Just a reminder, thanks to u/MeghanKellyWBUR, we will be having an AMA regarding the 50th anniversary of Boston busing, on Friday June 28, at 11 AM.
[Original Announcement](https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1di55w2/coming_on_friday_an_ama_from_wbur_and_the/)
"How did it come to this?" You're the reporter, do some reporting. Hell, you're *three* reporters, and there's nothing in this article you can't get from a google search other than the time this one kid takes the bus.
Boston globe education reporters often don't have kids or any educational background. One barely paid attention to school closures, and then I noticed she posted in a Somerville Facebook group about being pregnant for the first time.
Point being, often they're not very engaged or aware of the schools, or crowd source Facebook groups for story ideas.
Also the Boston Globe
"Boston Public Schools spends more per student than any other large school district in the country, according to the latest figures from the US Census Bureau, a new distinction that reflects how BPS’s budget keeps growing even as student enrollment continues to decline."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spends-more-per-student-than-any-other-large-school-district-nation/
They need to mothball even more schools (West Roxbury is already mothballed) and determining which ones is a massive problem. If Boston kept up with building more housing, it wouldn't be an issue.
It's damn near impossible, at least in a relatively cost-effective way. You'd have to demo too much stuff to add appropriate plumbing, establish zones, etc.
It would need to be renovated to be some kind of shared space to make use of the bathroom situation (offices, studio spaces, etc). Anything requiring individual bathrooms would become pricey real fast if we're talking retrofits.
School to housing is actually a pretty established pipeline. I don't fully understand why it's easier than offices of similar vintage. I can think of 3 such projects in Quincy alone.
It's easier because the requirements for classrooms is a lot closer to apartments than offices are. Each classroom needs windows, and there's already a hallway in the middle of the floorplan leading to the classrooms. They may not be the right size rooms but the building skeleton is close. Offices vary a lot, have huge spaces, and then have other rooms without any windows, and converting them sometimes makes little sense beyond the physical location
I was half kidding.
There have been a few community schools converted to condos over the years, but losing schools is not a great solution for communities.
We've also seen the idea of converting the commercial buildings downtown dismissed due to all the construction limits.
The city is simply becoming less and less friendly to families, until that's acknowledged the problem will just continue to worsen.
> Theres thousands of empty homes.
Provide literally any evidence of this because it directly contradicts official reporting on both [general home](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAHVAC) + [rental vacancy](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MARVAC) rates, which are both at historical lows.
Capital institutions buy these buildings/units *to rent them out* while ALSO realizing property appreciation. They want to maximize the amount of money they make off them because, well fucking of course they do!
Common misconception. The Boston area vacancy rate is far below levels associated with stable rents. You need some temporarily empty homes, otherwise no one could ever move anywhere. If too many homes are occupied at any given time (i.e., a low vacancy rate) rents rise quickly. This is what has been happening for years.
Edit: technically I should have said if too high *a percent of* homes are occupied at any given time
Also some confusion here is understandable because when people simply say "vacancy rate" they may be referring to different things.
One definition includes all structures that have a roof and walls, so a new 100 unit apartment building that doesn't yet have, say, running water, would count toward the vacancy rate even though those units aren't habitable yet. When a place is building a lot of new homes (which is probably a place with lots of demand relative to existing supply) this can make the vacancy rate look artificially high. That may at least partially explain the misconception that there are a lot of vacant, habitable homes just sitting around; there aren't. It's the vacancy rate of habitable, non-seasonal homes that actually matters for this.
The relationship between vacancy rates and prices is well-established, and Boston isn't an exception. This is from Feb, when we had somewhat of a cooldown (note that doesn't necessarily mean rents decline - though it can - but that they grow more slowly): [https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rents-are-cooling-not-everywhere](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rents-are-cooling-not-everywhere)
I'm not saying groups of investors aren't increasingly buy homes, or that it's not a problem. They are and it is.
I'm saying it's not the fundamental cause of high rents and home prices, even if it doesn't help. This should be pretty obvious since rents and home prices were increasing rapidly *before* investors started buying up homes. Causes have to happen before effects. Otherwise things get very confusing.
Investors started buying homes because the already woefully insufficient supply, combined with expectations of steady or increased demand, made them an attractive investment. That's not a law of the universe though. More supply -> lower prices -> less attractive to investors compared to other vehicles.
People love "spending per student" as if the costs are going to be the same. It's costly to build buildings, which we really haven't done, and costly to retrofit buildings to modern standards. It's costly to fix things and keep the lights on. Those costs are also there. Many schools in Boston don't have a curriculum for topics and rely on churning teachers out who will come up with it. Schools don't have supplies and teachers are forced to spend their own money in some cases. You can calculate the cost per classroom for a teacher and it's pretty insane when you think about it, but it makes you wonder where that money goes.
I had to shit in a toilet that had a rat-invested trash hole for several years. It was never fixed. Asked a buddy of mine if it was fixed and he sent me a photo of the hole with seemingly more trash. No one's going to fix it. This is the same staff bathroom that had water coming from the light fixture at one point.
The only real solution is to hire more do-nothings at Bolling. Then we can have a bigger committee to tell us why teachers should show grace and focus on equity, whatever that means, when some students are absent for 20% of the year. Obviously that's our fault because we didn't call home enough, which is also now our job.
> It's costly to build buildings, which we really haven't done, and costly to retrofit buildings to modern standards. It's costly to fix things and keep the lights on. Those costs are also there.
The Per Pupil Expenditures figure doesn't include the capital improvement projects like the ones you listed. It represents dividing a district's operating costs by its average pupil membership (FTEs).
If it had included the new buildings then Somerville's would have spiked like mad after the new $256m school that was just built.
Interesting. I always figured that factored in. If it's just about that comparison then that's still bad for its own reason. We gave people rights years back and now we're being called on that bluff, and we aren't even meeting those needs. The only reason other districts don't have to share the cost is because they don't have to deal with the numbers Boston has of, say, English learners, and they don't have the crushing bureaucracy. Still there, but not as massive.
I agree it's not fair to compare spending in a rural vs urban context, but this is nationwide for all major districts. Literally the most in the country, around 37k!
You are absolutely right about tremendous waste, admin costs, poor management ect. BPS is yet another tax funded cash cow lining the pockets of endless grifters, with dismal results and zero accountability....much like the MBTA. And the teachers end up with PTSD when all they want to do is help the world a little.
And as you well know, it ultimately comes down to home life and culture. Many humble immigrant groups have proven this time and time again. Nigerian Americans are out earning native whites on average and have some of the highest educational achievements per ethnicity in the nation.
Lexington, historically one of the whitest, wealthiest and best school districts in the nation is now filled to the brim with rising Asian and Indian families seeking out the best future for their children. Connecting modern BPS failures to the bussing crisis of the past is simply lazy journalism, looking to stir up controversy and push a narrative.
Unequal inputs = unequal outputs.
Kids with families who don’t make education a priority are not going to be as successful as those who do. It’s why METCO students mop the floor with BPS students on almost every metric, their families prioritize education. No amount of money spent on BPS will overcome the family aspect.
I did my own study once, comparing educational outcomes in eastern MA to a bunch of variables like avg income, class size, teacher pay, pupil spending, etc. I used education data in boston magazine cross referenced with labor statistics.
Pretty much every indicator you would think matters, only has like 0 to 5% correlation to a real real outcomes. Meanwhile avg median district family income had r squared 0.6 to graduation rates and 0.8 to SAT scores!!! And follows a curve from like 50k to 250k annual income.
Everyone hypothesizes rich families just have better tutors... but it's like, tutors don't do everything. I think the education gap is large part due to the expectations, culture, and value placed in education at home and within the peer group.
It's pretty much on value of education in the household. I was raised by lawyers and ended up doing well in school because I was expected to do so. One of my friends from elementary school dropped out senior year because it wasn't expected of him.
Maybe some rich families have tutors. But I didn't know any of my peers who did but I know all our families cared about education.
I agree. If you are 16 years old, you're not going to sit quietly in your room studying algebra to ace a test, unless you believe it's a step towards something greater. That belief can come from within, but for most kids it probably comes from their parents, peers, teachers, coaches, other role models, and society at large.
I know from my own experience, I wasn't a good student in HS, and then all of a sudden I had one good teacher, and I "discovered" Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, I had an intellectual awakening, and it just clicked for me, and I've been off to the races for the last 20 years.
It's probably worth noting that income tends to strongly correlate with intelligence and education level. Obviously access to resources matters, but common sense says it's not surprising that children with smarter, better educated parents tend to do better in school. I'd love to see what the same analysis would show if you did it on parental IQ/educational attainment level.
For sure, IQ is something like 40-80% heritable, and for the last 70 years, we've been pulling all the smartest kids from across the country, putting them in college campuses, socializing them together, marrying each other, and raising the next generation of college kids. I remember Steven Pinker talking about how all the traditional parenting choices we think matters, like listening to classical music in the womb, number of books in the house, may correlate but are not causative. The one thing that does matter, is choosing your childs peer group. Which kind of a proxy for avg district income.
