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Consultant recommends BPS shut and sell up to 50 schools, slash central administration and increase student/teacher ratios

An outside audit of Boston Public Schools concludes the system needs to close and sell off between 30 and 50 of its 125 schools and make a wide range of staffing changes to balance its books and get BPS back on track towards bringing test scores up.

The report, by McKinsey and Co., was actually completed a year ago. BPS released the main final report in December, although without a specific school-closing number. But Quality Education for Every Student (QUEST), a BPS parent group, obtained a copy of the initial draft report through a public-records request this month and posted a copy online this week.

McKinsey cited three particular problems with BPS: It now has way too many seats and schools for the number of students it has, it's rudderless under a central administration with little accountability or ability to monitor results and it has way too many kids in expensive special-education classes. The result, McKinsey writes: remarkable increases in test scores between 1995 and 2009 have slowed or stopped and the "achievement gap" between white students and black and Latino students remains the same.

The result, McKinsey wrote, is that Boston spends more per pupil than comparable cities across the country - although McKinsey does acknowledge in the middle of its report that this could also be partly due to the fact that Massachusetts puts more of an emphasis on education than other states and so spends more and on the fact that Boston has a higher cost-of-living than most other cities (in fact, McKinsey acknowledges that when cost-of-living expenses are subtracted, Boston has a lower educational cost than comparable cities).

A key part of the report is an analysis of building use in a public-school system that has 50% fewer students than in the 1970s, but still has many of the same school buildings.

BPS has a significant number of underutilized buildings and classrooms, spreading funds thin across the system and lessening the impact of resources on a per pupil basis.

To concentrate resources more effectively for students, BPS can right-size the district to reflect current and projected BPS enroolment.

McKinsey estimated Boston could earn $120 million to $205 million by selling off those 30 to 50 schools and save $50 million to $85 million a year on top of that through increased efficiencies that would come from running fewer, larger schools - especially if BPS coupled that with increasing the average number of students per teacher, speeding up the mainstreaming of special-ed kids into regular classes, centralizing breakfast and lunch preparation, outsourcing night-time school custodial work and reducing the number of central administrators.

Also, BPS should increase the maximum distance young students might have to walk to a school-bus stop from a tenth of a mile to a quarter of a mile.

The savings, McKinsey says, could help pay for one brand-new, state-of-the-art high school (which McKinsey estimated would only cost $30 million) and a number of similar new elementary schools at $10 million a pop, and would let BPS guarantee a standard level of electives (such as physical education and art) at all schools

And the staff savings would help pay to hire new support workers, such as teacher's aides and counselors, McKinsey wrote.

Although BPS has taken no specific school-closing steps based on the McKinsey report - delivered just before Tommy Chang became school superintendent - officials said during hearings on the BPS budget for the coming fiscal year that they are looking at possibly significant restructuring of BPS. Before voting for the budget, School Committee member Michael LoConto, for example, said that without looking at consolidating schools, the School Committee will face the same agonizing budget process - which included a largescale student protest and walkout - year after year.

The largest cuts in the coming year do reflect the McKinsey suggestion to prune back central administration services.

QUEST, however, blasted the McKinsey report:

In examining the report, QUEST found multiple examples of unsound methodology, particularly around the number of excess seats in Boston Public Schools. “The Mayor and others should stop falsely referring to BPS having 93,000 available seats,” said parent Mary Lewis-Pierce. “The McKinsey report’s ‘seats’ aren’t real. They don’t look at educational needs, and count the square footage of hallways and bathrooms as classroom space.” Parents said the report’s recommendations, which include selling school buildings with high resale value, closing schools with low test scores or which are expensive to repair, increasing class size, and cutting costs to students in need of special education services, would harm children and communities. QUEST stressed that in cities such as Chicago and Newark, school closures have disproportionately impacted children and communities of color, and undercut efforts to close achievement gaps.

The group also questioned why it took the city a year to release the report draft - and four months to do so after the group filed its public-records request.

