It’s hard for an old left-winger to agree with anything that appears in the Herald, but this article in today’s Herald crystallized a few things for me.
She’s absolutely right to call Brookline on the carpet. I just don’t think she’s being harsh enough.
Brookline’s overnight parking ban is a clever way the municipality inflates the cost of living to keep the average income level high.
Brookline High School is tracked so as to effectively segregate the school by race and income.
And the Brookline School Committee, chaired by a Pioneer Institute director who strangely isn’t pushing charter schools on his rich constituents, is trying to ensure that people whose homes straddle the Boston/Brookline line can’t send their kids to Brookline schools. According to the article, this letter was sent to 30 homes, a trivial number of students given Brookline’s population of 58k. It also, apparently, wasn’t sent to homes that straddle the Brookline/Newton line. [UPDATE (by David): it appears that Brookline/Newton straddlers actually did get the letter, and they are also upset about the proposal.] I wonder why that is? Surely it costs just as much to educate a Newton line-dweller as a Boston line-dweller. But of course, a Newton line-dweller is more likely to be a better sort of person.
So, fine, Brookline is an incredibly hypocritical municipality that prides itself on its progressivism untainted by the presence of low-income people.
But forgive me if I don’t immediately embrace the plight of the line-dwellers. This is informed by my life in Jamaica Plain, where you can’t swing a snugli without hitting some earnest white liberal parents who “have” to move out of the city “because of the schools.” We’re talking about good NPR-listening, Prius-driving democrats who literally feel that their middle-class white kid will somehow be tainted forever if she has to go to Kindergarten with poor people.
I don’t think this is racism, because of course there’s nothing a white liberal likes better than a black friend to prove their non-racist credentials. Except maybe for a gay friend or two to prove their non-homophobic credentials. (And they throw such great parties!)
No, what’s happening here is not racism: it’s just good old-fashioned hatred of the poor.
It’s hard to decide who’s worse: conservatives who press policies to attack the poor but are at least honest about their bigotry, or liberals who profess to care about social justice but not enough to have little Tyler and Madison exposed to poor people.
Brookline, of course, has been in the forefront of this kind of thing ever since it became America’s first conscious suburb, declining to be annexed by Boston at a time when the independent towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, Brighton, Dorchester, etc. were merging with the city.
But the issue is not that Newton residents on the Brookline border are “more likely to be a better sort of person.” It’s that they’re less likely to attempt to enroll their kids in Brookline schools. It is not hatred of the poor to think that BPS has significant problems and people try to find alternatives. The BPS are not as bad as the school “reform” crowd would like to tell us, but they’re no picnic. My wife teaches in Boston and faces those problems every day. The kids are struggling to catch up academically and are exposed to all sorts of harsh distractions in their lives out of school. There’s drama nonstop. She and I both went to urban schools and lived it as kids.
I know people who came out of city schools, including BPS, just fine. Others who…didn’t. My wife’s cousin transferred out of Catholic school because she wanted to go to school with her friends from the neighborhood. Through them she got involved with a gun-toting dealer five years older and had a baby at 15.
I know the types of people you’re talking about in JP, and many of them were from affluent suburbs to begin with. My family’s been city people since they got off the boat from Ireland in the days of Lincoln, but I think you’re taking it way too far. Racial and economic segregation have been a major problem in our society for at least 50 years, but the tragedy of the era is that every individual family has to make the choice that makes sense for them. That’s why the problem has been so difficult to fix. But I’m never going to call out anyone for looking at the options and saying “no thanks” to BPS.
Personally, I moved out of Boston to avoid the bullshit and dealing with the absurd assignment system. Not interested in rolling the dice on what school the kid goes to, nor in figuring out how to transport a kid halfway across a crowded city with so-so public transportation between the neighborhoods.
…are Brookline taxpayers with Brookline addresses. So they are not “attempting” to enroll their children. They are enrolling their children as is their legal right. They are in the exact same legal position as a homeowner with a Brookline address whose house straddles the Newton line.
People in Catholic schools get pregnant at 15 too. So do people in Brookline and Newton. And students in suburban schools tend to drive to any party featuring alcohol consumption. There is no school system that can keep your child safe from the dangers of adolescence.
I’m not willing to let folks off the hook with that “what’s best for your family” line. Lots of white people think it’s best for their family if their child never meets a black person. Must we respect that decision and not call it out as racist? Why should we then respect the choice of classist liberals whose life choices undermine the values they claim to support?
I hadn’t realized that the people in question had property partially in Brookline. I thought maybe it was Boston residents with a “Chestnut Hill” zip code or something. Ironically, the article says those people’s ability to attend Brookline schools is not being challenged. Seems like a shitty thing for Brookline schools to try, but it doesn’t seem like they’re singling out poorer people here.
