FYI from BSF, 01.27.23
With issues of our time becoming more complex and polarizing, clear and even reductive solutions often take center stage.
For nearly fifty years, Boston’s yellow school buses have been a physical manifestation of the city’s duty to equitably provide excellent schools.
The upcoming golden anniversary of the desegregation of Boston schools produced the first of what is likely many comments and perspectives to come. An unpublished paper from MIT’s Blueprint Labs (summary here) found school travel can integrate schools, but it doesn’t boost academic achievement.
Like any other research study, there are assumptions and limitations. Data sources from high school students in New York City and middle and high school students in Boston (exam school students excluded). Benefits are limited to test scores and college enrollment. The majority of busing and busing costs in Boston Public Schools (BPS) is for children in grades PK-6 - grades 7 and above receive an MBTA pass - but impacts are not assessed for that age band.
Different people will weigh these factors and the implications of this study differently, but in the least it did provoke a necessary question: what are the buses for, now?
For integration? That may have been the stated goal in 1974, but it was not in 2013. The new BPS home-based assignment system created shorter choice lists for families, optimizing proximity and school performance measures. “Quality schools closer to home.” In a city that is residentially segregated with a relatively small white population, it was all too probable that schools would become more racially segregated. And that is exactly what happened. Nearly half of Boston’s schools are less diverse than the average Massachusetts school, which is saying something given demography and segregation in the Commonwealth.
The benefits of diverse schools are well-documented and there are diverse schools in Boston by happenstance, not design. It would require a radically different school assignment system or magnets intended to desegregate schools or the adoption of a multi-city or multi-town approach as seen in other states to see real changes here.
For resources? Among other things, busing was conceived as a funding equalizer, that students of color would have access to schools with traditionally more white students and more funding.
Since then, BPS has closed and reversed the funding gap. Per pupil spending is higher for Black and Latino students.
The buses themselves diminish resources. Even though fewer and fewer students are transported each year (down ~16% in the past six years), the costs continue to increase, now hitting $140M annually. It is an immense amount of money. And it is easy to muse that it could be spent differently, but there are real constraints ranging from special education services to state law. And after all, changing buses doesn’t change schools.
For choice? In a school system that does not provide enough high-quality options in enough places, families are not being offered choices, they are being offered a chance, a lottery stub for what they really want.
Getting to consensus on “school quality” is fraught with policy and political disagreements. But, every year, families offer their own definition through revealed preferences. There are years and years of publicly available demand data showing which schools families choose (scroll to the bottom).
There are many reasons why the 40 schools we work with increased their enrollment by 6% since 2020, while Boston schools lost 7% of their students. Most obvious: the demand data tells you that families like them.
So it should not be a surprise that Boston Arts Academy increased its enrollment even as it swung in and out of a different space in a different neighborhood. That New Mission High School and East Boston High School would fill their brand new 7th and 8th grade seats. That the Eliot would fill out its three campuses. That in-demand elementary schools all over the city - like the Hale in Roxbury - would retain students when a 6th grade was added. And so on.
The public process for the Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools has begun. As the city embarks on the tough math of determining the right number of schools for the right number of kids in the right places, let’s not ascribe value to “choices,” but place value on what families have actually chosen and will choose.
Expand and build schools and programs that families want, and the facilities to match.
Then, you figure out the buses.
Notes in the Margin
School safety continues to be a flashpoint in Boston, with an iPhone-captured fight at Boston Latin Academy and continued debate amongst the Boston City Council, and nationally, with a six year-old shooting a teacher (who claims administrators failed to prevent violence).
Planned school mergers are being pushed back.
Retro pay, a very common measure required when a town or city settles a new union contract, has not been provided to Boston teachers, leading the Boston Teachers Union to call for an audit of payroll systems, described by Mayor Wu as “clunky.”
This payroll issue found its way into the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting this past Tuesday. Full materials here, including an apparent consensus on revised learning and accountability targets and the closing of a Chicopee charter school.
Wednesday night’s State of the City Address by Mayor Wu had several education references (full text here):
Expanded early child care access
Averting state receivership
20 electric school buses
Planning process for more and faster school construction
Hiring Superintendent Skipper and supporting her vision, including equitable literacy
Funding for expanded special education inclusion and bilingual counseling services
A “Year 13” program for Fenway High students to attend their first year at UMass Boston for free (Fenway High’s most recent reported number lists that 8 seniors planned to attend UMass Boston)
The road to electric school buses is promising, long, and costly.
State budget season kicked off with annual revenue projections. How much revenue will the Fair Share amendment generate, and how much will go to schools?
At the same time that educators are sounding the alarm on teacher shortages, Teach for America produced its smallest corps in a decade (with layoffs now coming).
Upcoming court decisions could change the legal status of charter schools.