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^ the small schools thing prevents full stop any community investment.
BPD school are constantly moving, shrinking, rebranding, shifting focus or what have you. These tiny fragmented schools offer very few community oriented extracurricular, lack playing fields and open space, and half the time they share space with other schools, businesses, etc. Its hard to know when a school has arrived or departed your neighborhood. The lengthy names, variable start and dismissal times, throughout the city and winding roads to graduation create a totally lack of consistency/reliability.
Standardizing and streamlining schools is essential but folks view every BLS school as unique and special. You can’t get any standardization or connectivity within the system because it’s viewed as steamrolling or silencing voices. Tommy Chang tried to get school start times to follow basic circadian rhythm science to create a better academic results for HS’ers and young children and the man was hung out to dry and beat down. He wanted HS to start later closer to 9 and younger student to start closer to 7:30. Many states/cities elsewhere do this.
Casselius wasn’t to minimize social and geographic transitions by going K-6 and 7-12 (as most private schools in the area do) and the same was happening to here before the pandemic. Anyone will tell you these things have been implemented with success in other district but people in Boston don’t care about proof or science just what’s comforting to them. It’s a trauma reaction marked by cloudy judgement.
Basic investment in things that “round out” a school like Drama, music, sports, debate clubs, model UN and even just landscaping are absent in many BPS schools or wholly underfunded if they exist. Small learning academies simply cannot offer them and these smaller HS with the long names don’t prepare you for the dynamism of college/campus life.
In some cities large high school like Brighton High or East Boston High exist in areas where most of their students come from-but they’re not better than BPS schools...I think Boston would have a better shot at making them functional schools than Philly DC and Baltimore (where those types of schools still exist). Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and, I think, Seattle also have schools like that still. The idea/besides small class sizes-was that smaller HS minimize violence which has probably worked. But Boston is about 16 years deep into learning academies and the profile of students hasn’t changed much and enrollment has dropped a lot- meaning the schools just aren’t attractive...still.
Boston also abandoned pilot schools for out of system charter schools more or less. Which is a shame because Pilots give you the autonomy to work with without the basic public controversy of charters.
What's wrong with charters? Wouldn't you want schools to have the ability to remove those who make learning impossible for everyone else?
Quote:
Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade
^ the small schools thing prevents full stop any community investment.
BPD school are constantly moving, shrinking, rebranding, shifting focus or what have you. These tiny fragmented schools offer very few community oriented extracurricular, lack playing fields and open space, and half the time they share space with other schools, businesses, etc. Its hard to know when a school has arrived or departed your neighborhood. The lengthy names, variable start and dismissal times, throughout the city and winding roads to graduation create a totally lack of consistency/reliability.
Standardizing and streamlining schools is essential but folks view every BLS school as unique and special. You can’t get any standardization or connectivity within the system because it’s viewed as steamrolling or silencing voices. Tommy Chang tried to get school start times to follow basic circadian rhythm science to create a better academic results for HS’ers and young children and the man was hung out to dry and beat down. He wanted HS to start later closer to 9 and younger student to start closer to 7:30. Many states/cities elsewhere do this.
Casselius wasn’t to minimize social and geographic transitions by going K-6 and 7-12 (as most private schools in the area do) and the same was happening to here before the pandemic. Anyone will tell you these things have been implemented with success in other district but people in Boston don’t care about proof or science just what’s comforting to them. It’s a trauma reaction marked by cloudy judgement.
Basic investment in things that “round out” a school like Drama, music, sports, debate clubs, model UN and even just landscaping are absent in many BPS schools or wholly underfunded if they exist. Small learning academies simply cannot offer them and these smaller HS with the long names don’t prepare you for the dynamism of college/campus life.
In some cities large high school like Brighton High or East Boston High exist in areas where most of their students come from-but they’re not better than BPS schools...I think Boston would have a better shot at making them functional schools than Philly DC and Baltimore (where those types of schools still exist). Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and, I think, Seattle also have schools like that still. The idea/besides small class sizes-was that smaller HS minimize violence which has probably worked. But Boston is about 16 years deep into learning academies and the profile of students hasn’t changed much and enrollment has dropped a lot- meaning the schools just aren’t attractive...still.
