It's Time for a Return to an Elected Boston School Committee

As a Boston Public Schools (BPS) parent, Citywide Parent Council (CPC) Representative, educator (former social studies teacher and current teacher educator), and Dorchester resident, I've long advocated for an elected school committee. I am not alone, as many parents (like my colleague on the CPC Suleiko Soto and fellow Dorchester parent Matthew Shochat), students, and former elected school committee members (such as Jean McGuire) have been demanding this for years. This movement has culminated in a ballot question this fall, asking the residents to vote on returning to an elected school committee here in Boston.

Boston is the only municipality in Massachusetts without an elected school committee due to a home rule petition and bill passed by the state legislature in 1991. Of course, many people remember the Boston Busing Crisis of the mid-1970s, which was a situation made worse by the actions of the all-white school committee at the time (I recommend watching this or reading this, which provide an excellent background). However, the move to a mayoral appointed Boston School Committee had nothing to do with the busing crisis and it did not occur until about 15 years later. In fact, in the early 1990s, it was parents of color who were the strongest opponents to an appointed school committee (including Black political leaders like John D. O'Bryant, Charles Yancey, and Bruce Bolling). In contrast, a white parent-led door-to-door campaign in favor of the mayor having control was effective and the measure narrowly passed in a non-binding referendum. 

Yet, in the years since, the appointed school committee has not been the panacea that its supporters claimed it would be. There was turmoil in the early years, unpopular decisions in the 90s and early 2000s (see here, here, here, and here), years of unanimous votes based on the mayor's wishes, and several problematic recent decisions and incidents (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The community may already understand the importance of this issue, as there seems to be widespread support among both voters and city council candidates. Even former mayor Ray Flynn, who pushed for the change, expressed regrets only a few years later.

Above: Boston is the only municipality in Massachusetts without an elected school committee.

To be honest, any structure has disadvantages and it would be naïve to think changing the structure alone would inherently produce more equitable access for students to high-quality learning (related, I am also concerned about the amount of dark money flowing into school committee races nationwide). Regardless of structure, the reality is that educational equity comes from district leadership, the work of teachers and administrators, and funding choices made by the city and state. To be fair, Boston has made important educational improvements over the past few decades, including making the city's exam schools (see also here) more equitable for students of color, dramatically expanding the number preschool seats, and having increases in its students' scores on national standardized tests. But these changes have come despite not having an elected school committee, rather than because of having an appointed one. It is likely those changes would have happened regardless; Boston has significantly changed in many ways (including the city's wealth) since the 1990s. Moreover, the Boston City Council is the most diverse in its history, and structures can be put in place to ensure that an elected school committee would similarly represent the diversity of our city.

Above: Jean McGuire was the first African American woman to be elected to the Boston School Committee. She opposed ending the elected school committee and supports its return. Read her thoughts here.

There is a long history of democratically elected school committees in Massachusetts. Boston voters elected their first School Committee in 1789. The Commonwealth mandated that each community elect its school committee in 1826 (during the era of Horace Mann's education reforms). Since then, school committees have served as citizen oversight of our public schools. For me, this is an issue of democracy, equity, and racial justice. If the other 350 municipalities have elected school committees in Massachusetts, so should the one where I live, especially since this is a city where people of color are the majority and 85% of our students are students of color. Since 1991, Boston's residents have been disenfranchised on this aspect of democracy. For this reason alone, we should restore an elected school committee.

Ludlow High School (above; what it looked like in the 1990s) had not had any major reservations since it was built in 1962. As a high school student, I worked with my peers to influence the elected School Committee and Board of Selectmen to change that. As a teacher and union member in the Framingham Public Schools (below), I witnessed how the elected school committee was often responsive to parents and voters in the community.

My support for Yes on Question 3 is also based on my experiences living and working in three different Massachusetts communities. I have seen stark differences between communities with elected and unelected school committees. I grew up in Ludlow, which is a suburb of Springfield. When I was in high school, our school building was in great disrepair. My classmates and I witnessed members of the Board of Selectman make clear that they wanted to keep property taxes low and would not support borrowing to make renovations. As a result, students in town formed a movement to pursue change. Many seniors were 18 and we voted as a block to elect pro-renovation candidates to the board of selectman and school committee. This led to changes in leadership, and the town would later approve a multi-million dollar renovation of the building. 

My next experience was as a teacher and union member in the Framingham Public Schools, where I was a high school history and government teacher for eight years. For two of those years, I served as the Political Education Chair for the Framingham Teachers Association. In that role, I led protests related to stalled contract negotiations and a campaign to reduce class size. While we did not always see eye-to-eye with school committee members, I knew each of the members and they would almost always respond to and work with the teachers union (the district eventually settled our contract and added language about reviewing class size yearly). More importantly, in our conversations, they would often cite the concerns of parents and voters in how they made the decisions, as that is who they were ultimately accountable to. 

Meanwhile, I was raising my family in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston without an elected school committee. As someone with a child about to enter school, I deeply opposed the changes that were proposed to the district's school assignment process, which would move from a large number of choices within three zones to a home-based system that would result in parents having fewer choices (based on an algorithm that proclaimed to be race-neutral). Along with many others, I knew that these changes would negatively impact Black and Latinx families the most, but would also make the districts' schools more segregated. I wrote letters opposing the plan with no reply from school committee members, attended community meetings, testified at hearings, and met with fellow parents. I closely examined the work of Quality Education for Every Student, who had similar concerns. We then all watched as the unelected school committee unanimously approved the change despite protests (several studies have shown that our suspicions were correct and the district has experienced increased segregation as a result). 

After my daughter entered BPS, I was motivated to run to be the Citywide Parent Council representative for her school (the CPC is the umbrella organization for all of parent councils in the district and the officially recognized voice of all BPS parents). As a CPC rep., I saw again and again how us parents were relatively united on most issues (from changing the food services vendor to stopping schools from being closed and demanding tents for outdoor lunch during a global pandemic), but the school committee often hesitated to respond or outright voted against our stances. Moreover, we were almost never visited by school committee members, with the exception of a couple years ago when the chair came to lecture us on his preferred agenda (where he made clear that the appointed school committee provided "harmony" and that he was a "city finance guy, not an education guy."). My time as a CPC rep. has been five years of feeling voiceless and powerless (and I think most of my fellow CPC reps. would agree). In contrast, whenever I called or e-mailed my district or at-large city councilors, I have always received replies within days. Several city councilors have visited the Citywide Parent Council to work with us on various BPS and education-related issues. In fact, my daughters' school was not approved to expand to include a 6th grade, which would have had a devastating effect on our school community (especially since many secondary schools in Boston begin at grade 7 and parents had for years been left struggling to find school options for one year; we would routinely have a large exodus of students to K-8 schools in 4th grade for this reason). We wrote letters to and protested at school committee meetings. However, it was not until parents in our community reached out to our city councilors and they became involved, that we finally were given a meeting with the superintendent's office and received word that our school would get its needed expansion. 

While an elected school committee will not solve all of our educational problems in Boston, it can only help add a level of accountability through the return to democracy. Democracy is messy, but it is the best form of government we have. This is true for the Boston School Committee, as well.

The time is now for us to return to an elected school committee in Boston.