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April 15, 2004

Task force mulls overhaul of school assignment plan

Jeremy Schwab

A Student Assignment Task Force appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino to find out what changes Boston residents want to the current school assignment process came away from a month of neighborhood meetings with the strong impression that residents are more concerned with ensuring their children’s access to quality schools than with changing the current assignment plan.

Yet the task force is not charged with proposing changes in curriculum, budgeting, teacher training or parental involvement. The task force is charged with proposing alternative student assignment plans, and its members aim to do just that.

In meetings last week, task force members discussed five potential models for reassignment. One would maintain the status quo — three zones within which elementary and middle school children choose their top three schools and are assigned via lottery.

Another alternative would be to institute a citywide lottery — no zones, just a massive lottery with parents competing for the most competitive schools.

“The status quo and citywide choice are being presented because requests were made by some parents for analysis of those options,” said Task Force President Ted Landsmark. “We feel duty-bound to present those two options so the public can see their strengths and weaknesses. It is unlikely at this stage that either of those options would be final recommendations.”

The other three plans call for increasing the number of school zones to allow children to attend school closer to home, a longstanding demand of white parents particularly in West Roxbury and South Boston.

Landsmark said that smaller zones could be drawn so they give students equal access to quality schools.

“In the citywide plan, everybody would be competing for the top schools,” said Landsmark. “The [smaller zones] would have about the same access to quality schools.”

The task force will present its proposals to residents in neighborhood meetings across the city this spring before the mayorally appointed School Committee decides which plan to adopt. The chosen plan will take effect in the fall of 2005.

Community meetings earlier this year showed deep divisions among neighborhoods as to whether and how to change the system.

“Minority communities overwhelmingly want more choice, and the main reason is not all schools have equitable resources or teacher credentials,” said task force member Lauren Thompson. “There are very few communities that want neighborhood schools, just West Roxbury and white parents in North Dorchester. Jamaica Plain was totally different. The majority were white parents, but they were talking choice and diversity.”

Landsmark, however, interpreted the demands for more choice as manifestations of frustration over the poor quality of many schools in the district.

“When people ask for choice they are really asking for quality,” he told the Banner during a task force meeting last week. “We’re working hard to create a better model than the one that exists now, in part because the city has changed so much.”

In 1976, Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr. ruled Boston’s neighborhood school system unconstitutional and ordered integration by busing.

Since that time, Boston’s student population of color has soared as whites left en masse for private, suburban and parochial schools and Latino and other immigrants flocked to the city.

Now, the makeup of the public schools is over 80 percent black, Latino and Asian, making it unlikely that smaller zones would create segregated schools.

However, access to walk-to schools may be less available to people of color than to whites under a plan of more zones, because there are more public school students in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan than there are public school seats available. Other neighborhoods, such as Brighton and Allston, have a surplus of seats.

Not every neighborhood is regarded as having the same quality of schools, either.

A Banner analysis of the school department’s school performance rankings shows that a disproportionate number of low-ranking schools are in communities of color while a disproportionately large number of high-ranking schools are in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Out of the nine elementary schools that ranked in the bottom three in their zones, two were in Roxbury, two in Dorchester, one in Jamaica Plain, one in Brighton and three near downtown.

Meanwhile, of the nine elementary schools that ranked in the top three in their zones, two were in South Boston, two in Roxbury, two in Hyde Park and one each in West Roxbury, East Boston and Brighton.

“This is a much more complex issue than is normally presented to the public,” said Landsmark. “What we are dealing with is not simply a matter of neighborhood schools versus choice. Achieving access to quality schools when some schools in some neighborhoods are widely regarded as meeting standards of quality is a very tough task.”

 

 

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