Boston also abandoned pilot schools for out of system charter schools more or less. Which is a shame because Pilots give you the autonomy to work with without the basic public controversy of charters.
^ the small schools thing prevents full stop any community investment.
BPD school are constantly moving, shrinking, rebranding, shifting focus or what have you. These tiny fragmented schools offer very few community oriented extracurricular, lack playing fields and open space, and half the time they share space with other schools, businesses, etc. Its hard to know when a school has arrived or departed your neighborhood. The lengthy names, variable start and dismissal times, throughout the city and winding roads to graduation create a totally lack of consistency/reliability.
Standardizing and streamlining schools is essential but folks view every BLS school as unique and special. You can’t get any standardization or connectivity within the system because it’s viewed as steamrolling or silencing voices. Tommy Chang tried to get school start times to follow basic circadian rhythm science to create a better academic results for HS’ers and young children and the man was hung out to dry and beat down. He wanted HS to start later closer to 9 and younger student to start closer to 7:30. Many states/cities elsewhere do this.
Casselius wasn’t to minimize social and geographic transitions by going K-6 and 7-12 (as most private schools in the area do) and the same was happening to here before the pandemic. Anyone will tell you these things have been implemented with success in other district but people in Boston don’t care about proof or science just what’s comforting to them. It’s a trauma reaction marked by cloudy judgement.
Basic investment in things that “round out” a school like Drama, music, sports, debate clubs, model UN and even just landscaping are absent in many BPS schools or wholly underfunded if they exist. Small learning academies simply cannot offer them and these smaller HS with the long names don’t prepare you for the dynamism of college/campus life.
In some cities large high school like Brighton High or East Boston High exist in areas where most of their students come from-but they’re not better than BPS schools...I think Boston would have a better shot at making them functional schools than Philly DC and Baltimore (where those types of schools still exist). Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and, I think, Seattle also have schools like that still. The idea/besides small class sizes-was that smaller HS minimize violence which has probably worked. But Boston is about 16 years deep into learning academies and the profile of students hasn’t changed much and enrollment has dropped a lot- meaning the schools just aren’t attractive...still.
Boston also abandoned pilot schools for out of system charter schools more or less. Which is a shame because Pilots give you the autonomy to work with without the basic public controversy of charters.
I can't rep you more but this is spoken like a true Bostonian that cares. I substitute taught at one of those small schools with a fancy name which has since gone defunct after an administrative reorganization. The school hardly offered anything new or special and supplies were woefully underfunded. It was safer and more manageable than when it was part of a big high school but the whole change to small schools was just to save money that's all, not to improve education.
What's wrong with charters? Wouldn't you want schools to have the ability to remove those who make learning impossible for everyone else?
I don't care but the question you raised I what do we do with those "bad kids"? get dumped and concentrated in BPS schools, further dragging the quality down. Kids can't legally dropout until 16 so they have to go somewhere, and once they're 16 and uneducated it's gangs. Gangs recruit right outside of Madison park. Like directly outside the school...
BPS doesnt get stronger with more charters. It could be better for the more academic-oriented students though. So there negatives and positives.
No, something far more precious than that: a spot for their kindergartner in one of the best public schools in the nation, Penn Alexander — a K-8 founded by the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with the Philadelphia public schools and the city’s teachers union.
....
In Houston, the mostly Black, Latino, and Asian students of the Baylor College of Medicine-affiliated Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions do rotations at nearby hospitals and earn tens of millions of dollars in college scholarships every year.
...
There are university-affiliated public schools in Baltimore, New York City, and Los Angeles. And here in Massachusetts, the symbiotic relationship between Clark University and University Park Campus School, a public school that runs from grades 7 to 12, has changed the lives of hundreds of children from Worcester’s tough Main South neighborhood.
It’s a model that would seem well suited to Boston, home to some of the world’s greatest universities, hospitals, and biotech companies.
But oddly, there’s almost nothing of the sort.
Bill Walczak, cofounder of the health center and the Codman Academy Charter Public School, doesn’t get it.
