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School Committee approves school moves; Mike Ross decries blow to democracy
By adamg on Wed, 11/16/2011 - 7:12am
The Globe reports the School Committee gave its pro-forma approval last night to Superintendent Carol Johnson's school musical chairs.
Ross angrily denounced the plan to move the Mission Hill K-8 School in his district to the closed Agassiz in Jamaica Plain; according to the Globe, he uttered the ultimate Boston political insult: That moves like that mean "Boston will never be considered a world-class city."
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Comments
Great, so will my tax bill be cut in half now?
Since the school budget is about half of the city budget and Mike Ross is going to rally his colleagues not to support it, does that mean we are going to eliminate schools from the City of Boston? If so, this is great news for the taxpayers I guess, as we will have our tax bills cut in half.
What a load of malarkey. Please take note that next June 30 Mike Ross will vote to approve the city budget which is the only up or down vote the city council is allowed to make.
This is called grandstanding for his local support in Mission Hill.
Is there a serious politician anywhere?
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
More importantly, why isn't there anyone on the Globe with half a brain to ask him exactly what he is going to do about the school budget and how he is going to rally his colleagues? Notice he doesn't say he is going to "occupy the Mayor's office' until something gets done.
Does anyone think he doesn't understand where all the power is?
Boston will never be a world class city?
Well, perhaps that is because it simply isn't large enough to do so. London, Paris, NYC ... perhaps Chicago and Toronto ... are vastly larger metropolises.
Of course Mike Ross, who doesn't appear to have ventured outside Boston much in his life, knows what makes a city World Class ... in its own neighborhood or state perhaps. Grandstanding for the local neighborhood and making up special ridiculous rules for people he doesn't like certainly top his list of world classossity.
Does a 'world-class city' have to be huge?
Florence and Venice are not especially large cities but they are internationally renowned.
Internationally Renowned, yes
The Boston Area is internationally renowned for its educational institutions (that Mike Ross ironically likes to launch pogroms against) - but a world class city generally requires a large population to support a wide variety of world class amenities and institutions.
Boston does make it in at #29 on the Knight Frank Global Cities Index, largely on the basis of connectivity and intellectual capital (those darned evile universities again!). Powerful for its size, perhaps, but not a heavy hitter overall or any comparison to NYC, LA, Toronto and San Francisco. Check out pages 18 and 19 for details You pretty much have to scroll down to Zurich at #22 before you start getting "smaller" cities on that list.
Fox Trot or the Souljaboy?
At this point we're debating which dance those angels are doing on the head of that pin.
What the hell is a "World Class City" anyways? Rankings are gimmicks to sell magazines (helllooo Rolling Stone) or to get your press release covered by the media. Everybody likes to see where they rank in the nation's fattest cities, best cities, livable cities, greenest cities, etc... An objective ranking is impossible for most considerations. Madison, WI was on top of the Best Places to Live by various magazines (I think it was Money's list) until they started to weight weather more heavily and then it dropped. But not among people who enjoy winter sports (that don't really require steep slopes).
Normally when people are talking about "world class cities" it seems to me that the perspective is more from the visitor's standpoint (i.e., convention goers, tourists, etc.). Public education systems seem to normally be in the all around "livable," "best places to live" kind of real estate rankings. So Ross' invocation of the World Class Whine ("If I don't get what I want, Boston won't be "World Class" [subtext=second fiddle once again to NYC]") strikes me as a Boston pol faux pas. Get wit da program, ya bum!
Point taken
However, isn't it ironic that Mike Ross, who frequently vents at, whines about, and tries to harass people involved with our institutions of higher learning has uncorked this "world class" whine? The guy who venomously hates the very institutions which are almost inarguably the most prominent World Class feature of the Boston area?
SF?
SF isn't a large city. It's roughly comparable in population to Boston, a bit larger, and its CSA is almost identical.
I actually find these rankings to be a bit of a puzzle too.
Good for Mike Ross. Doesn't
Good for Mike Ross. Doesn't it feel good, councilor, to get that off your chest!?
This is big trouble for Menino and his pathetic council minions, of which there is now (thank God) one fewer with Maureen Feeney's bitter exit. Ross has always been borderline— he's played it safe mostly and not sought to offend the regime. He walked the line as president and did it well. Now he knows what it's like to get squashed by the machine like a gnat when you cross the "boss."