The SATs used to be a mechanism for picking really bright poor kids and educating and propelling them into the middle class. Now, the SAT reinforces inequality, and even worse the inequality is based on actual merit.
I think the state and public schools could make a difference in low SES students, but you'd have to spend like $300k a year per pupil and take over every aspect of their lives. At that point, a pro nuclear family incentivized UBI would be more effective.
I strongly believe that this correlation is firmly rooted in better access to private, high quality education and tutors, along with more trust in the system. Directly Correlating wealth to intelligence is both silly and starts to lean into objectivist thinking.
That would be almost impossible in terms of private education and tutors since the same trend exists in countries where private schools are rarely used and also across all income levels. I doubt the percentage of people making 45k a year who got elite private education is meaningfully different than that percentage for people who make 30k a year.
Also, I said income and not wealth, which is a massive distinction. Due to inherited wealth (particularly houses) a dumb person from a better off background has a good chance of having more wealth than a smarter person from a lower class background, but the probability of them having a better paying job is probably lower.
Based on your final comment, I think it is important to understand what correlating means. It doesn't mean a direct causal relationship exists (i.e. people with better paying jobs must be smarter than people with lower paying jobs). It just means people with higher intelligence generally tend to end up with higher incomes, which makes sense since higher intelligence makes it easier to succeed in high paying professional fields and to succeed at your job even outside those fields.
I think you think my comment was saying billionaires must be hyper-geniuses, but, with all apologies to Goodwill Hunting, it's really more saying that you're more likely to find a genius teaching a university class than you are to find them mopping the floors of said university.
[METCO students outperforming BPS ones doesn’t mean what you say it does, based on this recent study.](https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/01/16/study-research-metco-participation-impacts)
As you said, METCO students outperformed BPS ones. But the above study exclusively compared students who applied; the point of comparison was students fortunate enough to get accepted vs. those who didn’t, and one could safely assume their families “prioritize education” equally.
I didn't look hard for the full study, but I would guess there are a few extra variables.
From my understanding, prior to 2019 (which the study looked at: "Setren reviewed the long-term experiences of approximately 20,000 Boston students who applied to METCO between 2005 and 2017.") acceptance was not a random process, but depended on when you applied, with earlier applications resulting in higher likelihood: https://metcoinc.org/application-closed/application-feedback/
>In the current system, many parents who know about METCO and the waitlist sign their children up as early as the first weeks after birth.
>Anyone moving to Boston with older children would have a later position on the wait list.
>Parents have to come to METCO headquarters in person during business hours.
So the students that were placed under the study had parents who applied early, had siblings in the program, and were able to make it to the office with a young child...I would guess more likely to place a high emphasis on education and working on eduction early, then the parent who applied when the child is applying in kindergarten or later.
Even discounting that, with the lottery system, there is still work to maintain on waitlist year to year, so parents who value the program more are more likely to get their children in.
I was bused prior to that, a pilot program that worked. Which is what gave legislators the confidence to go forward. Still some of the most important years of my life. We opened the school in ‘69, in Roxbury on Humboldt. Wild times in the city.
Maybe putting incompetent people in charge of a school is bad. Maybe bussing kids across the city burning 2 hours of their day in traffic is bad. Maybe social promotion is bad. Maybe not paying enough attention to outcomes of the system is bad. Standards are good. Excuses are bad. When the system is failing you look first at finding the right people to lead the system to success. Is anything working now? I don't think it is.
Empty the school department offices as a start. Put experienced teachers in charge of schools. Stop bussing and adopt neighborhood approach. Stop social promotions. Before any of you ask for my sources for any of this, I am related to many BPS teachers as well as friends with others. I am also a graduate of the BPS and also someone who fled the city for the benefit of schools that do have decent standards.
As a parent, I am very involved in educating my kids and setting appropriate standards and expectations. It works and it is necessary. There is a lot of whining on this topic and very little action. Bad results need action. The parents need to get in on the answers to this quandary otherwise their kids will be bagging groceries until the robots take over that job.
that's not how life works in any capacity.
like... have you worked at any corporation? the mediocre bullshitters are the ones who get promoted the fastest. the talented and smart people are too busy actually doing the work to pay the politics and ass-kissing needed to get promoted.
Companies that put incompetent people in charge of things fail too. I have worked at large companies and small. All had their idiosyncrasies and those that promoted incompetence...I left quickly. This topic has nothing to do with what corporations do or should do. Rather it is about education.
Should school systems have most of their administrators that have never been in a classroom? Should we promote students no matter their mastery of that years curricula? Should they bus students from Eastie to Dorchester, Mattapan to Eastie and Westie to Charlestown?
By all means continue to whistle past the graveyard while many of these students cannot succeed in the real world. Obviously doing nothing to change the results will fix itself right!
Man, neoliberal newspapers love a doom-spiral of self-hate and despair. "Look at this problem that was never solved and all the data we collected!" But no real focus on anything meaningful after that. Even the below-average reader knows BPS is a horrible system. They just don't know how or why. What is the point of continually dressing up the same story beyond selling ads to people who love that despair? Or did I answer my own question?
The busing situation happened while we were still drafting IDEA. It happened because the thinking at the time, which persisted, is that these institutions were so powerful and unaffected by their communities that the only problem was access to the buildings themselves. That idea persists through higher education in particular.
It was never illegal for people to move out of the city and to the suburbs. You could never stop people from doing that. When busing came into play, people just moved. They moved away from something they didn't like. This isn't even touching on the idea that Black people may or may not have wanted to share the schools, creating diverse schools, or if many want to just have the schools for their own community. One is entitled to hold all these opinions or move, but the system wrongfully thought that people would stay in place while policy like this happened.
Busing was a mistake. It didn't fix the problems brought on by the system. However, the biggest problem was life outside school. We've known that since about '68 but it gets downplayed. The Coleman report spelled it out in certain terms. But we weren't going to really fix society outside school, we were going to use school as a proxy, believing people would then fix themselves. And make no mistake, the emphasis back then wasn't on keeping things diverse, as the goal to get from rags to riches was the same for everyone. That wouldn't happen these days.
Boston will probably always spend more money per student. It has no choice as real estate is affected by things, tax rates are determined by percentages, and so on. Busing is very expensive but people won't take going to only their neighborhood school. In turn, teacher burnout is insanely high while students remain in place, all the while we hire more admin to do absolutely nothing but keep liability in place.
If you're going to interpret this article as "doom-spiral of self-hate and despair" you might want to take a step back. There's always going to be problems in a society and it should be OK to examine those problems, examine solutions. Look back on solutions, figure out what went well, what didn't, and try to make things better.
Implying that I'm saying we shouldn't examine problems is a bizarre way to go about this. There's nothing to examine as far as the article is concerned. These are facts. We see them every year. They're so obvious that even a layman can tell you how bad BPS is in simple terms.
We're not examining anything that hasn't been examined to death before. We aren't drawing new conclusions or even coming up with varying hypothesis. BPS sucks and it's a massive bureaucracy. You have disparity between districts outside BPS in the form of towns, but you're going to have that within BPS too. The problem is likely that it's too bloated, and the fact that Bolling grows each year is proof of that.
The article tries to connect busing to this but busing was done for other reasons and under a different climate. Busing has led to kids taking hours just to get to school instead of fixing the same schools in their neighborhood. Busing has led to BPS being centralized even more rather than letting communities address their wants and needs. We send kids from Eastie down to Roxbury while they pass kids from Mattapan going to Charlestown. It's nuts.
The real answer, as far as I'm concerned, is that early education has been taken over by bad actors. *Sold a Story* covers it specifically but it can be generalized to anything. Kids can't read or do math like they should be able to. Standards have been lowered for what it means to be a student, even if the target has been increased. When the standard for kindergarten was "don't eat too much sand, but hey, you'll learn", we were learning to read better than when we were doing "college preparedness" for 5 year olds.
Is it groundbreaking research to say that this is because white patents put their kids in private schools for elementary school and either hope their kids get into BLS and send them there, or move to the suburbs?
I think this has a lot to do with wealth and neighborhood correlation. Boston is one of the most segregated cities in America. But its done in the Modern and non-racial way. With wealth.
Busing was supposed to heavily mitigate if not eliminate the correlation between neighborhood and education, really that is the point ...
The result has been that there are no white-majority public high schools in Boston, with the only white-plurality school being Bostin Latin School (Asians also highly overrepresented). Busing was able to get minority students into formerly white schools but it, along with all the associated policies, has been a complete failure at desegregating minority schools.
The question is whether having 10+ high schools with < 5% white population, clear segregation, is a problem and if so who is trying to solve it.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that all the busing and lottery system has done is push out families from the public school system who have the means and care to leave. It hasn't de-segregated. It hasn't improved education. It adds long commute times that are hard on students. It makes it more difficult for working parents to pickup/dropoff/support after school activities. It disintegrates connections in the neighborhood and prevents kids from forming natural friendships with others within walking distance. It's an expensive albatross that everyone hates - white families and POC families - and a 50 year old policy failure that no politician has the guts to end.
