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Wow that's news to me that it's been horribly run since the 1960s. Some of the teachers I've known who worked there have been very bright. Usually it's the administration that is bad not the teachers though
I recommend you read some of Jonathan Kozol's work. for sure BPS was worse in the 1960s than it is now. They used to have bats in classrooms, windows that would not close, they would take kids to the basement and beat them out of sight of others (Kozol says the whip was dipped in vinegar so it would sting more.).
Black children were given 1940s textbooks with songs using the "N*ggers" in them. The teachers also called black students the n-word in school. Sometimes the floorboard and other things in black schools like the Christopher Gibson- were so bad they put the entire school in an auditorium and tried to teach hundreds of kids there at once.
The first day he started working there in the fall of 1964, Kozol says, he was stunned by what he saw. There was no heat in most classrooms. Plaster fell from the ceilings. The window frames had rotted away. With a few exceptions, Kozol says teachers were indifferent and cold toward children of whom they expected little.
"Something about the presence of those African-American children brought out the worst in them." Some teachers referred to the children as "the black stuff." Or as one teacher put it, "This school is a zoo, and those are the animals."
One of the soft-spoken children who was abused in BPS was in prison last when he spoke to him. He was beaten by his foster mother at home and then beaten more at school, and told he was incapable of learning. Not a surprise he went on to murder someone.
I still think much of the blame is on the parents. The teachers give up because the kids are out of control. The pay isn't that bad at bps although with the costs of living skyrocketing the past few years the wages haven't kept up.
One wildcard in all of this is poor immigrant (often Asian) families. They tend to be outliers on the socioeconomic vs test score correlation. It's possible they will lose out. However, what is the alternative? Most other cities don't have BLS and they can't afford affluent suburbs or private schools.
maybe in the zip code system.. By census tract? no. Those are much smaller and more consistent in their economic profiles.
Also, the Vietnamese community has always been in support of these changes. Many if not most Asian kids in Boston live in low-income Asian heavy tracts in Allston, Chinatown and Dorchester. From what I can tell most Chinatown resistance dies off after it was announced they went to the Census Tract system.
Even compared to the great of the county-its not a good school district and has been in decline since Carol Johnson retired-objectively. Whereas many urban district have improved in the same time period. As far as in concerned it's a last resort.
I can only imagine how BPS would be if they had a student population that was normal and healthy for a big city and if they had more traditional high schools. I'd wager itd be the same as it was in 1994-below dismal.
It has not been a good school district since at least the Vietnam War Era before I was born and has been in steady decline since. Old timers in the past privately told me the Boston Public Schools used to have a sense of community which has long since vanished. No one from that generation wants to advance it publicly now because it is politically too hard to get back. We probably don't want to go back to the old days because as you mentioned, there were egregious issues even back then but we really ought to look for something innovative, beyond preparing for the exam schools.
It has not been a good school district since at least the Vietnam War Era before I was born and has been in steady decline since. Old timers in the past privately told me the Boston Public Schools used to have a sense of community which has long since vanished. No one from that generation wants to advance it publicly now because it is politically too hard to get back. We probably don't want to go back to the old days because as you mentioned, there were egregious issues even back then but we really ought to look for something innovative, beyond preparing for the exam schools.
BPS is probably a lot better than the 80s 90s and 2000s. You can simply look at dropout rates and MCAS scores and figure as much ....in the 80s 40% of all kids of all races including whites and Asians would drop out of HS. In the 80s and 90s fights were super common. Even in the 2000s graduation rates never topped 62%.
The cohesion, continuity, community, and social fabric of the incoming students is probably worse now than its ever been-but the school system has a lot more resources, experience, and does a better job with their population than they did in the 80s/90s/2000s. So far as I can tell and just from talking to people educated in BPS from various generations.
BPS is probably a lot better than the 80s 90s and 2000s. You can simply look at dropout rates and MCAS scores and figure as much ....in the 80s 40% of all kids of all races including whites and Asians would drop out of HS. In the 80s and 90s fights were super common. Even in the 2000s graduation rates never topped 62%.
The cohesion, continuity, community, and social fabric of the incoming students is probably worse now than its ever been-but the school system has a lot more resources, experience, and does a better job with their population than they did in the 80s/90s/2000s. So far as I can tell and just from talking to people educated in BPS from various generations.
True. The BPS student population shrank and thinned out over the years. One major failed experiment was the "magnet school" idea of the 1970's and 80's trying to attract students from all over the city to select centralized high schools in the aftermath of busing. Madison Park was one, English High was another. These magnet schools were housed in these large complexes that were not conducive to learning or safety. The result was a clash between oil and water, school safety deteriorated, buildings were vandalized, and families with means got fed up and pulled their kids out of the school system and the City altogether for the suburbs. When the City found they could no longer afford the concept, they downsized, sold off some property, and left the remaining schools wallowing for a while. I think the system is more controllable nowadays because the BPS downsized to the point that they have adequate resources and small enough number of students to handle. I was a substitute teacher in the BPS in the 2000's and back then there were still crowded uncontrollable schools but yeah, the writing was on the wall for those.
