Hi everyone-
This email just went out to Marty’s list, and I want to share it with you as well. Several BMG-ers have been part of our teams. I’ll let them out themselves if they want to! Also, if you want to bypass the “share your ideas” link below and contact me directly with ideas, I can be found at joyce@ashmontmedia.com
Joyce
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Since June, 100 volunteers – a diverse group of practitioners, experts, professors, students, and neighborhood leaders – have been meeting in kitchens and living rooms to discuss our vision for Boston, and the bold policies it would take to make that vision happen.
Marty told us to look at the City’s current best practices, and other cities’ best practices, and then to come up with some bold new ideas. He met with 20 different teams across 20 different policy areas, and gave us direction and feedback. We, in turn, conducted over 600 interviews with people working in the respective fields. This took some time!
Marty has a 16-year record of accomplishment in the State Legislature, and a fully-formed set of values that inform his great work, and the vision to keep improving our City every day. So, you can be sure that he knows his way around policy.
He could have written and posted solid, academic policy briefs all by himself weeks ago, but he asked us to approach this differently – to apply the same ethic to the policy side of the campaign as we do to field – by building it from the ground up. It’s grassroots policy.
If you go to Marty’s website, you’ll read about our bold plans to develop workforce housing, stem foreclosures, expand vocational training and reinstate some version of Little City Halls. In the coming weeks, we will release more plans, in Economic Development, Arts & Culture, Transportation, Public Health and many other areas.
You’ll see how we framed everything against the four themes that define Marty’s vision of political life: Access, Accountability, Collaboration and Transparency.
And then you’ll see that in each area, we list his past related legislative accomplishments. He is the ONLY candidate in this race with that kind of experience.
Marty says that he’s lucky to have us on his team, but in reality, we’re lucky to be working with a candidate who wants to hear what we have learned, either in our civic life, or as a result of this exercise.
That’s the kind of collaborator Marty is. He is generous, open and smart. Those are leadership qualities.
Thanks for being a part of our grassroots team,
Joyce Linehan
Policy Director
Marty Walsh for Mayor
P.S. We have great ideas, but this is an ongoing process, and we would love to hear from you. Do you have a bold idea for Boston that you’d like to share with us? Tell us your ideas to keep making Boston even better.
This grassroots process is an example of why as a progressive I’m supporting (and volunteering for) Marty Walsh for mayor. All it took was one question from me about one issue, and the campaign invited me to share all my concerns and ideas.
There’s plenty of overlap between the various candidates’ policy ideas. But this approach stands out as democratic, and it’s reflected in positions that are more detailed in both goals and process than other candidates’.
Walsh is also more able to turn these positions into realities. Anyone can trumpet a cool idea. Check out the “Marty will make it happen as Mayor” sections that conclude these briefs. He’s made a mark in these areas already. This has required listening openly to the various interests and doing the steady, hard work of building consensus. I like several of the other candidates, but I don’t think they have nearly this degree of experience.
how any candidate on board with the charter school Trojan Horse can be taken seriously as a progressive. I wanted to support Marty but merely being less full-throated about drinking the Kool-Aid doesn’t cut it for me.
I am very much against lifting the cap on charters. It’s a testament to how much I prefer Marty overall as a candidate that I still made the decision to support him. I can attest that he is listening to everyone, including teachers and parents (like me) who are happy with BPS schools and want city resources focused on supporting them. I like his ambitious building plan for BPS schools, e.g. It’s another way that process (and experience driving such processes to consensus) can be more important than positions in distinguishing these candidates.
I’m also personally not crazy about lifting the cap (I don’t have kids, so fwiw), but I still think he’s the guy who can move us – BPS included – forward. Charter schools wouldn’t exist if there hadn’t been a need for them, so it’s on us to fix the problems in BPS. In the meantime though, how do you tell a mother in Dorchester who didn’t get her first five school choices that she can’t pursue the charter school option? There’s no panacea, including charter schools, and Marty recognizes the ongoing need to address legitimate concerns around charters’ implementation and impact on other parts of the system. We all know – he knows – charter schools don’t always serve special education and ELL students to the degree that traditional public schools are obligated to, which creates inequities and also problems with performance comparisons. The goal is definitely to strengthen the public schools. He has already announced an ambitious school construction/renovation plan that focuses on the fact that BPS is leaving LOTS of money on the table at the MSBA for some reason. Next week, he’ll unveil a plan to create more K1 seats, and to strengthen voc tech. I’m excited about it. And once again, I am happy to hear all ideas and take them to Marty!