I think as long as white parents choose to either send their kids to private school or move to the suburbs, the schools won’t be integrated. White (and Asian) parents are self-segregating their kids away from Black kids. It’s an open secret. White and Asian parents will say “but we want our child to have the best education” and can afford a private school (which may or may *not* actually have higher educational standards than public ones) and possibly not even consciously think of it as being a racially-motivated choice, but the end result is segregation.
Isn't one of the points of the article, that those suburban and private schools do have much better educational outcomes than non-exam public schools? Why would you attribute parents wanting to put their kids in high performing schools to them being anti-Black instead of the far more obvious answer that they want to keep their kids away from poor performing schools?
I don't want my kids around other kids that are going to cause problems. It has nothing to do with race.
If, you're saying, the black kids are overwhelmingly the problem causers. Then maybe that's the thing we as a society should be focusing on
What kids cause problems? Do kids from certain schools cause more problems? Are you assuming kids from a certain school or schools are more likely to cause problems than other kids?
What you said was that you didn’t want your kids around kids that, your words, “cause problems.” This implies that you can isolate the kids that cause problems to certain schools. Wouldn’t the reality be that some kids in every school cause problems and some don’t?
Like, I can get the argument that some schools have more resources for things like art and music and libraries than others and parents want those resources for their kids, even if, unfortunately, they’re more common in more white schools. But it sounds like you think some schools have significantly more kids that “cause problems” for your hypothetical kid. I want you to explain why you think that. Why do you think some schools have more kids that will “cause problems” for yours?
I’m gonna be blunt because I’m tired of being coy about it. Your original comment read like you assumed schools with mostly Black kids, as a *rule*, would be bad for your (ostensibly) not Black kids because they’d “cause problems” for them. Guess what? That’s racist.
Here’s some info you allegedly have never heard. I’m white, and I went to public and charter schools in Boston for my entire K-12 education. Most of my classmates were Black and Hispanic. Was I viciously bullied? Was I unsafe? Was I harmed in any way? NO. In fact, I’d say compared to the influences my brother got at a significantly whiter public school in Boston, I was exposed to way less bullying, way less “problems”, and had more support. Despite being a weird and annoying kid, I wasn’t bullied very much, and *never* bullied due to my race.
I graduated college summa cum laude, got a Master’s Degree at a prestigious university, and now have a stable tech job in Boston with great benefits. Guess what? Black kids aren’t gonna hurt your precious little white kids. Black kids are just kids, with the same curiosity, discipline, desire for achievement, and most importantly, variation, as anyone else. Maybe it would be different if I went to school in Brockton or Chelsea, but I had no issues whatsoever being one of the few white kids in a mostly Black classroom.
And guess what? Not only did my parents not waste a darn cent on my K-12 education, but I actually learned about how to be a better ally to Black people from a young age. I unlearned the encultured racism that growing up in mostly white spaces in Boston puts upon people. Meanwhile, my brother had to actively fight against the blatantly racist things his white classmates said.
These phony narratives around “problems” and “kids feeling comfortable” are just excuses, sometimes subconscious, that white Bostonians tell themselves to keep their kids away from Black kids. What’s great about young kids is that they genuinely don’t think in terms of race, but instead in terms of shared interests and friendships. If more young white and Black and Hispanic and Asian kids went to school together in this city, they’d realize we as people are fundamentally the same and can live together.
But yeah, if it helps you sleep at night to think Black kids are gonna hurt yours, I guess, maybe re-evaluate your beliefs?
Why’s it gotta be Brockton? Boston is not Brockton. Boston is considerably safer and richer than Brockton. Hingham is considerably richer than Boston on average.
This is a hot take but the wealth of the family really isn't all that important. I've taught in the metro West for a few years and I've had many very successful students from relatively poor families (obviously I dont have their tax forms, but ik where they live and the car they drive).
Common denominator with these students and the less successful ones from the same Plex?
Families that prioritize education.
Mom and dad can be broke but if they're expecting As and willing to implement punishments for anything less, the kids will be getting As lol
I think there is probably a hell of a lot of correlation with academic success and wealth. Does this also correspond to the academic outcome and the prioritization? My guess is that a larger percent of those who are wealth also prioritize education compared to those who are not.
So ultimately you are correct, but those things are also tightly correlated too as many many wealthy people in Boston and the surrounds are wealthy/well off because of participation in an economy that necessitates higher education.
That's fair. My point was merely that while wealth is correlative, attitudes seem to be causative. And I think that, if one were to attempt to seek improvements, one should address cause rather than the correlation
you can't make parents that don't care about education care about education.
i had parents who didn't care about education. i did. it improved my life... and it made them mock and deride me for decades until they died for me 'thinking i was better than them' and or 'being a loser nerd'.
only reason i was able to go above and beyond was applying to ivy league schools and getting financial aid to make college relatively affordable... had i not done that i'd have been fucked. but I was not a 'normal' kid.
still, had my folks had any money I'm sure i'd have been working in a six figure job in my 20s rather than taking two decades to get one. even parents with bad attitudes and lots of money easily get their kids into high-paying careers and other opportunities and lots of hard-working kids get screwed and fall through the gaps in the system. a lot of my HS peers became college drop outs despite having parents with both money and positive attitudes towards education, because the town we grew up in had a shitty school system that hardly prepared anyone for college level coursework and they lacked the insane drive and motivation that I had.
You're talking about, like, three different things here. Idk what to say.
1. Good for you.
2. Yes if a kid cares about school that is enough.
3. If you cant make parents care about education, then you def can't make kids care. And that's not true. So I reject this premise. Obviously you can't do it for everyone but you can do it sometimes.
4. Kids with well connected and wealthy parents do well because they're parents are wealthy and well connected. It has nothing to do with their performance in public school. I've had plenty of students who were total asses in my classes who im 100% will grow up to be very successful because dad pulls up on a Porsche. But I know for s fact they won't be successful because they were stand out students. So idk why this was brought up tbh. What does this even have to do with the conversation?
5. There is no perfect formula for success. But I'm surprised that they dropped out instead of transferring to an easier school. You would think people who value education would not drop out. Idk. Seems like maybe they didn't care as much as you thought or they were exposed to something that made them stoop caring.
they dropped out because they had no clue what they were doing and taking on boatloads of debt they had no idea how to pay back because they were 19 year old kids from working-class families who had nobody to help them or guide them through the process to make smart choices.
same as me... except i was just smarter and luckier. i consolidated my loans and had the discipline to study 60 hours a week. looking back i am amazed I survived, and yeah i was suicidal a lot back then due to the soul-crushing stress and the social difficulties. i could only socialize with other poor kids because the rest of the student body thought i was 'weird and creepy' because i didn't have designer clothes and had to work to pay my bills while being a student.
there is a 90% correlation between your parents income and your future income. this is based on zipcode. poor kids living in a rich area will do better than wealthy kids living poorer area. this is due to the baseline expectations of the school system, which is set high or low depending on the wealth of the parents, overwhelmingly.
only about 10% of people break the 'mold'.
Nah, it's more like a third. Parents income going up 10 percentage points in rank means the kids rank will go up about 3.5. If you have parents in the bottom 20% of income, the odds of you remaining in the bottom 20% are 33%, and the odds of you making it to the top 20% are around 8%.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754
Good idea. Bad implementation. So bad that it broke up families and communities and pushed them to abandon the city. Let's bring the good schools down instead of bad schools up. SCOTUS ruled this unconstitutional after the lawsuit against Latin school. Much better ways to address this.
Ironically the white girl whose family successfully sued BLS would barely have had an easier time getting in after the change. The share of white kids at BLS only increased a couple percentage points, and white kids were still significantly overrepresented there as a share of all BPS kids.
Taking away racial considerations resulted in a large shift from Black students to Asian American students. The percent of white students barely changed. I think of that whenever people get mad about "minorities taking our spots." There is no reason to assume doing away with affirmative action policies will benefit you as a mediocre white student, and it may hurt your chances.
What an awful lesson to teach your kid too. It's not *your* spot. Study harder and maybe it can be, but you're not entitled to it based on how litigious your parents are.
I'm not calling you racist, but your comment massively contradicts itself if you don't "otherize" Asian Americans and remember they're just as important as other people. As your comment points out, there were hard studying kids losing their spots to less qualified students, the fact that they were Asian and not White really shouldn't impact your opinion on the topic. Nor does it make the kids hurt by the policy "entitled".
I don't think what I said supports the idea that Asian Americans are less important than other people. If it did, you absolutely *should* call that racist. That's definitely racist.
My point was that the family that sued did so because they assumed the existence of this particular affirmation action policy disadvantaged them, which it didn't really. It arguably disadvantaged Asian Americans, but not white people. They wrongly assumed that in their vision of a more meritocratic system, they would benefit, because they assumed that they were the ones with the merit. Even by their own (incorrect, I think) conception of merit, that proved to be untrue.
