An Unlikely Spot at the Head of the Class

Top honors for the once maligned Boston schools

By Elizabeth Weiss Green

From the October 2, 2006, issue

A year ago, Lyndsey Jones ran to her principal in tears: A friend had been arrested, and his prison sentence was rumored to range from 10 years to life. "I was telling her, 'I feel like I lost him'-like, society lost a great feature. He has so much to offer. He's so smart," Lyndsey says.

The Boston public schools used to be like that: littered with stories of good kids lost to bad circumstances. Jones's high school was no exception. In 1999, 82 percent of 10th graders at Boston High School failed the state's math test, and 71 percent failed the English exam. Districtwide, 26 percent of high school students dropped out before graduation, budgets were never balanced, and superintendents, ambitious though they were, came and went.

But today, the stories filling the hallways at Boston High are more likely to feature kids like Lyndsey, a 16-year-old African-American who has her heart set on the Ivy League and who is likely, judging by her academic performance, to get there. The school, now known as Boston Community Leadership Academy, sent 86 percent of its students to college last year (one acceptance is a prerequisite for graduation). And the district, once distinguished by violent antibusing riots, has become a national model. Student-teacher ratios stand at 12 to 1, and 71 percent of high school graduates now attend a two- or four-year college-compared with 67 percent nationally. Those accomplishments have not gone unnoticed: Last week Boston Public Schools was awarded the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education, an honor that comes with $500,000 in scholarships and is based on a rigorous review of performance data.

To be sure, the district has its problems. The dropout rate is troubling at 21.6 percent, and test scores still rank in the bottom 10 percent of the state. But thanks to a new reformist regime, led by a committed mayor and a forceful superintendent, "there are real signs of hope," says David Trueblood, spokesman for the Boston Foundation, an advocate for school reform.

The transformation began in 1993, when Democrat Thomas Menino won the mayor's office promising to fix the public schools, then granted a new superintendent an unprecedented five-year term. Having run four other school systems, Thomas Payzant was certainly qualified. But he was also lucky. Menino increased education funding by 8 percent each year, allowing Payzant to offer higher teacher salaries and better benefits to get what he believed was necessary: among other things, a 6 1/₂-hour school day.

Bottom up. Payzant set out to reform Boston schools from the bottom up. He set standards high, provided schools with a clear road map for how to reach them, and let them loose. Some teachers and principals thrived; others were fired. When Payzant wanted to close a Roxbury school, parents said he was out of line, a charge that the Boston Teachers Union would echo in the years to come. BTU President Richard Stutman says Payzant's goals were worthy but his style was autocratic; he didn't talk enough to the teachers his policies affected.

Nicole Bahnam, principal of what was then Boston High School, says she was "devastated" when she heard the news in 2001 that hers was one of the schools to be shut down. But then she caught on to Payzant's vision: Boston had initiated a program of so-called pilot schools that were showing impressive results. She wasn't out of business; she would simply go a different route.

By converting Boston High to a pilot school, Bahnam won many new freedoms. Like charter schools, pilots abide by neither union contracts nor system-wide rules. This gives their principals full control over budget, staffing, and curriculum. Whereas Boston High School was large and impersonal, at BCLA, students form committees to create their own rules, Bahnam knows all 400 students by name, and when some stay after school to study and miss their bus, Bahnam often drives them home. "It doesn't matter what time of night," says Yesenia Santos, a junior at BCLA who has Bahnam's numbers plugged into her cellphone.

But the Massachusetts pilot schools, unlike its charter schools, are public, and as public schools they must follow some of the system's rules. That means Bahnam is bound to Massachusetts's sky-high testing standards. To graduate from high school, students must pass Massachusetts's Comprehensive Assessment System exams. BCLA takes the standards a step further. Students must also create and defend a portfolio of their best work, and they are encouraged not just to pass the MCAS tests but to show "proficiency" on them.

