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Mayor Menino to adopt "radically different student assignment plan"
By Anonymous on Tue, 01/24/2012 - 2:32pm
West Roxbury Patch reports:
Connolly to Lead Council's Review of Student Assignment Process
City Councilor John Connolly will lead the Council's review of the Boston Public Schools student assignment plan. His announcement comes days after Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's State of the City Address in which the Mayor called for "a radically different student assignment plan."
Connolly's order will be introduced during tomorrow's City Council meeting. No dates have been set yet for the City Council hearings, but Connolly wants to give parents an opportunity to weigh in on what makes a quality school, the challenges parents face with the current assignment process, and changes parents would like to see.
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Comments
How BPS does assignments, the
How BPS does assignments, the lottery or otherwise, does not create winner and losers, good schools and inadequate schools create winners and losers. No matter how we assign students to schools, the problem comes back to how the schools perform.
The mayor is committing to a new assignment plan, this before the hearings and before he's presented his argument for how new assignment improves the schools.
Connolly argues that the assignment plan should be designed around community based schools. He argues that where Boston Public Schools have failed, they'll start to succeed when everyone goes to school closer to home. He doesn't say why.
Mr Connolly went to Harvard. For him, that's close to home but students go there from all over the world so clearly proximity is NOT the defining factor is good schools.
I do not know know where this solution came from, and it may not be an actual solution so much as a preference that being framed as a solution. It would be good to know the background on this "solution."
Community based schools cannot explain the success of the METCO program. All of the METCO students travel a distance everyday to go to good schools, where they can get a good education and gain admission to excellent academic institutions like Bowdoin and Tufts. If the school in their neighborhood (IR Roxbury) was not so good, and the METCO school they attended was excellent (IE Weston) then we have examples that demonstrate the opposite of Mayor Menino and John Connolly plan for school improvement through community-based assignment.
There is a lot of data on what makes schools successful. What does that data say?
Politics is Boston drives a narrative that sounds reason-based but is terribly flawed. The argument for community-based school assignment as a solution to under-performing schools is terribly flawed.
any kid who has to spend 2
any kid who has to spend 2 hours everyday to being cooped up on a bus in "America's Walking City" is losing alot
commuting to school
Kids take the MBTA to get to Roxbury Latin, Catholic Memorial, BC High and Boston Latin. I don't see them "losing alot."
METCO busing is sending kids
METCO busing is sending kids to school districts which otherwise use the community school model. If Boston used its cash to fund good community schools instead of busing kids all over east overshoe the quality of education would be better and students would have more of a connection to their communities.
Union Stools
Schools are underfunded because a large portion of the allocated funding goes to bussing and union stools, IE Bus drivers and over paid part time(seasonal) teachers. Teachers should be paid on their performance just like their student are graded on theirs.
What percentage of the BPS
What percentage of the BPS budget goes to bussing?
Show your evidence that teachers who are members of a union are less effective teachers.
$70 million
About 9% of the BPS budget is devoted to transportation (=busing)
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/view/fy-2012-bu...
Total FY12 budget = $829 million
• Transportation: A majority of our students rely on bus transportation to get to school every day. BPS also provides – and pays for – bus transportation for charter school, private school and parochial students who are not enrolled in the Boston Public Schools. State law requires BPS to drive charter school students to their schools even if they are outside their home zone, which is a much higher level of service than is provided to most students in BPS. BPS already spends more than $70 million per year on transportation. If nothing changes, annual transportation costs are expected to exceed $100 million in the next three years.
can't save it all
Even if you shift to more neighborhood schools kids still need to be bused. You can probably only sacve about half the transportation budget.
good point, and important to
good point, and important to remember, but look at my post below and cut those in half-- i still have to think that those would be game changers
break it down
$70 million per year is:
1,400 new teachers with masters degrees
or
an average $16,588 annual pay increase for every single teacher in the system
or
a $522,388 budget bump for every school in the city
sources:
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/salaries
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/facts-and-figures
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/view/fy-2012-bu...
Some metco kids go to
Some metco kids go to Framingham, some go Weston. Both towns have one (1) high school. It's not a question of these being community schools or proximate to the students attending from, say Mattapan.
The argument that going to a school closer to home will improve the school closer to home is ... unproven.
METCO works because of the parents more than the schools
METCO is successful because all the parents/guardians are actively invested in their kid getting a good education. You have to be engaged to even apply and then keep your kid getting up early and schlepping to the 'burbs.
Students with engaged parents will do better no matter where they go. There was a study in Chicago on similar program that showed just having a family that tried to get you in the program meant you did better, whether you got a placement or not.
"Students with engaged
"Students with engaged parents will do better no matter where they go." Amen.
Easier for parents to be
Easier for parents to be engaged with the children's schools when those schools are in their neighborhoods!
parent engagement with their children's education AND the school
It's not either/or, it's both. When students take a demanding workload from early in their high school careers and are ready for AP as juniors and Seniors... it takes good teachers, a demanding curriculum and parent engagement.
Solution: put all Boston
Solution: put all Boston students in the Metco program.
What do you propose then?
As others have posted, METCO is successful because Boston kids get shipped to community based schools that are surrounded by actively engaged parents. Period. You argue at length against community schools, but you don't present any solution to Boston's chronically under performing system. So no, status quo is no longer an option in Boston and I am glad that Menino is finally stepping up.
Metco is great but.....
it isn't the panacea to urban education. Black students in Metco programs still fare much worse on tests and general college placements than their suburban white classmates.
Race is a huge issue with education in Boston, and schools are only a small section of the overall educational developemnt of minority students.
I believe radical social reforms must be made in order to even the scales with the racial divides that exist in education, housing, job issues, etc.
more than race, income. it's
more than race, income. it's true that wealth at home and in the community correlates highly to good educational outcomes.
what we've also learned is that students from poor backgrounds can achieve at higher levels if they're brought into "good" schools.
i'm afraid Menino and Connelly who have already decided their top reform priority is community school thereby having eliminated their biggest opportunity, identifying a set of reforms that would increase the performance of schools throughout Boston. They've chosen, and their choice will move Boston away from a system that counteracts institutionalized racism in Boston public education.
Curtailing busing and
Curtailing busing and promoting more quality neighborhood schools will bring back some of the academically-oriented and engaged parents with resources who have already left BPS or will leave if their kid doesn't get their "choice" in the current lottery assignment system. You know, parents like John Connolly.
Agreed.
I think that a lot of the advantages of neighborhood schools are intangible or at least difficult to quantify, but I think giving parents more of a sense of control will do a huge amount to keep young middle-class families in the city and will help lift the schools in countless ways.
Why do you assume busing
Why do you assume busing lowered the quality of schools in Boston? On what evidence do you base that claim, and what do you say caused it?
I think neighborhood schools
I think neighborhood schools are tremondously important. As a working parent, I want to be involved in my students school but have limited time because of my work hours. If my child is assigned to an elementary school cross that makes it very difficult for me to be actively involve let alone coordinating "drop off" and "pick up" because I will not send my 4 or 5 year on a bus to a part of the city I do not know.