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Comments

The best disinfectant.

I think I know where you can build your affordable housing.

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and billionaires.....

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No one is arguing we have too many teachers.,McKinsey is arguing we have too many school buildings for the number of students we have today but their methodology is suspect. They count square footage in classrooms and bathrooms as available without regard to teacher: student ratio, a key factor in the progress Boston has made as a district.

Boston is forecast to have population growth. It would be unwise to close schools and repurpose the property so that it could not be used as a school at some time in the future.

The report says we'd save $700,000 by closing a school. We'd have to close 47 schools to close this year's budget gap of $32,000,000 an amount Walsh was willing to fund last year and the year before.

Last year Walsh added $38m in new funding. They year before he added $37m in new funding. Walsh is sitting on almost $200m in new revenue but he's decided not to spend more than 36% of Boston revenue on Boston Schools. The state average is 53% of budget. Towns like Lexington spend 70% of revenue on schools. They get results too. A few years back they sent 6 Lexington High grads to Harvard.

This year Boston Public Schools Quincy Upper School sent its first graduate to Harvard, Johnny F.

Walsh got BPD to cut 15% from its overtime budget of about $80,000,000 or approx. $13m cut, from overtime!

Snow removal had an approx. $8m surplus. Instead of erasing a $5m worth of cuts from schools across the system, Walsh allocated it to parks, sidewalks and streets.

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I'm sure Walsh would swap the fiscal challenges of Boston for the pressure packed financial decisions of a town like Lexington.

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Walsh is sitting on almost $200m in new revenue. He had $150 million to give to GE not including buying them two office buildings and, unless the contract is changed, provide that office space to GE rent-free for 20 years. An 8 million dollar snow removal surplus was given to parks.

I'm a person who thinks a budget is a values statement. I'm not impressed with Walsh's values.

Schools are a fundamental government service. Giving for-profit Fortune 10 companies 25 million in tax abatement with no claw back is not fundamental government service, it's bad deal making.

Boston funds schools at about 36% of budget . The state average is about 53%. We have the funds.

Boston became the best urban school district by providing resources. If we spend those resources on parks or GE instead on schools we stop closing the achievement gap and our students will graduate with fewer opportunities.

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publicschoolmama:

Think about this statement for a minute. If you could just shove kids into a classroom without regard to student/teacher ratio, you could argue that BPS has empty seats.

[snip]

On slide 24 of the presentation, there is a little gift to developers.

Extremely valuable property in the Fenway and on Newbury Street that could be sold. That would be Snowden International on Newbury Street (a building that cannot be sold because it is held in a trust) and BLS and BAA in the Fenway.

This isn’t about our kids. This is about selling our buildings to land developers. Our children are merely in the way.

Becoming mayor does not give Marty Walsh the right to raid public assets.

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Yup Walsh is going to throw your kid out onto the street and give the school to a bunch of fat cat developers. The issue as pointed out by the ever perceptive sock puppet is sunlight on what is actually happening in BPS administration. The cluster f of bureaucracy and special interests is that poison ivy that never goes away.

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As far as I can tell, you're the only one saying this:

Yup Walsh is going to throw your kid out onto the street

Your argument is nothing but polemic. No facts, no refutation of facts cited by others.

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then good luck with public opinion. Boston taxpayers fund not only schools but public safety and the infrastructure of a major US Metropolitan area. They carry the burden of non profits up the ying yang with the trade off being the reliance on the commercial tax base, who are now labeled as the devil. I hope this parent group keeps up its argument that 70% of the cit budget be dedicated to schools. Your opponents won't have to lift a finger to win that PR fight.

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Your argument is about the politics of public education funding not a critical analysis.

Here's Pasi Sahlberg on ideas McKinsey is arguing for. His expertise includes school improvement, international education issues, classroom teaching and learning, and school leadership.

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loud and clear. Especially the made up revenue figures.