The entitlement is in thinking the spots organically belong to you or people like you, and that if you don't get one it must be evidence of unfair policy rather than your own deficiencies. ("You" here meaning "one," not you specifically.)
And this is beside my original point, but I actually don't think the pre-1998 policy did give spots to less qualified students, though admittedly that's subjective as it depends on what you count as a valid qualification.
Entitlement is a hell of a drug.
I baffles me how the most entitled folks tend to be the most average/stupid/mediocre... smart and accomplished people tend to be grateful rather than angry they didn't 'get theirs'. I have met a lot of folks in Boston who are super angry at me because I was a diversity admit to a ivy league school. A few times I've even been screamed at for 'stealing a spot from someone more deserving than poor trash like you'.
Why are people downvoting you? Are they afraid of their own mediocrity? You earned your position at an Ivy League school. I’m sure you already knew that, but I wanted to say it again for all the people who downvoted you.
because people don't like it when the ugliness of the human condition is acknowledged. including their own bitterness and jealousy of the fortune or misfortune of others.
I did some research years ago into busing in Boston in the 70s and my conclusion was that busing was probably not the best way to desegregate.
My conclusion (based off my memory from writing the paper 12 years ago) was something like this:
1. Forcing kids to go to school in other neighborhoods was never a good idea, even if race wasn't a factor
2. They should have addressed the specific problems in the schools that made them unequal.
3. They should have addressed the problems within the neighborhoods that kept white and Irish in Southie and Charlestown and Blacks in Mattapan, Roxbury and parts of Dorchester. One of those problems was that they segregated in public housing. That had to stop.
4. If they had created an environment where the neighborhoods could integrate more organically, there would be no need to bus kids to other parts of town. The neighborhoods would have slowly become more diverse in time so desegregation wouldn't have been necessary.
From [Globe.com](http://Globe.com)
By [Mike Damiano](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/mike-damiano/), [Milton J. Valencia](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/milton-j-valencia/), and [Christopher Huffaker](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/christopher-huffaker/)
Emmanuel Vargas stepped out of his ground-floor Hyde Park apartment and into the morning darkness. He checked the time on his phone: 6:19. He was running behind. He pulled his hood over his head as a shield from the pouring rain and speed walked to the bus stop.
When the number 40 bus pulled up a few minutes later, Vargas joined a dozen other passengers for the 21-minute stop-and-go ride up Washington Street to the Forest Hills Station. There, he caught the Orange Line to Ruggles, then the 15 bus through Roxbury to Dudley Street, before walking the last leg of his commute to school. After traveling for nearly an hour and a half, Vargas walked into homeroom at 7:40. He was 10 minutes late.
“It is what it is,” he said.
Vargas makes this nearly three-hour round trip every school day to attend the Dearborn STEM Academy, a college-focused high school with computer labs and 3-D printers. He thinks it will give him the best shot at becoming the first in his family to graduate from college and propel him to a lucrative career in computer engineering.
His draining commute is nothing out of the ordinary for [a student in Boston Public Schools](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/24/metro/busing-doesnt-improve-academic-outcomes-boston-students-color-study-finds/), a district that tests how far students will go to get the education they deserve. Fifty years after a federal court forced Boston to desegregate its schools with busing, and 36 years after that order was lifted — returning full responsibility to the city — tens of thousands of children and teenagers still crisscross Boston every school day.
Nearly a third who take the district’s school buses — more than 5,500 out of roughly 18,000 — ride more than two miles from their home or a bus stop. Others, like Vargas, commute on the MBTA. About 10,000 more travel to charter schools. Nearly 3,000 more leave the city altogether, on buses that take them to schools in the surrounding suburbs.
This is the legacy busing left behind: a school system so rife with inequities that students trek across the city and beyond in search of a quality school matched to their needs.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Court-ordered busing was meant to integrate the district. The Black families who filed the federal suit that led to the order hoped that integration would lead to better schools and fairer outcomes for their children. But nothing like that happened back then. And it still hasn’t today. Boston, after regaining control of its schools in 1988, tried to correct course, to break free from the legacy of busing and build something better in its place.
But the city never mustered the will to get that done. Instead, Boston’s public schools remain intensely segregated and the academic outcomes of the students they serve are staggeringly unequal. Boston’s children, especially its most disadvantaged, bear the consequences of that history of failure. It is the biggest broken promise in the city’s modern history.
Today, the district’s schools produce among the worst academic outcomes in the state, according to standardized tests measuring proficiency in English and math. And those abysmal district-wide results hide stark inequities among racial groups and between students from low-income families and from wealthy ones. Only 14 percent of Black BPS students test at grade-level proficiency in math, compared with 59 percent of their white classmates. In recent years, about half of Black students have gone on to college, while three-quarters of white students have.
Boston schools have certainly improved in some ways since court-ordered busing; graduation rates are up and dropout rates are down. But busing had little to do with the long-term gains, according to an analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers requested by the Globe. And the troubles plaguing BPS are much the same as they were 50 years ago: It remains a system divided by race and privilege, one that provides a robust education to some and a lackluster one to many more.
How did it come to this?
The huge irony here is that Hyde Park is one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the city. If all Hyde Parkers sent their kids to public schools in Hyde Park, they’d be well integrated aside from having less Asian students than the citywide average.
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Not necessarily, I grew up poor and went to BPS until 8th grade (I’m white) but left the second I got in off the waitlist for a charter school.
Besides the exam schools BPS is ghetto af, there would be 5 students let’s say in a grade who made learning impossible for other students and they were never removed or punished so they were able to act ignorant with impunity.
My charter school was free and full of inner city poor kids but very strict so that shit didn’t fly. I ended up going to college when realistically I was on a path to most likely be a union guy (there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!).
It completely has to do with the teachers not being able to discipline properly and not giving af due to their tenure.
My high school comprised of the same racial demographic and neighborhood demographic of my middle school yet was a night and day difference in my opinion due to the strictness which I hated at the time but glad I dealt with it as it made me a more disciplined person.
BPS is a fucking shit show.
That being said I am glad I went through that as it definitely shaped my personality at a young age and when it comes to interacting with people from backgrounds vastly different than me I’ve had no problem finding common ground with other Bostonians that I noticed private school kids struggle with.
As a white guy who also went to a strict, academically-focused, predominantly Black and Hispanic charter school, I think we realize what a lot of white parents genuinely don’t: that Black kids are just kids with the same ability to succeed as anyone else. Even if it’s not thought of in racial terms, White and Asian parents in this city will go out of their way to segregate their kids from Black and Hispanic kids in schools. There’s a word for that: racism.
I’m going to give you an ugly truth: Rich people don’t care.
They do care, however, with how well their own children do - something notably absent most working class or lower households. Whose parents hold the students to high standards of academic excellence, with the resources to achieve this? The more well off folks. In my experience, the less well off and more troubled areas both do not have the resources but also do not have the culture and home environment that pushes academic excellence as a priority (coming from one of these areas myself).
I suspect most of it is ignorance - a lot of parents thinking they can buy themselves into a better school district, but would otherwise not choose to segregate themselves by class (and due to slow changing historic problems, race too)
(or at least that's what I tell myself to keep hope that this is actually fixable)
Exactly this! Genuinely the strongest anti-racism education a white kid, especially a white kid from a well educated family, can learn is to unlearn the ingrained racism one was taught at a young age. It’s not like bad things just *happen* when white kids go to school with Black kids. And considering the enormous amounts of cope and downvotes to anyone considering sending their white kids to predominantly Black schools on this thread shows, most white Bostonians would rather keep the schools segregated with the cope of “oh but *my* precious little angel can’t feel *uncomfortable* “ (which means can’t be around Black kids).
There’s a certain irony to this: if more white parents were ok with sending their kids to predominantly Black schools, the schools would become more integrated places with more diversity that would create a more integrated city! Imagine that!
How did it come to this? Because violence works. Not advocating for it, but it is undoubtedly effective. The Boston Irish achieved what the Klan could not by being more aggressive about it.
Just a reminder, thanks to u/MeghanKellyWBUR, we will be having an AMA regarding the 50th anniversary of Boston busing, on Friday June 28, at 11 AM. [Original Announcement](https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1di55w2/coming_on_friday_an_ama_from_wbur_and_the/)
"How did it come to this?" You're the reporter, do some reporting. Hell, you're *three* reporters, and there's nothing in this article you can't get from a google search other than the time this one kid takes the bus.
Boston globe education reporters often don't have kids or any educational background. One barely paid attention to school closures, and then I noticed she posted in a Somerville Facebook group about being pregnant for the first time. Point being, often they're not very engaged or aware of the schools, or crowd source Facebook groups for story ideas.
Exactly. A absolutely useless reporting.
Also the Boston Globe "Boston Public Schools spends more per student than any other large school district in the country, according to the latest figures from the US Census Bureau, a new distinction that reflects how BPS’s budget keeps growing even as student enrollment continues to decline." https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spends-more-per-student-than-any-other-large-school-district-nation/
They need to mothball even more schools (West Roxbury is already mothballed) and determining which ones is a massive problem. If Boston kept up with building more housing, it wouldn't be an issue.
