Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/textfile/lydon.zip/LYDON.BPS

Text File | 1993-08-14 | 10KB | 195 lines

This is the full text of a policy paper on the Boston Public
Schools issued by Chris Lydon, candidate for mayor of Boston.
.............................................................

        We meet this morning in the shadow of a failed
institution, the Boston School Department. But we come with a
plan to revive education in the Athens of America, the city where
public schooling began on this continent.

        Let us be blunt: the Boston public school system is a
mess.  It is astonishingly expensive, and by almost any measure
it does not work.  Some 40,000 students have left the system
since the Seventies, which is to say nearly half the "customers"
are gone.  More than 7,000 minority students are on a waiting
list today for Metco  -- a blunt repudiation.  SAT scores keep
dropping, far below national averages and below American cities
similar to Boston. Dropout rates, attendance rates, reading
scores are all pretty dismal.

        And yet the monopoly grip on the system is intact, and
almost unchallenged.  Mysteriously, a discredited system is
treated by most of the mayoral candidates as if it were
sacrosanct.

        I present myself this morning as the only candidate with
enough experience as a Boston Public School parent (12 years at
the Quincy, Timilty and Latin schools) to talk credibly about the
problem. I believe I am the only one with the grit to say and do
what must be said and done, heedless of the conventional taboos.

        The essence of the problem is the locked embrace between
an over-staffed School Department and an overreaching Teachers
Union. Together they have formed a monopoly owned and managed by
its employees.  The educational system that should be shaping the
citizens and workers of Boston's future looks more like an
employment agency for certain privileged adults and a warehouse
for children.  The only reasonable remedy is a radical overhaul.


    I present today the essential elements of the Lydon plan.

        There are only two means of breaking monopoly control and
in the mayor's race I advocate both of them.


        1.      The first step is to diversify the system.
Principals and headmasters must be made the chief educational
officers of their schools.  They must be given explicit authority
to define the mission of their schools, the hours, the dress
codes, and the rules and they must have the power to hire,
inspire and, if necessary, fire teachers on the basis of
classroom performance and results.  "School based management" as
I've observed it in Boston is a sham.  Real leadership and
anything resembling modern management will require a full rewrite
of the BTU contract, and of course it will have to compromise the
iron rules of seniority and tenure.  For the future the city
should limit the union's collective bargaining authority to cover
wages, working conditions and the right to represent staff
members who are in danger of being disciplined or dismissed.  The
bright promise of bold change is that in a diversified public
schools system, parents and children will know what they are
choosing; and they will know exactly whom to hold accountable.

        2.      The second way to bust the monopoly is to
introduce a meaningful level of market-based competition from
outside the system.  My campaign promise is to throw open the
education of our children to competing initiatives from any and
all institutions with a track record in the field. We can easily
pay for our new ventures with the public funds that now go to the
care and feeding of the school department.

        I will request proposals from Benno Schmidt and his
Edison Project, from the Jesuits, from the YMCA, from the Boston
Teachers Union or its individual members.  Obviously, Harvard and
Boston University and Brandeis and Boston College, and the
Wentworth Institute, could be invited to run a primary or
secondary school after the University of Chicago example.  In
addition, it could be valuable to solicit some of the
cutting-edge and public-spirited young corporations around Boston
(like Thinking Machines, Digital, Lotus and Raytheon).  Who among
them is ready to apply their acknowledged brilliance in
technology and training to the task of teaching the rising Boston
generation of citizens and workers?

        In short, if I am elected mayor I will enlist help
wherever I can find it.  The principle guiding every policy and
every clause of the teachers contract will be that we put the
best teachers in front of the children every day of the school
year.