True. The BPS student population shrank and thinned out over the years. One major failed experiment was the "magnet school" idea of the 1970's and 80's trying to attract students from all over the city to select centralized high schools in the aftermath of busing. Madison Park was one, English High was another. These magnet schools were housed in these large complexes that were not conducive to learning or safety. The result was a clash between oil and water, school safety deteriorated, buildings were vandalized, and families with means got fed up and pulled their kids out of the school system and the City altogether for the suburbs. When the City found they could no longer afford the concept, they downsized, sold off some property, and left the remaining schools wallowing for a while. I think the system is more controllable nowadays because the BPS downsized to the point that they have adequate resources and small enough number of students to handle. I was a substitute teacher in the BPS in the 2000's and back then there were still crowded uncontrollable schools but yeah, the writing was on the wall for those.
I still don't get how magnet schools failed. They work in most cities. Even Hartford has magnet schools that work- albeit they draw some students from Hartford suburbs but they're mostly low-income and minority. I think Philly has some good magnet schools.
I know Roxbury Latin used to get some of its black students from magnet schools-one of my teachers there told me as much. I would think a Magnet school would be as good as the O'Bryant.
One of the reasons I never attended BPS was due to safety concerns from my parents. When I was young in the early 2000s my neighborhood friends at BPS made fighting sound like part of the core curriculum...One major thing I used to see and my family used to not were tons of teenagers seeming out of school at like 1:45 PM and then kids used to roam the streets in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan but Hyde Park as well...until like 10pm. It seemed they never ever had any significant homework . My father, being raised in Trenton NJ, always said "Boston parents don't parent."
So my understanding was these kids hang out pretty much all day, go to school to fight and hate their teachers and do it all over again. As the early 2010s arrived and I graduated HS I noticed that many of the BPS kids were "softer" than my previous memories but I couldn't tell if it was just the result of me being more grownup. I still saw the inside of what I imagined uncontrollable schools ~2010. When I had a friend transfer from a private school to BPS she recounted how bad it was upon her visits to potential new schools.
Nowadays it seems most BPS students are ELL or children of immigrants and maybe a bit more docile? However, It seems that the standard BPS student is low-income or impoverished and there are way more homeless students, fewer extracurriculars, no continuity, and grades are inflated through the stratosphere.
The increased graduation rates don't mean much to me seeing as I remember working with Reverend Eugene Rivers on some project I cant remember and kids with 4.56 GPA's were getting like 1580 out of 2400 (average is like 1520) on the SAT and going to UMASS. In Baltimore, 41% of HS students has a 1.0 GPA or below but they boast a 71% graduation rate district wide just like Boston.
Graduation rates have to be at least 70% because with the modern economy being the way it is it's probably more harmful to simply not graduate underserving kids than to pass them through. In 2021 you can't do anything BUT crime as an adult without a high school degree. So unless youre absolutely beyond egregious I would think you'd HAVE to graduate kids for the sake of the city's safety if not for anything else...
Boston already was a city of silos prior to the 1970's, which made busing and magnet schools so much more difficult and controversial. They also tried to emulate other cities but did it wrong. Families were crying that they did not want to mix in with the folks from the other side of town but the City was telling them "No, it's a good idea for your kids to come out of your neighborhood and mingle with kids from all over, it's a better learning experience". Say what you will about the argument but that "The City knows how to better take care of our kids than us" thought rubbed many families the wrong way and also led to decades of mistrust from the government. A friend who grew up in Alabama told me busing down there was far less controversial because the teachers the kids had at the old schools were bused along with them to their new schools. Not so in Boston. It was a head on collision with folks that didn't know you, didn't trust you, and ultimately didn't like you. You might ask, well are there any successful magnet schools left in Boston? Apart from a few small pilot and charter schools, the three best examples are the three exam schools, that's all.
I like the sound of the new admissions process, and I'd like to be cautiously optimistic.
However, it does seem that whenever BPS makes a change to "fix" itself, it always ends up making things worse. And the exam schools are/were the last glimmer of hope in the system.
I like the sound of the new admissions process, and I'd like to be cautiously optimistic.
However, it does seem that whenever BPS makes a change to "fix" itself, it always ends up making things worse. And the exam schools are/were the last glimmer of hope in the system.
This is exactly how I feel. I appreciate some of the other replies in this thread giving more context re: support throughout the city, but I'm not sure why so much of the emphasis is on changing admissions of the exam schools and not increasing the quality of non-exam schools.
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