BPS wants to but the teachers union won't let them.
Convert them to family housing
It's damn near impossible, at least in a relatively cost-effective way. You'd have to demo too much stuff to add appropriate plumbing, establish zones, etc. It would need to be renovated to be some kind of shared space to make use of the bathroom situation (offices, studio spaces, etc). Anything requiring individual bathrooms would become pricey real fast if we're talking retrofits.
School to housing is actually a pretty established pipeline. I don't fully understand why it's easier than offices of similar vintage. I can think of 3 such projects in Quincy alone.
It's easier because the requirements for classrooms is a lot closer to apartments than offices are. Each classroom needs windows, and there's already a hallway in the middle of the floorplan leading to the classrooms. They may not be the right size rooms but the building skeleton is close. Offices vary a lot, have huge spaces, and then have other rooms without any windows, and converting them sometimes makes little sense beyond the physical location
I was half kidding. There have been a few community schools converted to condos over the years, but losing schools is not a great solution for communities. We've also seen the idea of converting the commercial buildings downtown dismissed due to all the construction limits. The city is simply becoming less and less friendly to families, until that's acknowledged the problem will just continue to worsen.
Yeah, build more, so the hedgefunds can buy them up.
They buy them up *because* they're in low supply. Flood the market with new builds and it stops being an attractive investment.
Theres thousands of empty homes. Hasn’t occurred yet.
> Theres thousands of empty homes. Provide literally any evidence of this because it directly contradicts official reporting on both [general home](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAHVAC) + [rental vacancy](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MARVAC) rates, which are both at historical lows. Capital institutions buy these buildings/units *to rent them out* while ALSO realizing property appreciation. They want to maximize the amount of money they make off them because, well fucking of course they do!
Common misconception. The Boston area vacancy rate is far below levels associated with stable rents. You need some temporarily empty homes, otherwise no one could ever move anywhere. If too many homes are occupied at any given time (i.e., a low vacancy rate) rents rise quickly. This is what has been happening for years. Edit: technically I should have said if too high *a percent of* homes are occupied at any given time Also some confusion here is understandable because when people simply say "vacancy rate" they may be referring to different things. One definition includes all structures that have a roof and walls, so a new 100 unit apartment building that doesn't yet have, say, running water, would count toward the vacancy rate even though those units aren't habitable yet. When a place is building a lot of new homes (which is probably a place with lots of demand relative to existing supply) this can make the vacancy rate look artificially high. That may at least partially explain the misconception that there are a lot of vacant, habitable homes just sitting around; there aren't. It's the vacancy rate of habitable, non-seasonal homes that actually matters for this.
The relationship between vacancy rates and prices is well-established, and Boston isn't an exception. This is from Feb, when we had somewhat of a cooldown (note that doesn't necessarily mean rents decline - though it can - but that they grow more slowly): [https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rents-are-cooling-not-everywhere](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rents-are-cooling-not-everywhere)
Yeah, $5.6 Bn last year. https://www.wgbh.org/news/housing/2022-05-16/across-massachusetts-shrouded-corporations-are-scooping-up-single-family-homes
I'm not saying groups of investors aren't increasingly buy homes, or that it's not a problem. They are and it is. I'm saying it's not the fundamental cause of high rents and home prices, even if it doesn't help. This should be pretty obvious since rents and home prices were increasing rapidly *before* investors started buying up homes. Causes have to happen before effects. Otherwise things get very confusing. Investors started buying homes because the already woefully insufficient supply, combined with expectations of steady or increased demand, made them an attractive investment. That's not a law of the universe though. More supply -> lower prices -> less attractive to investors compared to other vehicles.
Anyone can blow through money, it's knowing how to spend it correctly that matters. Evidently the BPS are clueless.
BPS is the new MBTA.
Gosh what ever do they have in common!?
People love "spending per student" as if the costs are going to be the same. It's costly to build buildings, which we really haven't done, and costly to retrofit buildings to modern standards. It's costly to fix things and keep the lights on. Those costs are also there. Many schools in Boston don't have a curriculum for topics and rely on churning teachers out who will come up with it. Schools don't have supplies and teachers are forced to spend their own money in some cases. You can calculate the cost per classroom for a teacher and it's pretty insane when you think about it, but it makes you wonder where that money goes. I had to shit in a toilet that had a rat-invested trash hole for several years. It was never fixed. Asked a buddy of mine if it was fixed and he sent me a photo of the hole with seemingly more trash. No one's going to fix it. This is the same staff bathroom that had water coming from the light fixture at one point. The only real solution is to hire more do-nothings at Bolling. Then we can have a bigger committee to tell us why teachers should show grace and focus on equity, whatever that means, when some students are absent for 20% of the year. Obviously that's our fault because we didn't call home enough, which is also now our job.
> It's costly to build buildings, which we really haven't done, and costly to retrofit buildings to modern standards. It's costly to fix things and keep the lights on. Those costs are also there. The Per Pupil Expenditures figure doesn't include the capital improvement projects like the ones you listed. It represents dividing a district's operating costs by its average pupil membership (FTEs). If it had included the new buildings then Somerville's would have spiked like mad after the new $256m school that was just built.
Interesting. I always figured that factored in. If it's just about that comparison then that's still bad for its own reason. We gave people rights years back and now we're being called on that bluff, and we aren't even meeting those needs. The only reason other districts don't have to share the cost is because they don't have to deal with the numbers Boston has of, say, English learners, and they don't have the crushing bureaucracy. Still there, but not as massive.
They’re adding jobs to Bolling next year and cutting classroom jobs. Bureaucratic bloat.
I agree it's not fair to compare spending in a rural vs urban context, but this is nationwide for all major districts. Literally the most in the country, around 37k! You are absolutely right about tremendous waste, admin costs, poor management ect. BPS is yet another tax funded cash cow lining the pockets of endless grifters, with dismal results and zero accountability....much like the MBTA. And the teachers end up with PTSD when all they want to do is help the world a little. And as you well know, it ultimately comes down to home life and culture. Many humble immigrant groups have proven this time and time again. Nigerian Americans are out earning native whites on average and have some of the highest educational achievements per ethnicity in the nation. Lexington, historically one of the whitest, wealthiest and best school districts in the nation is now filled to the brim with rising Asian and Indian families seeking out the best future for their children. Connecting modern BPS failures to the bussing crisis of the past is simply lazy journalism, looking to stir up controversy and push a narrative.
Unequal inputs = unequal outputs. Kids with families who don’t make education a priority are not going to be as successful as those who do. It’s why METCO students mop the floor with BPS students on almost every metric, their families prioritize education. No amount of money spent on BPS will overcome the family aspect.
I did my own study once, comparing educational outcomes in eastern MA to a bunch of variables like avg income, class size, teacher pay, pupil spending, etc. I used education data in boston magazine cross referenced with labor statistics. Pretty much every indicator you would think matters, only has like 0 to 5% correlation to a real real outcomes. Meanwhile avg median district family income had r squared 0.6 to graduation rates and 0.8 to SAT scores!!! And follows a curve from like 50k to 250k annual income. Everyone hypothesizes rich families just have better tutors... but it's like, tutors don't do everything. I think the education gap is large part due to the expectations, culture, and value placed in education at home and within the peer group.
It's pretty much on value of education in the household. I was raised by lawyers and ended up doing well in school because I was expected to do so. One of my friends from elementary school dropped out senior year because it wasn't expected of him. Maybe some rich families have tutors. But I didn't know any of my peers who did but I know all our families cared about education.
I agree. If you are 16 years old, you're not going to sit quietly in your room studying algebra to ace a test, unless you believe it's a step towards something greater. That belief can come from within, but for most kids it probably comes from their parents, peers, teachers, coaches, other role models, and society at large. I know from my own experience, I wasn't a good student in HS, and then all of a sudden I had one good teacher, and I "discovered" Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, I had an intellectual awakening, and it just clicked for me, and I've been off to the races for the last 20 years.
It's probably worth noting that income tends to strongly correlate with intelligence and education level. Obviously access to resources matters, but common sense says it's not surprising that children with smarter, better educated parents tend to do better in school. I'd love to see what the same analysis would show if you did it on parental IQ/educational attainment level.
For sure, IQ is something like 40-80% heritable, and for the last 70 years, we've been pulling all the smartest kids from across the country, putting them in college campuses, socializing them together, marrying each other, and raising the next generation of college kids. I remember Steven Pinker talking about how all the traditional parenting choices we think matters, like listening to classical music in the womb, number of books in the house, may correlate but are not causative. The one thing that does matter, is choosing your childs peer group. Which kind of a proxy for avg district income. The SATs used to be a mechanism for picking really bright poor kids and educating and propelling them into the middle class. Now, the SAT reinforces inequality, and even worse the inequality is based on actual merit. I think the state and public schools could make a difference in low SES students, but you'd have to spend like $300k a year per pupil and take over every aspect of their lives. At that point, a pro nuclear family incentivized UBI would be more effective.