And, sure, people in Newton or Catholic schools get pregnant or into trouble. But in my experience the urban public schools still have more of certain types of issues (including pedagogical issues in addition to behavioral ones) that some other schools don’t have to nearly the same level. People play the percentages.
In our cousin’s Catholic school, we know of one girl getting pregnant. In the school she transferred to it was an epidemic. I think it’s less of an issue for the younger kids, but as you hit middle and high school there are all sorts of issues that come up. I sure as hell wouldn’t want my kid going to the school my wife teaches in.
My wife spent a couple of years working in an affluent suburban district before her current job in Boston and, while there were problems at times, it was night and day. The kids, for better or worse, did not generally have the same level of trauma in their outside lives. Less exposure to crime and violence, less pressure to participate in it, less of an anti-learning environment.
Your “never meet a black person” argument seems like a straw man. There is a long way between refusing even to meet a person who might be of a different background, and a choice about the first 12 or 13 years of your kid’s education, which will have lifelong ramifications.
I understand your point of view and respect it, but I think you’re being too critical of people who decide to leave. It’s too important a thing to leave to a lottery, even a lottery that’s been revised.
at least not all of ’em.
There are three kinds of domiciles at issue:
1. Residences which are not *at all* in Brookline, but have a Brookline address because the mailbox — which is not on the land owned by the resident — is in Brookline. Check out 1862-1870 Beacon St. It is the set of buildings with a white facade surrounding a red courtyard that Google labels Reservoir Ct. See how there are different roofs along the set of buildings? The front building (nearest Beacon) on each side of the courtyard is entirely in Brookline. The second building, just north of the first on each side — only the southern half of that building (on each side of the courtyard) is in Brookline. The other buildings (the two smaller ones facing each other, and the two oriented at the base of the ‘U’)? those are entirely in Boston. There is $0 paid to the Brookline tax man for all of those units. The address is Brookline, but zero percent of those units are in Brookline. The current policy allows those kids to come to Brookline schools, but is that appropriate? Is it reasonable for Brookline to not allow future residents of those apartment units — units physically located entirely in Boston — to come to Brookline schools? Note that residents of the units I’m describing in this section are not eligible to vote in Brookline by state law — legally, despite the Brookline mailing address, they are residents of Boston. That is issue 1.
2. Properties where there is *land* in Brookline, but the entire structure is on the other side of the town line (Newton or Boston). On parcels like this, similar to (1), the mailbox could well be located in Brookline, but the entirety of the housing structure is outside of Brookline. An example is 170 Middlesex Rd. The neighbors on both sides have part of their home in Brookline, but in this case the entire structure is just north of the town line. Currently, these residents are allowed to enroll in Brookline schools, but like (1), they are not allowed to vote in Brookline by state law because they are not deemed residents of Brookline by voting law. Should these residents be permitted to send their kids to Brookline schools?
3. Properties where there is *land* and *home* in both Brookline and another community. An example is 200 Russett Rd. This is the case where the building itself straddles the line. My understanding of state law is that, technically, the physical location of the bedroom is the determining factor, though I suspect that, in practice, the residents of that address essentially get to choose in which community they would like to be counted. Should these residents be permitted to send their kids to Brookline public schools?
So that’s the three cases which must be decided. Currently, 1, 2, and 3 get to send their kids to school in Brookline, despite the fact that, by voting law, neither 1 nor 2 are considered residents of Brookline. I think it’s pretty clear that Brookline will still allow group 3 to attend Brookline schools, and I have a hunch that the SJC would see it that way too, push comes to shove. However, groups 1 and 2 — it’s not at all clear that they will (or should) be permitted to attend. That written… the outcome will almost certainly “grandfather” all kids — including the younger siblings who don’t even exist yet — of families currently enrolled in Brookline schools to remain in Brookline schools.
Finally, so long as the rules comply with state law, the School Committee has authority to change the rules on who can attend Brookline schools, and making that change is no different in concept than the town deciding to change the parking rules in front of your house or under what zoning code your property (or your neighbors) must comply, or any host of other rules or regs whose outcome impacts the market value of your property. All of which is to say, if the value of your home falls because the School Committee changes or clarifies the policy, tough noogies. Them’s the breaks, it’s an unfortunate outcome for you and your family, and your real estate attorney and your real estate agent should have made you aware of this regulatory risk when you purchased the property.
