Johnson calls on community to help reform Boston schools

Talia Whyte

New Boston Public Schools (BPS) Superintendent Dr. Carol Johnson said that it is up to students, parents, educators and the community at large to share responsibility for reforming education during a forum at Freedom House in Roxbury on Saturday.
Johnson’s remarks came one day after the release of a new Boston school system report revealing that nearly half of Boston students don’t graduate from the city’s public high schools in four years.
Serving notice that she will not be the “lady sheriff” doing all the work to improve the present system, Johnson said, “The city has to come together. It is our collective energy and work together that will help our students be successful.”
Over the next two months, Johnson will be addressing similar community meetings all over Boston about the report’s findings and possible strategies for improving the city’s climbing dropout rate.
Saturday’s forum, entitled “Students and Parents United to Reform Education: Taking Back Our Education,” was hosted by Project Listen, a Freedom House program focusing on education reform issues. Parents and students participated in workshops on negative media representations of hip-hop culture and the impact of school violence on academic achievement with the superintendent.
But much of the participants’ attention focused on the information in the BPS report, conducted over a 10-month period, which aimed to determine the most likely reasons why students drop out and to compile data on those who have already dropped out. School officials hope to use the results to create strategies for rectifying the problem. Right now, the school system doesn’t have a coordinated program for reaching out to at-risk students, and Johnson said she is pleased to have an opportunity with this report to address the issue more effectively.
Project Listen member Cindy Printemps, 18, hopes the report will serve as a springboard for a more proactive approach from Johnson and the BPS.
“Instead of looking at just percentages, we need to actually be doing something about this now,” said Printemps in response to the report. “Something should have been done about it before it got so bad.”
According to the report, students that fall into one of the following four categories are more likely than their peers to drop out: eighth-graders with chronic absences, ninth-graders that fail one or more courses, special education students educated separately from nondisabled students, and students not fluent in English who first enter the BPS system in high school.
The report shows that eighth-graders with an attendance rate below 80 percent may also have other characteristics — being overage or failing grade-level course work. In the case of ninth-graders, Johnson explained that they are failing in their courses because they worry that they will not graduate on time. In many cases, these students are overage for their grade level, and they are likely to give up because they feel that they are too old to be in school.
Concerning special education students, Johnson said that there are too many over-referrals, or wrongful placements, of boys — especially boys of color — in special ed. The majority of Boston school dropouts are black and Latino boys.
Johnson estimated that one-third of current Boston school students didn’t attend elementary and middle school in the city. Many of them are foreign-born students for whom English is not their first language.
“We have a lot of students from Somalia, and they come here from refugee camps in Kenya,” Johnson said. “Many of them don’t have any formal schooling. We put them in the ninth grade because they are old enough. But they don’t have the prerequisites to enter high school.”
The superintendent said she has some initial strategies that BPS will look to implement, including providing student sensitivity and “family-friendly” training for teachers and administrators. Johnson feels it is vital for educators, parents and students to interact with one another as equals, on the same level and with the same respect for the educational goals being pursued.
Johnson would also like to see more of Boston’s business leaders offer mentoring opportunities, like summer jobs and internships, for students.
She is expected to address the Boston School Committee with her recommendations at the beginning of next year.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who was also in attendance at this meeting, has vowed to work with school officials and the community on the increasing number of dropouts.
“This is too serious an issue,” Menino said. “Our job is to improve on this situation. The future is the youth of Boston.”
Most importantly, Johnson wanted to make it clear that instead of pointing fingers and placing blame for the city’s high dropout rate, accountability must ultimately be shared across the board.
Growing up in the segregated South, Johnson said she was part of a community that couldn’t afford to take education for granted, and everyone took part in helping students. Johnson reminisced about her pastor helping her through the college admission process and how the lives of her peers in school were shaped by other community members.
“When I was growing up, and when the parents weren’t always around for their children, other people stepped up to the plate,” Johnson said.
“They understood that when moms and dads couldn’t do everything they needed to do for their children, everyone had to act responsibly. We have to make sure our children don’t get lost.”