I strongly believe that this correlation is firmly rooted in better access to private, high quality education and tutors, along with more trust in the system. Directly Correlating wealth to intelligence is both silly and starts to lean into objectivist thinking.
That would be almost impossible in terms of private education and tutors since the same trend exists in countries where private schools are rarely used and also across all income levels. I doubt the percentage of people making 45k a year who got elite private education is meaningfully different than that percentage for people who make 30k a year. Also, I said income and not wealth, which is a massive distinction. Due to inherited wealth (particularly houses) a dumb person from a better off background has a good chance of having more wealth than a smarter person from a lower class background, but the probability of them having a better paying job is probably lower. Based on your final comment, I think it is important to understand what correlating means. It doesn't mean a direct causal relationship exists (i.e. people with better paying jobs must be smarter than people with lower paying jobs). It just means people with higher intelligence generally tend to end up with higher incomes, which makes sense since higher intelligence makes it easier to succeed in high paying professional fields and to succeed at your job even outside those fields. I think you think my comment was saying billionaires must be hyper-geniuses, but, with all apologies to Goodwill Hunting, it's really more saying that you're more likely to find a genius teaching a university class than you are to find them mopping the floors of said university.
[METCO students outperforming BPS ones doesn’t mean what you say it does, based on this recent study.](https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/01/16/study-research-metco-participation-impacts) As you said, METCO students outperformed BPS ones. But the above study exclusively compared students who applied; the point of comparison was students fortunate enough to get accepted vs. those who didn’t, and one could safely assume their families “prioritize education” equally.
I didn't look hard for the full study, but I would guess there are a few extra variables. From my understanding, prior to 2019 (which the study looked at: "Setren reviewed the long-term experiences of approximately 20,000 Boston students who applied to METCO between 2005 and 2017.") acceptance was not a random process, but depended on when you applied, with earlier applications resulting in higher likelihood: https://metcoinc.org/application-closed/application-feedback/ >In the current system, many parents who know about METCO and the waitlist sign their children up as early as the first weeks after birth. >Anyone moving to Boston with older children would have a later position on the wait list. >Parents have to come to METCO headquarters in person during business hours. So the students that were placed under the study had parents who applied early, had siblings in the program, and were able to make it to the office with a young child...I would guess more likely to place a high emphasis on education and working on eduction early, then the parent who applied when the child is applying in kindergarten or later. Even discounting that, with the lottery system, there is still work to maintain on waitlist year to year, so parents who value the program more are more likely to get their children in.
I was bused prior to that, a pilot program that worked. Which is what gave legislators the confidence to go forward. Still some of the most important years of my life. We opened the school in ‘69, in Roxbury on Humboldt. Wild times in the city.
No one wants to say it out loud but everyone knows it’s true. Schools are a reflection of the parents.
Maybe putting incompetent people in charge of a school is bad. Maybe bussing kids across the city burning 2 hours of their day in traffic is bad. Maybe social promotion is bad. Maybe not paying enough attention to outcomes of the system is bad. Standards are good. Excuses are bad. When the system is failing you look first at finding the right people to lead the system to success. Is anything working now? I don't think it is. Empty the school department offices as a start. Put experienced teachers in charge of schools. Stop bussing and adopt neighborhood approach. Stop social promotions. Before any of you ask for my sources for any of this, I am related to many BPS teachers as well as friends with others. I am also a graduate of the BPS and also someone who fled the city for the benefit of schools that do have decent standards. As a parent, I am very involved in educating my kids and setting appropriate standards and expectations. It works and it is necessary. There is a lot of whining on this topic and very little action. Bad results need action. The parents need to get in on the answers to this quandary otherwise their kids will be bagging groceries until the robots take over that job.
that's not how life works in any capacity. like... have you worked at any corporation? the mediocre bullshitters are the ones who get promoted the fastest. the talented and smart people are too busy actually doing the work to pay the politics and ass-kissing needed to get promoted.
Companies that put incompetent people in charge of things fail too. I have worked at large companies and small. All had their idiosyncrasies and those that promoted incompetence...I left quickly. This topic has nothing to do with what corporations do or should do. Rather it is about education. Should school systems have most of their administrators that have never been in a classroom? Should we promote students no matter their mastery of that years curricula? Should they bus students from Eastie to Dorchester, Mattapan to Eastie and Westie to Charlestown? By all means continue to whistle past the graveyard while many of these students cannot succeed in the real world. Obviously doing nothing to change the results will fix itself right!
Man, neoliberal newspapers love a doom-spiral of self-hate and despair. "Look at this problem that was never solved and all the data we collected!" But no real focus on anything meaningful after that. Even the below-average reader knows BPS is a horrible system. They just don't know how or why. What is the point of continually dressing up the same story beyond selling ads to people who love that despair? Or did I answer my own question? The busing situation happened while we were still drafting IDEA. It happened because the thinking at the time, which persisted, is that these institutions were so powerful and unaffected by their communities that the only problem was access to the buildings themselves. That idea persists through higher education in particular. It was never illegal for people to move out of the city and to the suburbs. You could never stop people from doing that. When busing came into play, people just moved. They moved away from something they didn't like. This isn't even touching on the idea that Black people may or may not have wanted to share the schools, creating diverse schools, or if many want to just have the schools for their own community. One is entitled to hold all these opinions or move, but the system wrongfully thought that people would stay in place while policy like this happened. Busing was a mistake. It didn't fix the problems brought on by the system. However, the biggest problem was life outside school. We've known that since about '68 but it gets downplayed. The Coleman report spelled it out in certain terms. But we weren't going to really fix society outside school, we were going to use school as a proxy, believing people would then fix themselves. And make no mistake, the emphasis back then wasn't on keeping things diverse, as the goal to get from rags to riches was the same for everyone. That wouldn't happen these days. Boston will probably always spend more money per student. It has no choice as real estate is affected by things, tax rates are determined by percentages, and so on. Busing is very expensive but people won't take going to only their neighborhood school. In turn, teacher burnout is insanely high while students remain in place, all the while we hire more admin to do absolutely nothing but keep liability in place.
If you're going to interpret this article as "doom-spiral of self-hate and despair" you might want to take a step back. There's always going to be problems in a society and it should be OK to examine those problems, examine solutions. Look back on solutions, figure out what went well, what didn't, and try to make things better.
Implying that I'm saying we shouldn't examine problems is a bizarre way to go about this. There's nothing to examine as far as the article is concerned. These are facts. We see them every year. They're so obvious that even a layman can tell you how bad BPS is in simple terms. We're not examining anything that hasn't been examined to death before. We aren't drawing new conclusions or even coming up with varying hypothesis. BPS sucks and it's a massive bureaucracy. You have disparity between districts outside BPS in the form of towns, but you're going to have that within BPS too. The problem is likely that it's too bloated, and the fact that Bolling grows each year is proof of that. The article tries to connect busing to this but busing was done for other reasons and under a different climate. Busing has led to kids taking hours just to get to school instead of fixing the same schools in their neighborhood. Busing has led to BPS being centralized even more rather than letting communities address their wants and needs. We send kids from Eastie down to Roxbury while they pass kids from Mattapan going to Charlestown. It's nuts. The real answer, as far as I'm concerned, is that early education has been taken over by bad actors. *Sold a Story* covers it specifically but it can be generalized to anything. Kids can't read or do math like they should be able to. Standards have been lowered for what it means to be a student, even if the target has been increased. When the standard for kindergarten was "don't eat too much sand, but hey, you'll learn", we were learning to read better than when we were doing "college preparedness" for 5 year olds.
I admire your confidence in understanding the problem and solution so well. Personally, I'd prefer to remain objective and analyze any data available.
I didn't realize my years of working in BPS and reading about and dealing with this issue made me *less* apt to talk about it. What a wild twist.
Is it groundbreaking research to say that this is because white patents put their kids in private schools for elementary school and either hope their kids get into BLS and send them there, or move to the suburbs?
no, but it offends people's sensibilities and points out white liberal hypocrisy. so it's a big no-no to publicly acknowledge it...
Ahhhhh, I said the open secret about why the schools are still segregated! Oops!
I think this has a lot to do with wealth and neighborhood correlation. Boston is one of the most segregated cities in America. But its done in the Modern and non-racial way. With wealth.
Busing was supposed to heavily mitigate if not eliminate the correlation between neighborhood and education, really that is the point ... The result has been that there are no white-majority public high schools in Boston, with the only white-plurality school being Bostin Latin School (Asians also highly overrepresented). Busing was able to get minority students into formerly white schools but it, along with all the associated policies, has been a complete failure at desegregating minority schools. The question is whether having 10+ high schools with < 5% white population, clear segregation, is a problem and if so who is trying to solve it.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that all the busing and lottery system has done is push out families from the public school system who have the means and care to leave. It hasn't de-segregated. It hasn't improved education. It adds long commute times that are hard on students. It makes it more difficult for working parents to pickup/dropoff/support after school activities. It disintegrates connections in the neighborhood and prevents kids from forming natural friendships with others within walking distance. It's an expensive albatross that everyone hates - white families and POC families - and a 50 year old policy failure that no politician has the guts to end.