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It makes complete sense. Why wait to implement it? Shut down the underutilized and non-performing schools and invest the savings to improve the remaining schools.

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red-tape bureaucrats to hire teachers is bad for the bureaucrats.

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of the bureaucrats so its an even swap.

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Because reducing the number of central administrators is bad for crony hire layabouts and good for the children.

BPS is a giant money pit because of all the nameless faceless paper pushers siphoning off every last penny of funding before it can get to the employees and infrastructure which actually matter to children's educations.

They are so resistant to change because the rigged system benefits them. They could care less about the children.

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Because that isn't what they want to do. Moving kids out of special ed and increasing student/teacher ratios will not improve the schools. I agree that they could probably cut a lot of administration jobs throughout the system sell off some schools (or repurpose so they can be more easily turned back into schools if necessary), but not just to build a nicer high school.

If the money were spent to hire more (good) teachers and provide child care for students in the younger grades that don't have parents at home at 3pm, I would support it much more. I am a high school teacher (not BPS) and would much rather have really well behaved students come into HS from the lower grades than have a state of the art high school.

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The Anti-Student Teachers Union won't allow it. It's in the contract.

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Teachers would like nothing more than to chop a bunch of administrators from the budget like a hung over yuppie chops bloody Mary brunch celery.

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teachers do not want that because they would be next on the chopping block.

..and make sure you make my latte with soy milk.

- The Original SoBo Yuppie

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Usually this kind of thing is released at 5pm on a Friday.

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It's 5 o'clock somewhere

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The savings, McKinsey says, could help pay for one brand-new, state-of-the-art high school (which McKinsey estimated would only cost $30 million) and a number of similar new elementary schools at $10 million a pop

This right here makes me skeptical. I'm no math genius, but how on earth would a brand-new, state-of-the-art high school cost only $30m???

Didn't Newton spend almost $200m to build their new high school several years ago? I'm not making any claims about that pricing and/or its ramifications, but something doesn't add up here.

If those particular numbers are wrong, it's hard to take the report's other conclusions seriously.

The other piece is that BPS needs to come to terms with is the fact that many special ed kids are simply too emotionally disturbed (or have other serious problems) for mainstream classes. Period. Kids who have PTSD, who are homeless, who have been bounced around from DCF to various foster families to juvenile hall -- often these kids won't ever be able to handle being mainstreamed. Instead of pretending they don't exist, BPS needs to make a serious, realistic plan to meet their legally-mandated educational needs, in a supportive therapeutic setting.

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I can't say for sure but I have heard that due to the way charters select kids for their school (or remove them from) that BPS has a higher rate of special needs students. If that's the case than there is another element of this report which may be skewing the actual facts.

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http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/news/2015-1209MA-CS-DemographicData.pdf

Charter schools are approaching the same levels as regular BPS for students with disabilities. Now, I don't know if that means they're taking kids with 'mild' challenges and not kids who are 'seriously' challenged. I'm not a SPED expert.

Second, charters educate 9% of the school aged kids in Boston. It's not insignificant but I don't think they are truly skimming off the 7000 easiest to educate kids out of the system. That's the private and parochial schools if anything. Charters by definition get kids who's parents care a bit about their kids education as they have to go through the extra hurdle of signing up for a charter lottery in addition to the regular BPS lottery. That's the biggest filter.

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Charters will only keep kids who can make their scores look good. Everyone else gets pushed back to the regular system. You will not see higher need kids at a charter.

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The $30 million and $10 million could be the city's share if the projects were built with through the Mass School Building Authority. The MSBA pays somewhere around 75 percent of the costs, so those figures aren't too far off.

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I've been saying exactly this out here for years. How many millions did this cost the city?

I love these studies that are kept "under wraps". What were they waiting for?

And btw McKinsey, you're not going to build schools in Boston for $10-$30 million. You can start by tripling those numbers. Granted, you'll also get a lot more than $4 million per school you sell too.