The result: After teachers worked to align the school's math curriculum with the MCAS, 75 percent of the class of 2008 showed proficiency on last year's test-up from under 30 percent the year before. A report in January by the nonprofit Center for Collaborative Education found that pilot schools outperformed district schools "on virtually every indicator of student engagement and performance."

More options. All well and good. But what about the 89 percent of students who don't go to pilot schools? They, too, are benefiting from the pilot school example. "In the past," explains CCE Executive Director Dan French, "regular high schools all had to use one [model]." Now, schools have three options: They can break themselves down into three or four autonomous schools, they can split into small "learning communities," or they can become pilots themselves.

From the start, Payzant made it clear that a few successful outliers were not enough to satisfy him. "This is the challenge in urban education," he says. "It's all kids, not just some." So he built a menu of resources and encouraged (or required) every school to adopt them.

At the Richard J. Murphy School, an elementary and middle school, these programs have helped teachers change almost everything they do-right down to how they design their classrooms. "Four years ago, we had desks in rows," says Lauren Grace, Murphy's literacy coach. Now Murphy classrooms are anything but linear. Almost all the posters on the walls are made by students, not educational publishing companies. "Ways to Choose Books," they say, "Ways to Make 10," and "Things We Noticed About Clocks." Instead of bookshelves, plastic bins with handwritten labels like "Nonfiction: Science,"Nonfiction: Animals," and "Dr. Seuss" hold books "like at Barnes & Noble," Grace explains. "We're growing kids to become really independent. It's not about what did little bear learn today? It's about what did you learn about yourself as a reader."

Payzant's program builds in other kinds of personal reflection, too. In the past, "professional development" often meant a few hours set aside to watch a DVD. "Teachers [would] say, those don't look like my kids; that doesn't look like my classroom," Russo says. Now, with people like Grace demonstrating the good practices right in teachers' rooms, "you can't say they don't look like my kids-they are your kids." The result: As many as 10 adults might be floating around a classroom at any one time. "It's noisy," says Angel Petrie, Murphy's in-house math coach, "but it's purposeful noise."

The Murphy School has also embraced Payzant's focus on standardized testing. Every year, Grace reviews data charting each student's answer to every question on a test. Then she turns the numbers into graphs, the graphs into plans, and the plans into lessons she'll give to her teachers.

Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts education plan has faced stiff criticism for this focus on test scores. Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, argues that the high-stakes regimes encourage or at best ignore achievement gaps. Boston schools have "done well in the sense that they've been coherent and they've had honest leadership," he says. "But they haven't made big gains, and they have a disturbingly high dropout rate." As barriers to graduation go, a win-or-lose test, he says, is "very high."

At Murphy, teachers are well aware of testing's risks. At a recent meeting, Murphy's first-grade teachers reviewed a spreadsheet of scores, trying to decide which students should be pulled into "Reading Recovery." They talked data, but they also put faces to the numbers, making notes about a student's family life, past education experiences, even the test-taking environment. "That statistic on the board, it's Mercedes," Grace says. "And we know Mercedes, and we want her to learn."

The numbers have become even more important since 2003, when Massachusetts made high school graduation contingent on passing its MCAS tests. Among the controversial measure's unlikely advocates: urban superintendents, including Payzant. "They could have said those standards are too high, the tests are unfair," says Andrew Calkins, executive director of the pro-testing group Mass Insight. But the superintendents decided it was better to risk failure than to assume their students couldn't perform.

Many Boston students have not met the high expectations; the federal government lists about 90 Boston schools as needing improvement. Yet impressive numbers have. Lyndsey Jones, for one, cannot imagine giving up: "Because of all that support," she says, "who would fail?"

Payzant retired in June after 11 years as superintendent, leaving the school committee with the task of filling some very big shoes. It's a challenge a lot like the one the members of the committee faced in 1995. But, says Elizabeth Reilinger, chair of the committee, today they have one important advantage: The job they're selling no longer feels impossible.