P.S. jamaicaplainiac — this isn’t about class, not at all. These rule changes will impact people in apartments on Beacon St, in expensive single family homes in Chestnut Hill, and in (relatively) inexpensive WWII era single family homes near the VFW Parkway. This issue is about school enrollment up 25 percent since 2004-2005 — so much that Brookline is preparing to ask for both an override and a debt exclusion to expand four schools, with a major high school expansion coming five years later. In preparation for that override vote, the Town is tightening up everything — reviewing all expenditures to make sure that, when they ask the citizens to vote to fund mo/better schools, the administration can be sure it did everything it could to minimize the tax increase.
since they lose the value of their home b/c they can no longer use the Brookline public schools as a selling point when marketing their home.
How can this be legal?
that the property actually is divided between Boston and Brookline? I initially understood that these were 100% Boston residents who happened to be near the line. In that case, I don’t know the law on this but that seems sketchy. Certainly could affect resale value and the town should pay for that, or better yet, scrap the whole plan.
This article does suggest that people on the Newton line are affected as well. If the letters were sent only to people on the Boston line, there’s no excuse, but somehow the Newton line people knew about it.
I stand behind my comments about BPS and the broader problems we face.
Sounds like the Newtonites did get the letter. That’s what I get for taking the Herald as a news source.
I stand by my comments about Brookline sucking.
I definitely dislike liberals that target Wal-Mart workers or the people that shop there. Target is just as bad, sometimes worse, but it has a hipper rap and a more middle class clientele so it doesn’t get the same bad press. I am not excusing Wal-Mart, but my perspectives on it changed since I’ve lived on the South Side of Chicago and dated/engaged a first generation American. For many people it’s the only place they can afford to shop and the kids who boycotted it at CRLS tended to be the ones dropped off in a Volvo or Saab with a Starbucks latte in hand.
I feel the same way about schools. Good Prius driving, NPR listening liberals were some of the worst critics of the CTU here in Chicago and make up the Bloomberg/Rahm base in a lot of municipalities. We saw that many of them, even good BMG posting ones, backed Connolly over Walsh for this very reason. I support mixed used development, socio economic integration, and maintaining property tax bases, and in many instances gentrification and catering to the creative class accomplishes good public policy goals. But that class ought to think about the immigrants, the urban poor, and the working poor more often than it does. I am hoping thats where our movement goes.
But I won’t bash Brookline, or bash the zipcodes in Cambridge and JP that are emulating it, I will simply say that we are all in this together and we won’t have progress or a revitalized middle class unless the ladder of opportunity is open to all. At the end of the day equity matters as much, if not more, than excellence in education.
“At the end of the day equity matters as much, if not more, than excellence in education.”
Agreed
The best thing you can do for urban schools is to be an active, engaged parent who advocates for your school community. By doing this, you strike a blow for equity and help not only your own child, but also the other children in the school community. The relatively small number of liberals who are willing to do this speaks volumes about the depth of people’s commitment to the ideals they profess.
You are saying, in essence, that people are hypocrites if they would like BPS and other urban districts to better serve all kids, but don’t themselves keep their kids in BPS and devote huge hours to lobbying for their kids and the system as a whole.
I’m not willing to put that on people, and there are other reasons to move. I lived in the city (Boston and other large cities) for about 30 of my first 35 years. Then I hit a point where I was tired of the city, and tired of paying a lot for a cramped, noisy space. I actually saved a ton money compared to JP and got a bigger place with laundry, parking, decent yard, etc. in an area considered upscale but affordable because off the radar for many urban renters. The commute to downtown Boston is actually shorter. Sometimes I miss city life, sometimes not. There are tradeoffs.
But if you want to talk about the “depth of [my] commitment to the ideals [I] profess,” maybe you could take into account the countless hours I’ve spent volunteering for causes over the past 20 years, or all the years I’ve worked for a fraction of what I might have been paid in the corporate world. The purity test is off-putting.
I hear and respect everything you’re saying, and I may be guilty of staking out an extreme point of view in order to be provocative. Okay, I’m totally guilty of that. I just get so very tired of people saying that they have to leave because of the schools, when in fact there are a lot of great options–especially at the elementary level–in Boston. There’s this implicit criticism that comes from these folks–if you really cared about your kids, you’d move them out of BPS–and I guess I felt like I wanted to turn it around a little bit. But you’re right–life is complex and defies black-and-white distinctions.
Would benefit by a controlled choice system like the kind Cambridge has. It would create better racial balance and get the parents that do get involved to partner with those that can’t to create better schools for everyone. Maybe that strikes some as idealistic, but I definitely benefited from going to school with kids from all races, creeds, and classes and I suspect the actual quality of education improved as well.
Inter-district school choice is basically a lottery which puts the district at a disadvantage for parents who have the economic ability to move. If you’re a middle or upper income parent and have option of either moving to Jamaica Plain or entering the Boston School Lottery where your odds may be 1/100 to get the school you want, and you won’t know which school you get until it is too late to make preparations to move, you’re not going to play that game.