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30 million is like the ante at the school-building table hereabouts.

I'd like to see them structure a phased round-robin:
1. Build a brand new school.
2. Close two schools, consolidate students in brand-new school.
3. Sell one school, use second school site to build another brand-new school.
4. Goto 2.

Close all the schools that need closing and put all the students in brand new schools while you're doing it. Everybody gets an upgrade. What's not to like?

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Which just KILLS me. - and then we don't get to see it for a year. I'm getting the link that talks about the cost.

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There were a few news reports at the time that listed the cost as $660K - but I don't know where they got that from:

http://learninglab.wbur.org/2015/12/18/boston-schools-audit-empty-seats-...

From Dec 18, 2015
The city paid the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. $660,000 to conduct the audit, in hopes of exploring “more efficient operational approaches and … reallocating potential cost savings to better serve all students in the system,” according to a BPS statement.

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I just corrected my original post: BPS released the final report in December - still a long time given that the report was submitted last April. What QUEST got was the initial draft of the report.

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Who did BPS release the full report to? Because for that WBUR report back in December all that was shared was a slide deck FROM the report. Quest got the 220+ page report.

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a 30 page slide deck of highlights FROM the 220+ page report is what BPS released in December. A few different groups filed FOIA request to get the full report - Quest being one

http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib07/MA01906464/Centricity/Domai...

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What the BLS memo linked to is not the full report, but just as Iresd said -a highlights presentation. I was unable to find a link on the BLS or CoB sites to anything like the full report.

For whatever reason, there are two versions of the final working draft in that SCRIBD account - the one you linked to has corrupted text (ie not just formatted wrong). There's another copy from that same account that has an unscrewed-up version of the same draft copy of the full report. You should change the link.

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McKinsey probably billed $30 million just to write the report.

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I bet it was 225K-275K range.

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Or at least some footnote credits!

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As other communities have discovered, a school that is excess today may be needed in 20 years. Better to repurpose or rent out the buildings, so that they'll be available when needed.

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In the population lull after the baby boomers a lot of communities closed schools only to find themselves scrambling to build costly new ones when the youth population bounced back. I think it's fairly clear that more people, even young couples with families, are looking to move to or stay in the city so the risk for repeating that problem is real.

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The counterargument is that if you sell some small school built prior to modern ADA requirements, etc... you have the opportunity to get a new school in the future without all the weird 'inherited' design flaws of the old one. So stuff like handicap access (non-existent at the Rosi K-5 for example outside of the Haley), non-lead pipes, etc... It's an opportunity to get rid of bad, dated buildings at least.

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But if they sell off the school they have to then find land and build a new school which would probably be more expensive than if they just tore down the old one, made a small park or something that could be used by the city in the interim while leaving the land earmarked for a school in the future.

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BPS population has been stagnant and declining for 10+ years. Unless we're assuming explosive growth in both population of families and housing, we're talking about 20 years into the future or something. I don't see economic or societal pressures changing to where suddenly lots more people are having big families again AND moving to the city where housing is muy expensive.

The park idea is interesting, but then once you have a park for twenty years, people will fight tooth and nail to leave it as such.

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Sell the most valuable land, build schools on the least valuable, and lease some sites in the middle. Plant future school sites in the largest new developments.

Boston is never going to need that many schools again.

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I was going to say the same thing. If the schools improve significantly (which is the overall goal here), we could see kids from middle class families returning from the private sector, and more families remaining in Boston or choosing to move here. That seems idealistic right now, but getting those seats back after selling off the schools could be very expensive.

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Of the roughly 78k kids in the city, only 20k don't go to BPS or charter schools.

http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib07/MA01906464/Centricity/Domai...

Allegedly we have the capacity in terms of buildings, but there's no way we could afford to pay for the staffing to educate these kids unless we could truly distribute them around to all these classes with extra seats.

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to the connected developers so we can have more luxury condos for yuppies with no kids. That way there will be even less kids in Boston so they can close even more schools and build even more luxury condos.

