Why is BPS so bad and what should be done to improve it? (Boston: daycare, house)

[WestieWhitie]

Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade

Nope. Didn’t happen because of the hate and violence black students faced getting to the school I’m surprised they didn’t stab/shoot more kids they weren’t given a chance to be regular students. Tbh if I got off the bus I would’ve started fighting within a few hours just base off the hostility. The toxic environment white communities created Ed to adverse mental health effects in generations of black kids. It’s a fact that most of the current Boston black gangs formed in the mid 1980s…. in 1974 most of Bostons serious crime was white in white or white on black violence. South Boston probably was more gang entrenched than Roxbury back then.

The fact of the matter is all through the 70s and 80s all over MA the standard white reaction to integration was threats and violence. They did it to Cambodians in Lowell and Revere, they did it to Latinos in Lawrence and Springfield, it’s just how a segment of the white populations acted by default. It didn’t lay the groundwork for cohesive neighborhoods or assimilation. Boston was jus an extreme example of that.

I’ve said it a thousand times and I will say. Again my dads arrived in Boston in 1977 and he always says he’d never seen such ignorant backward poor white people in his life. He said in those days Boston made Trenton look like the Shangri-La. You can glaze over that fact and blame imaginary black people because you’re a racist individual-but we all know what’s true.

Now what happened in BPS after that tumultuous period is to blame on a bit of everybody. But we’re not going to blame the decline of schools on integration with was 20 years delayed.

Failure to comply with federal standards, emotionally and physically abusive teachers, racism, and poor funding model precipitated the Garritty mandate. After that truancy, fights, poor teacher quality then gangs, gun violence, low standards, then came the fracturing of the system with charters, rampant closings and openings/reshuffling, crumbling buildings, incompetent cronyism, too powerful unions. And the list goes on but there’s an order of events here.

Homie, that’s a big wall of text but remind me, what was your hood like before them white devils came back and started gentrifying it? What were the schools like? What’s hamsterdam like right now? How many times did you get jumped? How many gunshots did you hear on a daily basis, how many pounds of trash was there per linear street yard, and how many candle and hennessy bottle ghetto shrines were there per average city block? And most importantly, who in their right mind would want that in their reasonably stable and safe neighborhood?

[BostonBornMassMade]

Originally Posted by WestieWhitie

Homie, that’s a big wall of text but remind me, what was your hood like before them white devils came back and started gentrifying it? What were the schools like? What’s hamsterdam like right now? How many times did you get jumped? How many gunshots did you hear on a daily basis, how many pounds of trash was there per linear street yard, and how many candle and hennessy bottle ghetto shrines were there per average city block? And most importantly, who in their right mind would want that in their reasonably stable and safe neighborhood?

I'm from Hyde Park.

The areas of Dorchester/Roxbury I lived in or spent summer with my uncle/aunt in having looked the same my entire life. Give or take a new triple decker or two.

what did South Boston look like in 1974?

[WestieWhitie]

Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade

I'm from Hyde Park.

The areas of Dorchester/Roxbury I lived in or spent summer with my uncle/aunt in having looked the same my entire life. Give or take a new triple decker or two.

what did South Boston look like in 1974?

So homie, if all those savage, animal, neanderthal white devil-infested hoods where such sh*tholes why would the mighty enlightened Nubian kings and queens want to send their kids there? You’re getting lost in your hustle, as usual!

[bostongymjunkie]

Why do you keep referring to him as homie?

[JacksonPanther]

Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade

I'm from Hyde Park.

The areas of Dorchester/Roxbury I lived in or spent summer with my uncle/aunt in having looked the same my entire life. Give or take a new triple decker or two.

what did South Boston look like in 1974?

Stop responding to people who have no intention of listening to you. And who calls you "Homie."

[WestieWhitie]

Originally Posted by bostongymjunkie

Why do you keep referring to him as homie?

Homie called me homie, I returned the favor.

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

Stop responding to people who have no intention of listening to you. And who calls you "Homie."

Do tell, how would folks in Madison feel if some judgegarrity orders Jackson school population to be bused to their town?

[dazzleman]

Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade

Good comment in the Globe today:


“ Had the redlining patterns that created the ghettoes here in Boston and the United States, generally, not been put into place to begin with, the need for the disastrous Federal Court-mandated large-scale cross-city school busing edict, which helped make many people more angry, fearful and suspicious of each other, and, moreover, did little, if anything to improve a lousy school system would not have come about.