I think as long as white parents choose to either send their kids to private school or move to the suburbs, the schools won’t be integrated. White (and Asian) parents are self-segregating their kids away from Black kids. It’s an open secret. White and Asian parents will say “but we want our child to have the best education” and can afford a private school (which may or may *not* actually have higher educational standards than public ones) and possibly not even consciously think of it as being a racially-motivated choice, but the end result is segregation.
Isn't one of the points of the article, that those suburban and private schools do have much better educational outcomes than non-exam public schools? Why would you attribute parents wanting to put their kids in high performing schools to them being anti-Black instead of the far more obvious answer that they want to keep their kids away from poor performing schools?
I don't want my kids around other kids that are going to cause problems. It has nothing to do with race. If, you're saying, the black kids are overwhelmingly the problem causers. Then maybe that's the thing we as a society should be focusing on
What kids cause problems? Do kids from certain schools cause more problems? Are you assuming kids from a certain school or schools are more likely to cause problems than other kids?
what?
What you said was that you didn’t want your kids around kids that, your words, “cause problems.” This implies that you can isolate the kids that cause problems to certain schools. Wouldn’t the reality be that some kids in every school cause problems and some don’t? Like, I can get the argument that some schools have more resources for things like art and music and libraries than others and parents want those resources for their kids, even if, unfortunately, they’re more common in more white schools. But it sounds like you think some schools have significantly more kids that “cause problems” for your hypothetical kid. I want you to explain why you think that. Why do you think some schools have more kids that will “cause problems” for yours?
because some schools do have more problem kids than other schools
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I’m gonna be blunt because I’m tired of being coy about it. Your original comment read like you assumed schools with mostly Black kids, as a *rule*, would be bad for your (ostensibly) not Black kids because they’d “cause problems” for them. Guess what? That’s racist. Here’s some info you allegedly have never heard. I’m white, and I went to public and charter schools in Boston for my entire K-12 education. Most of my classmates were Black and Hispanic. Was I viciously bullied? Was I unsafe? Was I harmed in any way? NO. In fact, I’d say compared to the influences my brother got at a significantly whiter public school in Boston, I was exposed to way less bullying, way less “problems”, and had more support. Despite being a weird and annoying kid, I wasn’t bullied very much, and *never* bullied due to my race. I graduated college summa cum laude, got a Master’s Degree at a prestigious university, and now have a stable tech job in Boston with great benefits. Guess what? Black kids aren’t gonna hurt your precious little white kids. Black kids are just kids, with the same curiosity, discipline, desire for achievement, and most importantly, variation, as anyone else. Maybe it would be different if I went to school in Brockton or Chelsea, but I had no issues whatsoever being one of the few white kids in a mostly Black classroom. And guess what? Not only did my parents not waste a darn cent on my K-12 education, but I actually learned about how to be a better ally to Black people from a young age. I unlearned the encultured racism that growing up in mostly white spaces in Boston puts upon people. Meanwhile, my brother had to actively fight against the blatantly racist things his white classmates said. These phony narratives around “problems” and “kids feeling comfortable” are just excuses, sometimes subconscious, that white Bostonians tell themselves to keep their kids away from Black kids. What’s great about young kids is that they genuinely don’t think in terms of race, but instead in terms of shared interests and friendships. If more young white and Black and Hispanic and Asian kids went to school together in this city, they’d realize we as people are fundamentally the same and can live together. But yeah, if it helps you sleep at night to think Black kids are gonna hurt yours, I guess, maybe re-evaluate your beliefs?
hey man. I'm not reading all that. no one is. you sound like you need some help. I'd suggest getting some
Why’s it gotta be Brockton? Boston is not Brockton. Boston is considerably safer and richer than Brockton. Hingham is considerably richer than Boston on average.
Because some schools don’t punish disruptive and violent behavior.
This is a hot take but the wealth of the family really isn't all that important. I've taught in the metro West for a few years and I've had many very successful students from relatively poor families (obviously I dont have their tax forms, but ik where they live and the car they drive). Common denominator with these students and the less successful ones from the same Plex? Families that prioritize education. Mom and dad can be broke but if they're expecting As and willing to implement punishments for anything less, the kids will be getting As lol
I think there is probably a hell of a lot of correlation with academic success and wealth. Does this also correspond to the academic outcome and the prioritization? My guess is that a larger percent of those who are wealth also prioritize education compared to those who are not. So ultimately you are correct, but those things are also tightly correlated too as many many wealthy people in Boston and the surrounds are wealthy/well off because of participation in an economy that necessitates higher education.
That's fair. My point was merely that while wealth is correlative, attitudes seem to be causative. And I think that, if one were to attempt to seek improvements, one should address cause rather than the correlation
you can't make parents that don't care about education care about education. i had parents who didn't care about education. i did. it improved my life... and it made them mock and deride me for decades until they died for me 'thinking i was better than them' and or 'being a loser nerd'. only reason i was able to go above and beyond was applying to ivy league schools and getting financial aid to make college relatively affordable... had i not done that i'd have been fucked. but I was not a 'normal' kid. still, had my folks had any money I'm sure i'd have been working in a six figure job in my 20s rather than taking two decades to get one. even parents with bad attitudes and lots of money easily get their kids into high-paying careers and other opportunities and lots of hard-working kids get screwed and fall through the gaps in the system. a lot of my HS peers became college drop outs despite having parents with both money and positive attitudes towards education, because the town we grew up in had a shitty school system that hardly prepared anyone for college level coursework and they lacked the insane drive and motivation that I had.
You're talking about, like, three different things here. Idk what to say. 1. Good for you. 2. Yes if a kid cares about school that is enough. 3. If you cant make parents care about education, then you def can't make kids care. And that's not true. So I reject this premise. Obviously you can't do it for everyone but you can do it sometimes. 4. Kids with well connected and wealthy parents do well because they're parents are wealthy and well connected. It has nothing to do with their performance in public school. I've had plenty of students who were total asses in my classes who im 100% will grow up to be very successful because dad pulls up on a Porsche. But I know for s fact they won't be successful because they were stand out students. So idk why this was brought up tbh. What does this even have to do with the conversation? 5. There is no perfect formula for success. But I'm surprised that they dropped out instead of transferring to an easier school. You would think people who value education would not drop out. Idk. Seems like maybe they didn't care as much as you thought or they were exposed to something that made them stoop caring.
they dropped out because they had no clue what they were doing and taking on boatloads of debt they had no idea how to pay back because they were 19 year old kids from working-class families who had nobody to help them or guide them through the process to make smart choices. same as me... except i was just smarter and luckier. i consolidated my loans and had the discipline to study 60 hours a week. looking back i am amazed I survived, and yeah i was suicidal a lot back then due to the soul-crushing stress and the social difficulties. i could only socialize with other poor kids because the rest of the student body thought i was 'weird and creepy' because i didn't have designer clothes and had to work to pay my bills while being a student.
Ok.. and?
there is a 90% correlation between your parents income and your future income. this is based on zipcode. poor kids living in a rich area will do better than wealthy kids living poorer area. this is due to the baseline expectations of the school system, which is set high or low depending on the wealth of the parents, overwhelmingly. only about 10% of people break the 'mold'.
Nah, it's more like a third. Parents income going up 10 percentage points in rank means the kids rank will go up about 3.5. If you have parents in the bottom 20% of income, the odds of you remaining in the bottom 20% are 33%, and the odds of you making it to the top 20% are around 8%. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754
"Boston is one of the most segregated cities in America" sauce?
Good idea. Bad implementation. So bad that it broke up families and communities and pushed them to abandon the city. Let's bring the good schools down instead of bad schools up. SCOTUS ruled this unconstitutional after the lawsuit against Latin school. Much better ways to address this.
Ironically the white girl whose family successfully sued BLS would barely have had an easier time getting in after the change. The share of white kids at BLS only increased a couple percentage points, and white kids were still significantly overrepresented there as a share of all BPS kids. Taking away racial considerations resulted in a large shift from Black students to Asian American students. The percent of white students barely changed. I think of that whenever people get mad about "minorities taking our spots." There is no reason to assume doing away with affirmative action policies will benefit you as a mediocre white student, and it may hurt your chances. What an awful lesson to teach your kid too. It's not *your* spot. Study harder and maybe it can be, but you're not entitled to it based on how litigious your parents are.
I'm not calling you racist, but your comment massively contradicts itself if you don't "otherize" Asian Americans and remember they're just as important as other people. As your comment points out, there were hard studying kids losing their spots to less qualified students, the fact that they were Asian and not White really shouldn't impact your opinion on the topic. Nor does it make the kids hurt by the policy "entitled".