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Possibly a printing error, or I'm misreading something, but when I view the SCRIBD document, especially in charts, my version shows 4/27/2016 over what I would think should be keys for what the charts represent. For example, Page 8, the version of the Chart on per pupil spending that I can see, has 4/27/2016 as the label 7 of the columns, and "Transportation" "Administration" and "General Education" for each of the remaining three. Similar issue on pages 16 & 18, the charts captioned "SPED".

Was this report redacted? Was it an issue in how it was uploaded to SCRIBD? Is it just my computer?

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Based on the fact that when I tried to copy and paste portions into a text document, I got all kinds of gibberish.

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For some reason, there are two versions of the same working draft version of the study document in that SCRIBD account. The link in the article above is to the one that happened to be screwed up.

Here's a link to the intact version of the document.

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It says that Regulation Teachers account for 160 million in the budget and that "all employee benefits" (all BPS it says) is another 138 million.

What does that mean?

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But in the beginning they say "regular education teachers" are $160 million. Looks like the words may have gotten scrunched?

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Adam, thank you so much for sharing this. Here's what kills me - page 115

Above the chart, the heading (bolding is mine):
" The current 473 schools could hold over 90,000 students if operating at full capacity without student-teacher ratio limits"

They say they didn't include "resource rooms" but don't define what "resource rooms" are. Does that mean they didn't count the teachers lounge or gym? What did they do for all those schools that don't have a gym or God forbid a dedicated art room or science lab or library?

and at the bottom:
"METHODOLOGY: Rooms were counted as "A" or "B" by the facilities team; "A" rooms could hold 21-30 students depending on the school. "B" rooms can only hold 12 students."

I don't WANT my 1st grader in a room with 30 students. For the "B" rooms are they talking about really small rooms that schools frequently use for counseling or targeting reading help? who knows!

Governor Baker and Sam Tyler of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau and so many others and even the press have been quoting these 93K "empty" seats for the past year as Gospel. For $660K this is maddening.

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Reading the comments so far I can see that the UHub crowd is generally in favor of closing schools and gutting administration. I understand why people feel that way, but let me offer a few thoughts from a BPS parent who pays pretty close attention to the department's budget.

  1. For me, the statement that there is room for 93,000 seats in the school buildings really does defy belief. I'd like to know more about their methodology, because understanding the accuracy of that figure is a big deal.
  2. I'd be careful with some of the dollar figures the report is throwing around. Recent history from other large districts suggests that the savings realized from school closings often fall well short of estimates, and as others have noted here, I imagine that building new schools is much more expensive than this report suggests as well. In fact, you don't really even need to look at other districts: BPS has closed quite a few schools recently without realizing a huge savings.
  3. You might be surprised to discover how normal BPS's administration costs are compared to other districts in the state. There are almost certainly savings there, but I personally don't have a lot of optimism that it's going to be a real game-changer in terms of the budget. Maybe I'll be proved wrong here, though, who knows.

I can't deny that BPS seems to be in a perpetual budget crisis. I understand why the city is looking at restructuring things to make the system more sustainable. The fix isn't easy, though, and I hope no one mistakes this report as providing a straightforward solution.

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I would say there's no actual consensus on U-Hub about BPS - it really depends on who's logged in that day.

The benefits of reform are probably overstated but my personal experiences with being on the SSC at a school, etc... did seem to be pretty inefficient in spite of the many good, dedicated people involved. Different initiatives being rolled out every 3-4 months with nebulous payoffs. Or of course the great assignment reform debacle where they had countless meetings about the options only to go with an undiscussed option (which was better) at the end of the process.

Generally speaking, our current big government system is not sustainably funded whether it's schools, cops, firemen, etc... As a city, we'll have to make some tough choices in 10-20 years when the retirement health care costs really kick in (like where to move to). I have little faith that our elected officials will figure that out so when in doubt, I think spending less money is the more prudent choice. I certainly don't see any silver bullet solving the school problems outside of gentrification pushing more families out of the city to lower the overall demand for seats. That seems like a pyrrhic victory at best.