        3.      Education is the work of a lifetime.  Anxiety,
too, can be the curse of a lifetime in the volatile modern
economy -- anxiety about having the right preparation and the
right skills.  We will do something new to address every worker's
right to security in a changing job marketplace:  Boston will
guarantee its high school graduates a credit card for job
training and retraining  for as long as a worker wants to work.
The schools that live tax-free in Boston will be asked to pay for
this program in lieu of taxes, in a currency more valuable than
cash.  We are the home after all of Harvard's business and
medical schools, of Boston and Northeastern Universities, of
Wheelock, Emerson, Simmons and Berklee Colleges, of Wentworth
Institute and the Boston and New England Conservatories of Music.
Every one of these institutions can be asked to take a
constructive hand in fine-tuning Boston talents for the new jobs
of the Nineties and the Twenty-first Century.

        4.      We will put educational support missions out to
competitive bid, starting with janitorial and transportation
services. The contract with school janitors has long been
notorious and will not be extended.  We are all familiar with the
absurdity, for example, of paying overtime to janitors for
opening the school door to working parents who would meet with a
teacher at six o'clock of an evening. I have observed myself that
the windows of this School Department - - even of the
Superintendent's office -- go unwashed for years.  We will
contract privately for cleaning services that work.  And through
new contracts with independent bus services, we will insulate the
city from the perennial pressure of shakedown strikes.

        5.      It is past time to get real about costly
code-words that are losing their meaning: "special" and bilingual
education.  Hundreds of children and parents now seek out
"special" education only because it seems to promise more teacher
time and attention.  But in fact, according to a Boston Globe
series in 1991, city schools failed to record any performance
gains in special education, even with a 42 percent increase in
spending.  Boston has one of the highest ratios in the country of
administrators to students in special education, prompting a
suspicion that Special Ed is an excuse to hire bureaucrats.

        Bilingual-lingual education, too, has drifted far from
its sound objective:  to give newcomers access to learning  and
opportunity through transitional instruction in the English
language.  In truth, the confusion about goals and the fear of
political incorrectness have produced this anomalous result:  a
generation of students who are illiterate in two languages.

        Surely we could better help many students in special and
bilingual education by mainstreaming them.  And we will help the
whole school system by re-appraising the mandated special efforts
that can also sap the vitality of general education in Boston.

        6.      We will sell this over-populated, under-worked
building as soon as the market presents us with a buyer and a
fair price. And we will cut back the School Department's
assignment to one that a score or so resource-managers and
standard-setters can handle.

        The strange contradiction today is that the world comes
to Boston (and environs) for higher education, while many
Bostonians feel they have to leave town to get modern, marketable
primary and secondary education for their kids.

        Bold, innovative, "outside" mayors of cities like
Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Baltimore are beginning to turn their
schools around by first smashing their educational monopolies.
We can do no less for Boston.  And, mind you, we can succeed.  My
sense of the voters I talk to every day is that they don't want
to kill the public school system -- as they might have been
willing to do, say, ten or fifteen years ago.  There's a general
understanding, as I am hearing voters, that neighbors need good
schools in the city to attract the younger families that preserve
communities -- and preserve the real estate market.  There is a
growing grasp, too, of the doctrine associated with Robert Reich,
among others, that the only guarantor of regional prosperity in
the new economy is a broadly trained and ready young workforce.

        As I said when I entered this mayor's race, there are no
votes I want more than the votes of teachers.  I want to be seen
as not just a friend but as a passionate advocate of public
education -- which served my parents and my three children in the
city of Boston.  Will it serve my grandchildren? Only if we are
bold enough in our politics, and bold enough in our educational
policy, to break the monopoly death-grip on the Boston school
system today.

        Accordingly, I am announcing this morning that ten
taxpayers and I will file suit to prevent the acting mayor from
negotiating, much less consummating, a new Teachers Union
contract that would compromise real reform of public education in
the city.  A new agreement this summer would represent, at best,
a sort of "social promotion" of a flunking school system.  It
would represent, at worst, another craven capitulation to an
extortionate monopoly.

        This is the summer to build a decisive mandate for real
revival of public education in our city.  We will not allow that
campaign to be thwarted by yet another round of inside
gamesmanship.