“This is something that’s been driving me crazy for years,” he says. “Boston is this place that has these tremendous institutions . . . and if they cared enough about the kids growing up in the neighborhoods, we could wind up with these fantastic options.”
Like Bill Wazcak said-fundamentally the city hasn't been a champion of it's own people and most especially it's kids.
More so than most cities it seem Boston relies on and caters to people that move in from out of town more, and typically those folks arrive without children.
From that same article. The BPS Superintendent says something along the lines of so kind as the exam schools are on the pedestal they are on now, it'll be difficult to innovate with institutional based schools.
In an interview with Ideas, Cassellius, the Boston superintendent, was enthusiastic about the notion of institutionally affiliated schools.
When she worked in Minnesota, her son attended a school located on the grounds of a zoo.
“They work with the animals, they do field studies — all of these very creative, wonderful ways of learning that this new generation is wanting and desiring,” she said.
The superintendent cautioned that it will be difficult to create these kinds of schools in Boston. She spoke of the exam schools sucking all the oxygen out of the air and pointed to the pushback she’s faced on her own high school redesign plans.“ .
These are uncomfortable truths that Boston leaders aren't willing to humble themselves enough to really take in. That's a big and disruptive reality in Boston and Massachsetts at large.
Because it's such a traditional place, and it's has these heavyweight institutions that sort of drag performance up across a wide swath of QOL categories...problems that could be solved or improved upon are instead met with complacency due to fear that it takes attention/energy from the upper institutions in any way. Or just a sense of “its good enough because it's not as bad as it could be.” That's a legitimate dialogue and argument folks from MA will make online on multiple online spaces.
One might also argue that adding yet another option for resourceful, middle-class, families would only zap the air out of the system more. I think making institutionally-based schools random-assignment is the only thing fair to do. And it needs to be middle or high school.
Ultimately, you have to improve the lives of those who raise families in Boston or you have to replace them with those already doing better.
One commenter got it pretty right:
“The children who are underperforming, and are most at risk, in public schools are not failing simply because their schools are bad but because they don't have the overall support in their lives to be successful. Schools could certainly be better but success will only be had with a community approach. Anyone can look at Lebron James' I Promise School in Akron Ohio for a successful working model of this. In that public school, public and private money is used to provide at risk children with year-round school, family counseling including parent education, student meals, a food bank for families, and even short-term housing for those wrestling with homelessness.”
^And Akron University gives graduates a full ride if admitted. Ultimately, that's what it takes.
“This is something that’s been driving me crazy for years,” he says. “Boston is this place that has these tremendous institutions . . . and if they cared enough about the kids growing up in the neighborhoods, we could wind up with these fantastic options.”
More so than most cities it seem Boston relies on and caters to people that move in from out of town more, and typically those folks arrive without children.
That's because unless you go to one of the elite private schools around Boston or BLS, Boston's top colleges just don't care about you and actively try hard not to recruit you. In fact your chances are way worse off than some guy from Eugene, Oregon. Even second rate private universities in Boston have this kind of bias; they like to think of themselves as not local universities but national universities. This extends to the suburbs too. Thus their "community" is not Greater Boston, but the country.
In some ways their community is actually the world. For example, Northeastern boasts itself as having the third highest number of international students in the country. BU has about 22% foreign students and Brandeis about 20%. MIT has about 3500 international students.
All the more the reasons why young families want to leave Boston if not Massachusetts altogether. This place is fun when you have no children but once you do and your kids are at school age, then the place becomes not so fun and you'll have hard decisions to make. There is still too much vitriol and distrust in this City not to mention the high degree of opportunists in the upper eschelons city government and the BPS for the schools to innovate. Honestly I don't think this international city model is sustainable. This pandemic showed that more than ever, our own communities are needed to provide shelter and support for our institutions, more so than some rich foreigner only here for a few years. You can't build a sustainable city on top of a redwood tree and ignore what's happening on the ground you know.
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I substitute taught at one of those small schools with a fancy name which has since gone defunct after an administrative reorganization. The school hardly offered anything new or special and supplies were woefully underfunded. It was safer and more manageable than when it was part of a big high school but the whole change to small schools was just to save money that's all, not to improve education.