Mike— don't wait for the school budget. Tell Kineavy and Dunford and yes the big guy himself to screw: Reject the corrupt bargain with the Feeney hire. Post the clerk job to a national audience in Municipal magazine. No rush on replacing Rosaria, after all. She's good thru February. They'll love that one in the Curley Room.
In world class cities, the
In world class cities, the party generally starts at about midnight. In Boston, drinkers start waiting to hear last call at midnight. Boston is Peoria with an ocean.
Maybe not so farfetched
A while back a staffer on Beacon Hill told me that there are those in the halls of power that say the city is strategically trying to push parents out of the city because education is too expensive. You have to start to wonder. They've closed every school in the northern half of downtown and with the closure of the Farragut and now the Mission Hill school (well - moved it) it seems like the whole process is to close a school - which drives out families, claim there are no families that want to send a kid to school X so then they close that one and then it marches on - it's a slow process but it's progressed steadily from the West End to Beacon Hill to Back Bay through Fenway and now they seem to be working on Mission Hill. My guess is either the Hurley or the Blackstone will be on the chopping block within a few years or perhaps even the Tobin.
As sock puppet and I have argued endlessly there's a lot of ways to chop up geography, neighborhoods and school access - but electoral districting is supposed to be at least one fairly neutral slice of a population and District 8 now has one school with about 500 elementary seats or fewer serving what I'm guessing is about 70,000 people - and for most of the people in that district it's not even a walk zone school - every walk zone school for the West End, Beacon Hill and Back Bay are clearly in another neighborhood.
As the Deputy Superintendent said in the hearing. We don't have neighborhood schools, we have zones. Sounds like a line right out of a science fiction book. You live in ze zone and you vill like it, damn you.
Shell Game
The problem is, in part, that the state has these suburban utopia requirments for building new schools that Boston really can't comply with (and that made it extremely hard for communities like Medford and Malden and Arlington to comply with as well - Medford did a land deal with the MDC and had to reclaim a 33 acre dump to complete the first phase of the rebuilding program). To get any state money at all, you need at least 10 acres for an elementary school and 30 for a middle school. So they move stuff around in the buildings they still have, and renovate, etc., and this means that the geographic coverage of schools is, well, a bit off.
School districts or zones don't have to match community boundaries - and, in a place like Boston, it may be better that they don't. You can still have schools that many kids can walk to that straddle neighborhood boundaries to mix things up in a healthy way. That said, the zones should have adequate coverage and the schools in those zones should have adequate numbers of seats. Otherwise, you get a lot of transportation (which is an operating expense) covering for what should be a capital expense concern (putting schools where the kids are).
putting schools where the kids are-That's the point
If you keep doing that the way they are doing it, eventually you drive out all the people with kids - probably nobody with a family looking for a public school has moved to the West End since 1960 because they razed the schools decades ago and the odds of getting into the Elliot are pretty small. Then they closed the Beacon Hill and Back Bay schools, then the ones in the Fenway - institutions in Fenway/Allston keep families from moving east so now they are just moving down the Brookline border - close the Farragut, close the Mission Hill school and before you know it there will be very few families on Mission Hill so they'll be pushing to close the Tobin (I'm guessing the Hurley or the Blackstone will be next on the city's chopping block though). You couldn't plan a military campaign any better than this. Just keep squeezing people with kids south and west. If there are no resources (schools) north and east - you can do this forever and keep using the excuse - we can't build a school there - there are no kids there - well duhh Mr. Mayor, maybe now you can tell us which came first the chicken or the egg.
You know the School Committee is blowing it when...
...SwirrlyGirl, Stevil and Sock_Puppet are basically in agreement.
I mean, the wiley puppy eatin' coyotes of West Roxbury get more love than the board!
In the know
Parents in the know send their kids to METCO!
Metco?
No can do if you're white!
in 2011?
Denying children equal to education access would be racism, no?
I agree mostly, but
"electoral districting is supposed to be at least one fairly neutral slice of a population" is laughable.
Just think about that for a minute, Steve. Is there anything farther from neutral than electoral districting?
That said, I agree with Steve about what's going on - chasing students out of Boston and chasing schools out of the central Boston area - and agree that there are multiple ways to look at the progress of Boston's de-schoolification. Intentionality is always a tricky thing to ascribe, but my limited personal experience supports the theory that the BPS is in the business of chasing off students. That the first and foremost students the BPS chases off should be in the wealthier and denser areas of town makes sense on two bases: prejudice and property.