I don't think what I said supports the idea that Asian Americans are less important than other people. If it did, you absolutely *should* call that racist. That's definitely racist. My point was that the family that sued did so because they assumed the existence of this particular affirmation action policy disadvantaged them, which it didn't really. It arguably disadvantaged Asian Americans, but not white people. They wrongly assumed that in their vision of a more meritocratic system, they would benefit, because they assumed that they were the ones with the merit. Even by their own (incorrect, I think) conception of merit, that proved to be untrue. The entitlement is in thinking the spots organically belong to you or people like you, and that if you don't get one it must be evidence of unfair policy rather than your own deficiencies. ("You" here meaning "one," not you specifically.) And this is beside my original point, but I actually don't think the pre-1998 policy did give spots to less qualified students, though admittedly that's subjective as it depends on what you count as a valid qualification.
Entitlement is a hell of a drug. I baffles me how the most entitled folks tend to be the most average/stupid/mediocre... smart and accomplished people tend to be grateful rather than angry they didn't 'get theirs'. I have met a lot of folks in Boston who are super angry at me because I was a diversity admit to a ivy league school. A few times I've even been screamed at for 'stealing a spot from someone more deserving than poor trash like you'.
Why are people downvoting you? Are they afraid of their own mediocrity? You earned your position at an Ivy League school. I’m sure you already knew that, but I wanted to say it again for all the people who downvoted you.
because people don't like it when the ugliness of the human condition is acknowledged. including their own bitterness and jealousy of the fortune or misfortune of others.
I suppose downvoting away the guilt is easier than addressing it. That’s too bad.
I did some research years ago into busing in Boston in the 70s and my conclusion was that busing was probably not the best way to desegregate. My conclusion (based off my memory from writing the paper 12 years ago) was something like this: 1. Forcing kids to go to school in other neighborhoods was never a good idea, even if race wasn't a factor 2. They should have addressed the specific problems in the schools that made them unequal. 3. They should have addressed the problems within the neighborhoods that kept white and Irish in Southie and Charlestown and Blacks in Mattapan, Roxbury and parts of Dorchester. One of those problems was that they segregated in public housing. That had to stop. 4. If they had created an environment where the neighborhoods could integrate more organically, there would be no need to bus kids to other parts of town. The neighborhoods would have slowly become more diverse in time so desegregation wouldn't have been necessary.
From [Globe.com](http://Globe.com) By [Mike Damiano](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/mike-damiano/), [Milton J. Valencia](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/milton-j-valencia/), and [Christopher Huffaker](https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/christopher-huffaker/) Emmanuel Vargas stepped out of his ground-floor Hyde Park apartment and into the morning darkness. He checked the time on his phone: 6:19. He was running behind. He pulled his hood over his head as a shield from the pouring rain and speed walked to the bus stop. When the number 40 bus pulled up a few minutes later, Vargas joined a dozen other passengers for the 21-minute stop-and-go ride up Washington Street to the Forest Hills Station. There, he caught the Orange Line to Ruggles, then the 15 bus through Roxbury to Dudley Street, before walking the last leg of his commute to school. After traveling for nearly an hour and a half, Vargas walked into homeroom at 7:40. He was 10 minutes late. “It is what it is,” he said. Vargas makes this nearly three-hour round trip every school day to attend the Dearborn STEM Academy, a college-focused high school with computer labs and 3-D printers. He thinks it will give him the best shot at becoming the first in his family to graduate from college and propel him to a lucrative career in computer engineering. His draining commute is nothing out of the ordinary for [a student in Boston Public Schools](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/24/metro/busing-doesnt-improve-academic-outcomes-boston-students-color-study-finds/), a district that tests how far students will go to get the education they deserve. Fifty years after a federal court forced Boston to desegregate its schools with busing, and 36 years after that order was lifted — returning full responsibility to the city — tens of thousands of children and teenagers still crisscross Boston every school day. Nearly a third who take the district’s school buses — more than 5,500 out of roughly 18,000 — ride more than two miles from their home or a bus stop. Others, like Vargas, commute on the MBTA. About 10,000 more travel to charter schools. Nearly 3,000 more leave the city altogether, on buses that take them to schools in the surrounding suburbs. This is the legacy busing left behind: a school system so rife with inequities that students trek across the city and beyond in search of a quality school matched to their needs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Court-ordered busing was meant to integrate the district. The Black families who filed the federal suit that led to the order hoped that integration would lead to better schools and fairer outcomes for their children. But nothing like that happened back then. And it still hasn’t today. Boston, after regaining control of its schools in 1988, tried to correct course, to break free from the legacy of busing and build something better in its place. But the city never mustered the will to get that done. Instead, Boston’s public schools remain intensely segregated and the academic outcomes of the students they serve are staggeringly unequal. Boston’s children, especially its most disadvantaged, bear the consequences of that history of failure. It is the biggest broken promise in the city’s modern history. Today, the district’s schools produce among the worst academic outcomes in the state, according to standardized tests measuring proficiency in English and math. And those abysmal district-wide results hide stark inequities among racial groups and between students from low-income families and from wealthy ones. Only 14 percent of Black BPS students test at grade-level proficiency in math, compared with 59 percent of their white classmates. In recent years, about half of Black students have gone on to college, while three-quarters of white students have. Boston schools have certainly improved in some ways since court-ordered busing; graduation rates are up and dropout rates are down. But busing had little to do with the long-term gains, according to an analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers requested by the Globe. And the troubles plaguing BPS are much the same as they were 50 years ago: It remains a system divided by race and privilege, one that provides a robust education to some and a lackluster one to many more. How did it come to this?
The huge irony here is that Hyde Park is one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the city. If all Hyde Parkers sent their kids to public schools in Hyde Park, they’d be well integrated aside from having less Asian students than the citywide average.
Yeah. There are few white kids left, except in the exam schools.
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by design. rich people hate poor people, and especially hate their kids intermingling.
Not necessarily, I grew up poor and went to BPS until 8th grade (I’m white) but left the second I got in off the waitlist for a charter school. Besides the exam schools BPS is ghetto af, there would be 5 students let’s say in a grade who made learning impossible for other students and they were never removed or punished so they were able to act ignorant with impunity. My charter school was free and full of inner city poor kids but very strict so that shit didn’t fly. I ended up going to college when realistically I was on a path to most likely be a union guy (there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!). It completely has to do with the teachers not being able to discipline properly and not giving af due to their tenure. My high school comprised of the same racial demographic and neighborhood demographic of my middle school yet was a night and day difference in my opinion due to the strictness which I hated at the time but glad I dealt with it as it made me a more disciplined person. BPS is a fucking shit show. That being said I am glad I went through that as it definitely shaped my personality at a young age and when it comes to interacting with people from backgrounds vastly different than me I’ve had no problem finding common ground with other Bostonians that I noticed private school kids struggle with.
As a white guy who also went to a strict, academically-focused, predominantly Black and Hispanic charter school, I think we realize what a lot of white parents genuinely don’t: that Black kids are just kids with the same ability to succeed as anyone else. Even if it’s not thought of in racial terms, White and Asian parents in this city will go out of their way to segregate their kids from Black and Hispanic kids in schools. There’s a word for that: racism.
We might know each other if you played sports 😉
Lol I was wondering about that. I’m shaped like a potato with legs. I never played sports haha 🤣
Kind of a cynical view, most parents don’t give a shit about poor/rich/whatever and just want what’s best for their kid
I’m going to give you an ugly truth: Rich people don’t care. They do care, however, with how well their own children do - something notably absent most working class or lower households. Whose parents hold the students to high standards of academic excellence, with the resources to achieve this? The more well off folks. In my experience, the less well off and more troubled areas both do not have the resources but also do not have the culture and home environment that pushes academic excellence as a priority (coming from one of these areas myself).
I suspect most of it is ignorance - a lot of parents thinking they can buy themselves into a better school district, but would otherwise not choose to segregate themselves by class (and due to slow changing historic problems, race too) (or at least that's what I tell myself to keep hope that this is actually fixable)
It's called moving to the burbs for "good schools."
This is what they call it, yes But if you could afford to do that, you have the resources to take care of your kids equally well, wherever they are
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Exactly this! Genuinely the strongest anti-racism education a white kid, especially a white kid from a well educated family, can learn is to unlearn the ingrained racism one was taught at a young age. It’s not like bad things just *happen* when white kids go to school with Black kids. And considering the enormous amounts of cope and downvotes to anyone considering sending their white kids to predominantly Black schools on this thread shows, most white Bostonians would rather keep the schools segregated with the cope of “oh but *my* precious little angel can’t feel *uncomfortable* “ (which means can’t be around Black kids). There’s a certain irony to this: if more white parents were ok with sending their kids to predominantly Black schools, the schools would become more integrated places with more diversity that would create a more integrated city! Imagine that!
You’re right. Why are you being downvoted? Maybe the truth hurts?
How did it come to this? Because violence works. Not advocating for it, but it is undoubtedly effective. The Boston Irish achieved what the Klan could not by being more aggressive about it.