I was frequently called on to salute our local heroes. I did it my way.

  Describing a key Red Sox–Yankees playoff battle in 2004, I said, “Davy Roberts stole second base, Mueller hit the double, got him in, then Ortiz won the game. . . . There’s so many . . .” I was doing great; then I wandered down memory lane: “Jim Lomborg had the great year he had.” Except it was Lonborg, and he pitched for the 1967 Red Sox.

  “There’s a lot of heart in this team, let me just tell you,” I said about the 2012 Celtics. “KJ is great but Hondo is really the inspiration. Hondo drives the team.” I meant “KG,” for Kevin Garnett, and Rajon Rondo. Memory lane again: “Hondo” was the nickname of Johnny Havlicek, who drove the great Celtics teams of the 60s and 70s.

  A press release from City Hall hailing the Bruins for winning the 2011 Stanley Cup would have been ignored. But when I called the Bruins “great ballplayers on the ice and great ballplayers off the ice,” it made news.

  An embarrassing moment came during a media event for the 2012 Patriots. They were facing a playoff against the Ravens, and I was on the phone betting a lobster on the Pats with the mayor of Baltimore. I said I expected great things from quarterback Tom Brady and nose tackle “Vince Wilcock.” Except that his name is Wilfork. Close? Yes, but I was wearing his jersey. With his name on it.

  “Menino’s Greatest Feat: He Can’t Talk About Sports,” read a Boston Magazine headline. Feat? In sports-mad Boston my “often comical ignorance about its sports teams and most popular players” didn’t hurt me with voter-fans. I left office with an 83 percent approval rating (“Menino More Popular Than Kittens”) because people judged me on the condition of the city, not on the slips of my tongue.

  The truth is, I rarely watched sports—or anything else—on TV. I focused all my attention on the city. Asked about the size of the city budget, Kevin White would make up a number. I knew it to the doll
ar. Instead of watching sports, maybe Bostonians sensed I was watching out for them. And as my doozies piled up, some observers wondered whether “Menino’s . . . comical ignorance” of sports was more comedy than ignorance. The Globe’s Shirley Leung voiced a growing suspicion: “Menino . . . played us masterfully, knowing a slip of the tongue could generate headlines and sound bites.” I kept ’em guessing.

  At Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain with Mayor Ray Flynn and former mayor Kevin White when I was a city councilor.Courtesy of the Menino Family

  On a panel with President Bill Clinton to discuss the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant in 1994. Community policing reminded me of the neighborhood cops on the beat in Hyde Park in the 1950s.Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

  After the panel, at lunch with President Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy at Mike’s City Diner, which was a cash-only place. I picked up the tab.John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe / Getty Images