The prejudice rampant in today's BPS bureaucracy is exemplified by Claudio Martinez, tenured member of the school rubber-stamp committee, with his disinterest in hearing from "privileged white kids" at school meetings. This kind of attitude and disrespect for people of certain races and classes goes up and down the BPS bureaucracy - I have heard it from parents, teachers, principals, and administrators - and it is left unchecked or unremarked. Like Claudio Martinez, many people in the BPS system feel they're in it only to help provide schools for certain people. If you have people who feel this antagonism towards others helping to decide (or approve) which schools to move or close, it should be unsurprising that they'd go after schools with higher numbers of PWKs.
Property is something Swirly mentions. She seems very familiar with state planning requirements (no doubt she worked in the field), and the idea that you'd need 10-30 acres to build a school is blatantly absurd in Boston (unless you have a brownfield handy). The only places you'd be able to swing that are pretty far out. But even if you only needed an acre, that acre is still going to cost a heck of a lot more in the Back Bay than it is in Hyde Park. I know in the case of hand, it has to do with the need to reoccupy the closed Hyde Park High. But in general, it is logical that provision of schools closer to downtown would come at a higher cost.
Here's what you do
We all have infinite time to play with stuff like this, of course ...
I used to do these things in ArcGIS, but I think you can do them in Google Earth these days ...
The trick is to get the most recent census data files and map out where the kids of school age are in the city. The finest grain you can get is usually the block level, which is fine for a dense city. Then you find out the schools and school capacity as it now stands, and put those on the map.
Draw half-mile buffers and mile buffers (circles) around those schools, and see how many blocks they cover, and count up the kids in those blocks. Alternately, if you can color the blocks to represent the number of kids in each block, it will give you a sense of where the kids are versus where the 1/2 and 1 mile radii around schools are.
Now see if you can find locations of BPS properties that could be schools, but are currently mothballed. Do any of these match up?
Then you do some playing around to figure out where the schools should be. With an advanced GIS system, you could automate this, but that's something the school system should invest in ...
In any case, showing such maps around can be very powerful, since they are easy to interpret and explain and difficult to b.s. away. If the mismatch is as bad as it sounds, you might be able to build a campaign for a rethinking of the system.
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I did something similar as part of a project for a mapping course when Medford was doing their big school rebuild and consolidation. there was much grieving over the loss of "neighborhood" schools that "kids could walk to"... and that also segregated the city. It turns out that very few (one or two) of the remaining "old" schools were actually in the neighborhoods where the kids were or in locations that they could walk to - they were mostly in the neighborhoods were the population was markedly older!
Of the four consolidated "new" schools, three were pretty optimally placed to be within 1/2 mile of where the kids were. In fact, the new locations meant that MORE kids were within a 1/2 mile of school, not fewer, despite the consolidation from eight to four schools. The fourth "new" school was slightly south of optimal placement, but it would be difficult to site a school nearer that population due to the topography. While actual site selection was entirely driven by available land for construction that met the state requirements, it ended up being almost as good as if somebody had intentionally selected for the centers of the kid population.
I showed these to the school committee members that I knew and the building committee members. They were all amazed at how much the reality went against the assumptions. Those who saw those maps weren't the ones who were surprised when 105 kindergarten-age kids turned up at registration for a school expected to enroll 80.
true, but i do wonder the
true, but i do wonder the percentage of school-age children in District 8 that do ended public schools versus those that do not
Loss for democracy?
How can yet another rubber-stamp decision by a non-elected body handpicked by a 20-year incumbent be a loss for democracy? There was no democracy in the process of getting these sycophants to the table and that there's no democracy in the result shouldn't be surprising to anybody.
Thread merge
Ok, now let's bring the "world-class city" thread and merge it with the Revere discussion for full comical effect published by the newspaper of....Lynn!
Why I'm just tickled by the alignment of so much nicotine-reeking absurdity. Pass the scratch cards and the Brioschi, Ethyl, we're going to Suffolk Downs!!
Mikey doesn't like it
Imagine how many phone calls Ross had to make to the Mayor's office letting them know that he was going to "oppose" the mayor. I kind of feel sad for him. If he really cared about democracy then he would fight for it ALL the time (i.e. just handing Feeney the clerk position), not just when it is politically expedient.
Better democratic practices at Boston City Hall.
In advocating better democratic practices at Boston City Hall it would be good to make ever more enquiries for the public records and read about the practices, about the deliberations so much as they are of record. I.F. Stone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_F_Stone had it right. Most journalists, the reporters don't make enough effort in reading the public documents.