Just a suggestion: The only places the last name of the candidate is mentioned are in the website name and at the very end of the post. Maybe “Marty” is as unique an identifier in Boston as is “Bono” or “Madonna” or “Cher” or “Sting”, but I didn’t know who this post was about until I got to the website name. Maybe include his last name in the headline?
for your thoughtful comments. I’m happy with Marty’s school construction proposal and agree that, among supporters of lifting the cap, he’s probably the least anti-BPS and anti-BTU. If Marty ends up in a run-off with Connolly or Conley, I’ll seriously consider coming back to the old neighborhood to help him out.
My comments below are less for you two (who I believe know all this) but for anyone who might be reading.
Joyce’s example of a parent whose child doesn’t get into any of the top 5 school choices is compelling on a personal level. Frankly, a big reason I moved out of the city (and I realize that my opinion is less salient because I’m no longer a Boston voter) is because I had no interest in being put in that situation. I now live in Newton, where you know where your kid is going based on where you live. Obviously the desegregation case and the wide disparities in quality – real or perceived – among different BPS schools make that impossible in the city, but even as a future (as opposed to current) parent I had no interest in the BPS rolling of the dice.
But the same argument about the parents who can’t get the school they want could be made in favor of vouchers. And charters are just vouchers on steroids. My wife started her teaching career in a Boston charter and has seen “problem” students disappear, sometimes before the halfway mark of Year 1. I myself attended a private (Catholic) high school and we lost some 25% of our class after the first year: anyone with an average below 2.2 was told not to come back. A hallmark of a private school is its ability to exclude, and exclude we did, so it’s not surprising that our school had higher average SAT schools than schools lacking that option.
Charter schools, in practice, function exactly the same way as my private school. They get higher-performing students to start with and then find ways to cut bait on the ones who don’t pan out, either academically or behaviorally. They don’t fill those spots. The problem, of course, remains that the students nudged to leave disappear from the school’s balance sheet (unless they graduate from somwhere else later, in which case they’re counted as charter school success stories) but not from the City of Boston. It falls to BPS to pick up the slack.
Thus, as you mention, the funding problem. Paying per-student costs equal to BPS is hardly fair when BPS has a much higher rate of ELL and special-needs students, and the fixed costs such as heating the buildings don’t go down proportionately when students decamp for charters. Not even getting to the fact that my wife’s pay was comparable to BPS in Year 1, but 10% lower than BPS in Year 2. If they’re getting equal funding to educate a relatively easier student population, it’s surely not going to teacher pay.
So I’m happy to hear that Marty understands all of this. My concern remains that any efforts to improve BPS will necessarily be undermined by raising the charter cap. If the cap is lifted, we’ll have as many charters as their corporate backers feel like funding. Parents, frustrated by the placement process and hearing all about the wonders of charters, will flock to them. They will do so because of propaganda coming from the likes of the Boston Foundation and its friends at the Globe and Boston Mag (hi there, Scot Lehigh).
I’d rarely read anything as disingenuous as TBF’s “fact sheet” on charters, until I saw their big study earlier this year. Showing that, for all the reasons I already mentioned, charters have higher average SAT scores. 4-year graduation rates? Not so much. But who cares about THAT? Step over here for a gander at these shiny 6-year graduation rates. 82% vs. 78%. Not statistically significant, but who’s counting?
And pay no attention to the fact that, as I noted above, they ascribed to charter schools students who won a spot but ended up leaving quite quickly and graduated from somewhere else (counted this way, perhaps the disparity between 4-year rates and 6-year rates shows the charters are giving up early on students who CAN graduate, but it takes a little more work).
And definitely pay no attention to anything like “(The study excluded two charter high schools that closed during that period because of low performance.)” Yes, the Globe resorts to parentheses to note that, oh yeah, good performance by charters is relevant, but poor performance is to be excluded. Gee, that’s not fixed at all. It’s like saying the Red Sox have the highest average batting average in baseball if you don’t count the hitters who stink.