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McKinsey & Co. are shady as shit.

They're backers of the "Fix The Debt" project which lies about how we can slash all the federal safety-net programs and ALEC, the crew that write all the ugliest legislation in the nation and then spam the dumbest conservatives to get them to propose that legislation at the state level to enact the worst of the worst laws identically in as many states as possible.

If you want a study to say "you should slash and burn and that will save your school system", then you'd get McKinsey & Co. to write it for you. Who hired them to create this report again? Because that person has it out for BPS and knew just what the hell they were doing.

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Yea, controlling out of control spending is outrageous! How dare they propose limiting the spending of other peoples money?

Per the recent NPR article and stats and the subject Boston spends 20k per student. Easton? 12k.

Which department has better results on the overall?

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You don't need to hire McKinsey to get a report that says "burn it all to the ground, you'll save money!".

I would have done that for $50 in a day if that's all you needed to justify the conclusion you already have that we need to "control out of control spending".

There are schools in Kansas that don't even spend $12k/kid and get comparable results. Hmm, I wonder if there are different cost pressures on maintaining/running/hiring/etc. for schools in Kansas, Easton, and Boston that don't let you just compare the $/kid spent...hmmmm....

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Do Easton and Boston have wildly different labor costs I was not aware of? Please do enlighten me.

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Let's take your theory out a bit though - Marty Walsh, old school labor Democrat, commissioned this. It's not like we elected some Bloomberg type as mayor. Why would Walsh set off on this path using an outside entity likely to come back with a report fairly hostile to the existing structure which is full of people who supported his mayoral run? Connolly was widely seen as the more BPS reform oriented candidate as I remember it.

My guess is that he wants to reform BPS a little bit and wanted to have something drastic to compare his reforms to I guess. I.e. the report says close 30 schools, but I want to close 6 or something.

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It's just closing schools.

If he's doing it to save money, we know it won't save much. If he's doing it to get his hands on the real estate he shouldn't be.

He will try. He will choose the schools in the neighborhoods with the poorest families in the city. They will lose their schools. He will make them available to charter operators.

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Kids are only allowed to walk a tenth of a mile to school? And then we wonder why there is an obesity epidemic. Of course, I trudged 5 miles both way in the snow in 98 degree heat.

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So if they are far enough away to get a seat on a school bus, that's the supposed distance from their house to the bus stop. The walk zone's a bit longer than that (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but is it a mile?).

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http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/transportation

BPS students are eligible for transportation if they live more than:
1 mile from their elementary school;
1½ miles from their middle school (includes grades 6–8 attending K–8 schools);
2 miles from their high school.

Also, the same page say it's up to a 1/4 mile walk:

If I think my child’s bus stop is unsafe or too far from my house, what can I do?

First, check with your child’s school to be sure the address on your child’s record is correct. When assigning bus stops, the Transportation Department considers student safety and operating the most efficient routes possible. In most cases, school bus stops are located within ¼ mile of a student’s home. If you think the BPS has made a mistake in the placement of your child’s bus stop, contact the Transportation Department. They will review the stop and may make an adjustment. But please note that many students who do not receive transportation often walk up to a mile to their school.

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Yeah, well, good luck with all that.

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So McKinsey says they can build a new Boston High School for $30 million but it cost$ Newton $210 Million. Consultants sure.

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I have two degrees, one of them being in secondary education and English.....alas, I am part of the building Trades, and gainfully employed at that.

So many ask, "why are you in the trades.?"

Sure, though I think my Union and its representation SUCK and is very disingenuous in its "representation" for us and our fellow middle class (as they post all day on FB from the office for 150k a year...while feeding us class warfar bs.)

But why am I in the Trades?

Because the teachers Union is the most awful Union of all......

"but what about the kids?!!"

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