Menino tells bus company it's on thin ice

Do you have an answer to the problems that arise from segregation when its all about neighborhood schools anywhere in the entire Boston area? If you think you can address the disparities that arise, what is your preferred scheme?

I don't disagree that busing started with horrendous inequalities ... and perpetuated them as well. I had young relatives in those schools in the early 80s. But that's because busing was fundamentally designed to pit the poor against the poor for what was always an inadequate pool of resources. Rather than upgrade the schools in the minority areas, the already too-small pot got split with the less affluent white populations.

That still doesn't get around the persistent segregation by neighborhood in Boston - and in the entire Boston area, really. Perhaps "area" schools would be better ... de link school boundaries from neighborhood boundaries and mix it up, changing boundaries in response to demographic shifts. Kids still go to schools nearby, just not based on enclaves.

My city just went through a consolidation of schools from "neighborhood" schools to four schools serving large areas, and those boundaries have moved as populations have changed. My kids have never gone to neighborhood schools. This was done in part because of segregation issues (economic and racial), and because of the need to build modern facilites.

Also ... suburban? I can see the Hancock and Pru from my dining room, and I may very well live closer to downtown than you do. Just because Boston is unusual in that it does not have much of its densely populated urban area to the north and south within its physical borders, doesn't make where I live suburban in any meaningful demographic context. When people in my field classify areal units for health studies, my census tract is classified as "urban" based on population density.

In any case, I think the numbers I was even thinking of are probably ten years old. My impressions are in large part anecdotal anyway, but I think it's hard to quantify the effects of that lottery feeling on parents. We managed to navigate our way through the BPS with some success, but too many parents quit--they feel as if they're gambling on their kids education, and I think they just feel less connected to the schools, especially when they have to travel from East Boston to Brighton, say, to attend a teacher meeting or a school play. The high-quality schools that I've seen--and again, this is just my impression--are the ones where the neighborhood and the parents feel some sense of ownership and connection and have worked hard to improve the school. I suspect--and maybe this is naive--that this would work in Mattapan as well as the North End. And if there were still options for parents who wanted to bus their kids, then maybe that would alleviate the anxiety that some families clearly still feel about being cut off or segregated somehow.

It does make things look more unfortunate than they are when you draw a circle around a part of a city that happens to be largely minority and impoverished and say 'all you kids here, you stay in here.' I am opposed to creating such a zone, and even more opposed to creating a cutesy euphemism for it. However, saying to all the kids 'just go to the nearest school' is different, especially if you back it up by making sure there is a nearest school.

Carol Johnson is going to take a lot of fire no matter what she does. Close the Agassiz. Open the Agassiz. Move the Agassiz. It doesn't matter: fire results. She should choose to take fire for doing something productive instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I question the idea that the schools in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan are all underperforming. What's the basis for the assertion? The basis for such an assertion is usually that the kids who go to the 'underperforming' schools have done more poorly on some standardized tests or other. Well, look, America is not a land of equality. It's hard to be poor. If you make a standardized test whose results don't reflect this hardship, you have made a bad test. If you aggregate the demonstration of this hardship and conclude that the schools suck (rather than that inequality exists), then you're making a poor jump of reasoning.

The most compelling arguments made in the days of attempted desegregation were that the schools receiving a racial imbalance on the darker side were poorer than those imbalanced on the other side. These arguments were made on objective bases, such as money per student, books per student, teachers per student. They were correct, and it was scandalous. Today, however, these arguments are no longer valid. It is a certainty that the average dollar amount spent to educate a poor African-American child in the BPS is significantly greater than the average amount spent to educate a middle-class white child. And there are very good reasons for that: typically, these students need more help, because of higher rates of learning disability, ESL, etc. This extra money is money well spent. And if you need 70 million more of it, I know where it is.

The extra money spent on busing kids willy-nilly about the city is poorly spent. If spent wisely, it could assure that schools in areas with higher rates of poverty and other difficulties had the resources they need to provide for their student population. Extra paras, extra libraries, extra field trips. This is what is being given up for the false promise of equality suggested by "choice."