Where does this lead? The fact is that charters, to the extent they “work,” can’t work for everyone. The main reason they have the success they have is their ability to exclude problem students. If charters come to represent an ever-larger percentage of the city’s student body, you’ll either see a shell BPS system maintained as a repository only for the hardest cases, or you’ll see charters’ performance come down. Then, in the name of accountability, they’ll fire all the teachers, hire new ones at lower cost, and then fire them two years later if test scores still haven’t improved. Rinse and repeat, and spread to the suburbs as well.
From where I sit, when you compare apples to apples, there’s not much difference at all in outcomes. Certainly not enough to revamp our entire education system in this way. This path leads only to de-unionization, profit (in many parts of the country), and the dismantling of universal public education, which was this nation’s very first progressive reform.
So I really don’t see how you stand up for BPS and lift the charter cap at the same time. And that’s why I was disappointed in Marty. I heard his Herald “mini-debate” with Dan Conley (a candidate I do not like) a while back. Conley accused Marty of being insufficiently full-throated in his support for charters. If Marty had given the answers you two gave, I’d have been pleased. His actual answer sounded very much like “me-too-ism,” stressing his work with Neighborhood House and saying he’s been “very clear in my support.”
I think it’s asking a lot of someone who has been involved in a successful charter school (one that backfills all its grades) since its inception to turn around and be strongly critical of charters as a group. Even as an opponent of lifting the cap, I don’t think I would like to see Marty do that.
That’s actually a pervasive dynamic in the ed debate. Almost anyone who has been an active leader in public affairs and/or education over the last two decades has been helping one charter or another. Personally, when I’ve participated in arguments about the cap, I’ve avoided criticizing existing charters. They are staffed by good people and thousands of families depend on them. I know if my kids hadn’t gotten into our first or second BPS choice, I would have looked at a couple of local charters and our parochial school as the next options.
The hardest issues are characterized by the seemingly irreconcilable interests of good people on both sides. A mayor shouldn’t choose sides, but find consensus where it seemed none could be found. I could wish Marty was closer to my position, but for me he is head and shoulders above the other candidates in his ability to hear all sides and make this work.
worked for a charter. I spent plenty of time there and I know there are good people working hard. My issue, as I’ve tried to explain, is one of policy. If we created alternative public parks or police forces they, too, might be full of good people. As a systemic matter it would not justify that policy choice – the effect on the existing institution would remain deleterious. Harm already has been done, and I cannot see how one could raise the cap without harming BPS even more.
I’m not asking for anyone to be critical of charters as a group for the pure sake of conflict. What I’m saying is that people should be open to more than Grogan-Lehigh logic: (1) they have an easier student body to deal with; (2) they nonetheless get the same funding per pupil; (3) despite all this the results are mixed; (4) ergo, charters clearly are superior and we should throw more public money at them.
So if you’re saying you wouldn’t want a mayor who questions this logic instead of regurgitating it, I don’t agree. I certainly want a mayor who’s at least skeptical of charters’ claims of high performance. Before we raise the cap on these premises, we should take steps to level the playing field and see if there’s really any difference in outcome.
This, honestly, I see as a major problem:
I may be reading in too much but it sometimes seems that “active leaders” in education are defined as people who have helped charters; nobody else is taken seriously. Does Richard Stutman not count?
I agree with your policy argument and I’ve made it myself here on BMG. What I’m saying is that Walsh, unlike Connolly, Conley, Walczak, or Barros, is definitely “open to more than Grogan-Lehigh logic.” He doesn’t claim charters are “superior” and he’s acknowledged the criticisms, indeed has invited people into his campaign who make them. For him, I believe, lifting the cap is primarily a matter of maximizing access points while going all-out to strengthen the BPS.
Great point about Stutman et al, by the way. (I did say “almost anyone” though.) It’s true that on a national level, the term “ed reform” is rigged in favor of charters and against teachers. But locally, on the ground, people like your wife and you and many others I know threw themselves into charters as a really promising new development in urban education.