The Boston public school system had/has been a school system in decline for over a hundred years (i. e. since around 1920 or so), which helped give rise to demagogic, patronage-ridden and opportunistic politicians such as Louise Day Hicks and her cronies on the Boston School committee, who refused to integrate the schools on their own like they were supposed to, which resulted in the Federal Courts having to intervene and take much tougher measures than would've otherwise been taken, which helped hieghten already existing racial tensions and hostilities in Boston, speed up the process of white flight from the city and its public schools, and to increase the student school drop-out rate in the city of Boston.

Had the banks and real estate agents affiliated with the B-BURG (Boston Banks Urban
Renewal Group) program allowed non-white homebuyers access to all neighborhoods throughout the city of Boston, rather than singling out Boston's Jewish neighborhoods for the program, there would've been a much better chance of neutralizing Louise Day Hicks and derailing her crusade before it had the chance to really get off the ground, and Boston's public schools and neighborhoods alike would've been much more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically integrated, and there would've been better public schools in the city of Boston at large for both non-white and white students alike today.”

There was so much blame to go around for the whole situation. I do think that Garrity's big mistake was ordering a rushed implement of a deeply flawed state plan that was guaranteed to create more problems than it solved, and was deeply harmful to the people it purported to help. As I understand it, the state plan was drawn up in a fit of pique and intended to inflict maximum pain on the people of Southie. As it turned out, that wasn't a great strategy and the blowback was fierce.

Garrity gave his decision at the end of June and ordered implementation by September. There was nowhere near enough time to pull it off correctly. I think it was highly irresponsible not to give it a bit more thought and more time, and draw some more people into it to get their buy-in to whatever the plan would be, rather than present it as fiat that was highly profitable to oppose and became a symbol of hated judicial autocracy to many in Boston. And it probably would have been wiser to skirt Southie mostly or completely, since their high school was garbage anyway and the black kids would have gotten no real tangible benefit from going there even without the violence.

Did you ever read the book "Common Ground" by Anthony Lukas? I read it as an (inadvertent) criticism of busing and a lot of the people involved. It chronicled three families through the busing crisis - a well-off white "limousine liberal" family living in the early stage gentrification of the South End, who favored busing and living in truly economically and racially integrated neighborhoods, a poor white family in the Bunker Hill projects who opposed busing, and a black family living in subsidized housing in the South End that was ambivalent about busing.

The way it ended up being presented, the well off white family who favored busing cleverly found a way to shield their own children from most of the impact that the poor white families had to face. Within 2 years, they abandoned the South End because of the persistent crime problem there and moved to Newton, so that doesn't say much about their supposedly great commitment to integrated learning and living. The poor white family in the projects was far from privileged and their own high school - Charlestown High School - was far from a center of academic excellence. The situation was accurately described at the time as people "fighting over who sits next to whom in some of the worst schools in the country." And the way things turned out with the black family presented, let's just say that there's good reason that many people wouldn't have been thrilled to have them in close proximity as neighbors or as schoolmates.

It was a very complicated situation that was handled poorly at every level.

[mdovell]

Well I think we've talked a bit about why/how things got bad but what's the solution?

I don't think more charters would be good but enlarged metco could be good.

I'd argue it really comes down to parenting. I get there are some parenting groups but Mass parents united personally I think is a joke. I've dealt with the director, she literally lived down the hall from me and has an active relationship with one of her staff.

[BostonBornMassMade]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

Stop responding to people who have no intention of listening to you. And who calls you "Homie."

Sometimes I will sometimes I won’t these post are read by thousands of people not just him. And there’s lots of people who are more sane than he but who agree with him on some core levels. Any post that counters this type of thought is worth value. Everyone here already knows WW is a flaming racist and part time loony bin escapee. But he/she/it provides a platform for me to expound more. It’s a 10/10 chance I don’t let WW put a wrinkle in my lovely life.

[BostonBornMassMade]

Originally Posted by mdovell

Well I think we've talked a bit about why/how things got bad but what's the solution?

I don't think more charters would be good but enlarged metco could be good.

I'd argue it really comes down to parenting. I get there are some parenting groups but Mass parents united personally I think is a joke. I've dealt with the director, she literally lived down the hall from me and has an active relationship with one of her staff.

Parenting plays a part but it’s just one part. Trying to pinpoint one reasons is just fingerpointing and scapegoating. How many “bad” BPS parents do you personally know or even on a cursory level. BPS mismanagement is a huge factor and a populous that doesn’t have kids and mayors that have kids outside of BPS or never used BPS is another one.