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Chaos Theory - Maura Hennigan revives the school-committee debate
Adam Reilly - Boston Phoenix
Friday, April 15. 2005
IT COULD BECOME the defining issue of this year’s mayoral race.
Fourteen years ago, the city traded its elected school committee — which
had presided over the ugliest stretch in the history of the Boston Public
Schools — for one appointed by the mayor. Five years later, in 1996,
Boston voters had a chance to weigh in on the change; they voted
overwhelmingly to keep the appointed body.
The results have been mixed. While there’s been obvious progress
(rising test scores, improved teacher training), Boston’s public schools
remain deeply troubled; if they have enough money, many families —
especially white ones — still flee to the suburbs when their kids reach
school age. As for the school committee, which used to be a hotbed
of racial tension and assorted bad behavior, it’s no longer an
embarrassment to the city. Then again, it’s not much of anything.
No one really pays attention to anything the school committee does these
days, partly because they can’t (unlike city-council meetings,
school-committee meetings aren’t televised) and partly because, in the
eyes of some, the committee exists only to do Mayor Tom Menino’s
bidding.
Enter at-large city councilor Maura Hennigan, a former
appointed-committee backer who now plans to make the return of an elected
school committee a focus of her improbable campaign against Menino. Given
the long odds Hennigan faces against the mayor (Menino’s popularity
ratings remain high, and at the end of March he had over $600,000 in the
bank, compared to about $30,000 for Hennigan), this could be a smart
political gamble. A broad swath of Boston voters might find Hennigan’s
school-committee gambit compelling — and as reviled as an elected
committee was, a case can be made for rethinking the status quo. Still,
Hennigan’s proposal entails both political and educational risks. And if
she mishandles this issue, it could doom her campaign.
THE BEST-KNOWN legacy of the elected school committee was the busing
crisis of the 1970s, which took the city to the brink of genuine civil
war. Morgan v. Hennigan — the 1972 lawsuit that forced
court-ordered busing in Boston — wouldn’t have happened if, at a September
1971 meeting, the school committee had heeded a state mandate to integrate
three new elementary schools. But when John Craven — a committee member
who happened to be running for city council — changed his vote at the last
minute, the committee ended up flouting the state in a 3-2 vote. (James
Hennigan, Maura Hennigan’s father, voted in the minority.)
Then, after creating the crisis, the school committee intensified it,
with committee members Louise Day Hicks and Pixie Palladino fanning
anti-busing sentiment and the committee as a whole rejecting a
desegregation plan that could have resolved the situation. Later, even as
relative normalcy returned to the Boston Public Schools, the elected
committee continued making itself look bad. School-committee minutes from
the mid 1980s often read like case studies in organizational dysfunction:
"This was the first of two September meetings which lacked substantive
issues.... An unexpected and loud argument erupted.... The meeting ended
abruptly when the superintendent — angered by the vote-switching and
defeat — suggested that the Committee begin the search for a new
superintendent."
Given this tortured history, the question is obvious: why? Why should
Boston voters even consider bringing back the days when committee members
— not all, but too many — focused on padding their résumés, pandering to
the worst instincts of voters, and padding their taxpayer-funded staffs
instead of serving Boston’s schools?
Hennigan’s answer hinges, in part, on race. "A lot has changed," she
argues. "What was particularly significant [about the 1996 referendum] was
that voters in communities of color did not want to lose the elected
body. Since that time, we now have a majority of people of color in
the city. And we continue to have a school system that [serves]
predominantly people of color." (The 2000 Census found that Boston had
become, for the first time, a "majority-minority" city, one in which
whites make up less than half the population. Approximately 85 percent of
Boston’s public-school students are black, Asian, or Latino.)
The subtext of Hennigan’s argument is clear: if Boston’s minority
voters use their newfound clout to make Hennigan mayor, she, in turn, will
help them democratize the school committee. It’s a neat line of reasoning,
one that deftly transforms Hennigan — an Irish-Catholic from an old Boston
political family — into a champion of the oft-invoked "New Boston" (see
"Winner’s
Circle," News and Features, September 24, 2004).
If elected, Hennigan promises, she will use the mayoral bully pulpit to
build support for replacing the seven-member appointed committee with a
five-member body that would be elected at large — that is, by voters from
across Boston. This, incidentally, is the same structure the school
committee had from 1905 (when Yankee reformers, who’d winnowed the
committee from 116 to 24 in the face of mounting Irish influence,
downsized it again) until 1983 (when the school committee adopted the city
council’s current 13-member, district-based model). However, Hennigan says
she’d consider further tweaks — e.g., staggering elections so that
only two seats would be contested during a given election, thereby
guaranteeing some level of continuity. "I’m more than happy to talk to
people about this," she says.
This openness points to another aspect of Hennigan’s proposal. Her call
to revive the elected committee is partly race-based, but it also relies
on a flexible populism that could transcend racial lines. One of her
favorite campaign themes is that Menino, now entering his 12th year as
mayor, no longer listens to ordinary Bostonians — and her school committee
argument is part and parcel of this larger critique. "There has to be
accountability in the school system," she says. "One of the weaknesses
I’ve seen in the Menino administration is a real lack of community input,
and, in the case of the school system, a real weakness in the desire to
communicate with parents who have children in our system. I have received
so much dialogue from parents, irrespective of their child’s race, who
just find it very disappointing that they do not have a voice."
Note the key phrase: irrespective of their child’s race.
African-American parents who bristled at Menino’s determination to reduce
busing last year (see "Bus
Stop," News and Features, February 13, 2004) could see themselves as
part of Hennigan’s voiceless public. But so, too, could Irish-Catholic
parents from West Roxbury who were disappointed when Menino’s push failed.
The notion of these two groups making common cause on this issue may
seem far-fetched. But "the record, so far, says that the appointed
committee isn’t the answer," says former mayoral candidate Mel King, a
bona fide liberal who met recently with a more conservative former mayoral
candidate, Joe Timilty, to discuss reviving the elected committee.
"There’s a strong movement to close the achievement gap [between black and
white public-school students] and it’s not getting enough attention on the
part of the mayor.... I think Hennigan has an excellent campaign issue
here."
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