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Trying to Move Forward While Looking Backward: A New Boston School Desegregation Trick

This article reviews the policymaking activities of the Boston School Committee between 1974 and 1999. Throughout these years, the school committee has been obsessed with school desegregation issues. The discussion concludes with a brief analysis of some policymaking activity regarding school desegregation by the appointed school committee, a recent phenomenon in Boston. In July 1991, the governor of Massachusetts signed into public law a bill that abolished the elected school committee and replaced it with one appointed by the mayor of Boston. A discussion of governance bounces the analysis into the new millennium. In the future, this phenomenon must occupy more of our attention and analysis than it has in the past. As stated by one of Boston's finest teachers, Joy Dickson, an African American woman and one of the school system's few instructors in Japanese, "Boston has . . . the power to set precedents for the rest of the country... and yet that's not happening." In an interview published in the Boston Globe Magazine, she attributes this inaction to too much talk about reforming kids and reforming teachers and not enough talk about reforming administrators and the Board of Education (Koch, May 7, 2000, p. 14). Certainly, A Nation at Risk, a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education had much to say about students and teachers and little to say about governance (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). This is one reason why the report has had only a limited effect on educational reform. Once upon a time, Boston was recognized as the cradle of liberty. In recent years, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, it has been recognized as the cradle of resistance to school desegregation. Along with Little Rock, Arkansas, Boston is remembered as the city that spun out of control with violent rage against court-ordered school desegregation. Jonathan Kozol, who has written passionately about inequality in Boston and elsewhere, asserts in his recently published book Ordinary Resurrections (2000) that segregation is, has been, and continues to be a primary cause of educational inequality that is harmful to people of color. Although this assertion is well-documented with legal evidence, social and behavioral science findings, and bitter personal experiences, the Boston School Committee, after several years of court surveillance, continues to resist integrated education and is now attempting to dismantle the Controlled Choice student assignment plan that has desegregated most Boston public schools and generated improved educational opportunities since 1989. Equity & Excellence in Education has chronicled the evolution of Boston's resistance to and compliance with court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation in recent years. This history began with a 1996 article on "Multiracial, Attractive City Schools: Controlled Choice in Boston" by Charles Willie, Michael Alves, and George Hagerty (Willie et al., 1996), followed by 1997 articles on "Boston Public School Enrollment Decline: White Flight or Demographic Factors" by Lauren McDonald (McDonald, 1997) and an assessment of "What We Learned about Urban Education Planning and Governance from the Boston School Desegregation Experience" by Charles Willie (Willie, 1997), as well as two articles published in 1998—one a summary of city-suburban desegregation by Gary Orfield, Jennifer Arenson, Tara Jackson, Christine Bohre, Dawn Gavin and Emily Kalejs (1998) entitled "Summary of 'City-Suburban Desegregation: Parent and Student Perspectives in Metropolitan Boston,' a Report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project," and the other, "Memorandum to the Boston, Massachusetts School Committee" Analyzing New Student Assignment Options Proposed by the Superintendent of Schools That, in Effect, Would Terminate Controlled Choice (Willie, 1998).