Inter-district school choice does help parents who do not have the resources to move out of the city, but it also generally weakens the system because it allows active and committed parents to ignore their neighborhood school (instead of working to make it better because it is the path of least resistance.
I will also note that suburban districts with “good” schools rarely allow inter-district school choice. You buy your house in a neighborhood and you are assigned to that neighborhood’s school.
Although the original post used the Brookline school example, the larger issue is being missed – liberals who dislike poor (and maybe poor nonwhite) people. Although in many ways Massachusetts is very liberal, when it comes to race and poverty, Massachusetts is very, very conservative. One only has to look at the extreme segregation in this state and the policies that codify that to understand that point.
I posted something yesterday in a thread that was long off the front page – I was struck by a video prepared by opponents of a casino in Foxborough. One person interviewed (and I don’t know either his politics nor Foxborough’s politics) stated that his biggest fear was socio-economic – that casinos bring with them low-wage workers who then need housing, so that means duplexes, and they need food, which means fast food restaurants.
Another woman stated that Foxborough was 100% in favor of jobs – but they wanted high-paying jobs, so that the people working them could go to the nice restaurants in town.
Yet another angle was to drum up fear about language. They interviewed someone from Uncasville CT who stated that there were 32 languages spoken in the school, and that because of this after-school programs had to be cancelled (presumably to divert the funds to teaching kids English). There were lots of people who described how their neighborhoods were worse because they didn’t know anyone anymore, their old neighbors moved out and those casino workers moved in.
They called this “changing the character of the town”. This is a line that is used in most small-town debates in this state. It means “don’t let *those* people in”.
Although I don’t think that race is as much a factor as is economics, I think that race still plays a very large part.
I was also struck about how successful Massachusetts is considered when it comes to education. That was largely achieved by segregating the poor and minorities into urban communities – which now have massively failed school systems. It’s tranching at its finest – creating very easy districts which can soar, and districts which have absolutely no hope. The average goes up because the failure at the lower end is off the scale.
Want to shake things up a little bit? Change three small things:
1) In the Chapter 40B calculation, do not let a community fill their 10% affordability goal with age-restricted senior housing. At worst, let senior housing fill just 5% of the goal, with the other 5% being family housing.
2) Require that a certain percentage of each town be zoned for multi-family housing. Maybe 20%. The state can do this by vote.
3) Create a new pool of state aid money based on the cost of housing, in recognition that communities which are more receptive to low-cost housing are getting hammered due to those units not bringing in enough property tax (in some cases, not even enough to pay the cost of the trash pickup to the units).
But no – instead, this state passed the Communities Preservation Act, which is funded via a deed surcharge (generated mostly in urban areas) to subsidize communities who vote to tax themselves higher (i.e. small rich ones).
This is a great post.
is largely homogeneous, not many poor or rich, in one of the more Republican-leaning parts of the state. It’s not usual for people in exurban towns like that not to want the “urbanization.” Some of that is certainly due to unfortunate stereotypes about the “wrong” people (meaning bias against certain types of people or bias against anyone not orginally from Foxboro). But some of it comes from the genuine sense that major development would in fact change the character of the town. They’ve already got the football stadium and all that traffic.
I don’t support the NIMBYism, but I agree with the person that we should prioritize high-skill, high-paying jobs over minimum wage jobs with little possibility for advancement. That should be our goal as a state and a nation, not just within the boundaries of Foxboro or any other NIMBY town. And the disparity between school districts is a nationwide problem, not just in Massachusetts.
Your proposed solutions are well worth exploring. Of course we often don’t get particularly progressive policy out of Beacon Hill. In some instances that’s because of popular resistance, in others it’s in spite of popular support.
If we prioritize for high-skill jobs, we are left with a substantial segment of the population who cannot be employed. I suggest you drive through Springfield, Lawrence, Holyoke, and see what is out there. The odds of kids growing up in poverty,or even in assistance-supported households, and making it to one of those plum jobs is almost zero.
We need a variety of jobs that fit our variety of population.
We’re always going to need a range of jobs. But we also need to do all we can to make it possible for kids from everywhere to move up. I don’t think our problem, in the last decade or so, has been that too small a percentage of our overall jobs are low-wage service jobs.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think you’re missing the point I’m trying to make. Not every person in this state is capable of landing a high-skill, high-wage job. Maybe it seems that way to the people who live in Foxborough, but it is definitely not that way to people who live in Springfield, Holyoke, or Lawrence. As it stands, the vast majority of people in those communities are not going to go to college – that rung on the ladder is too high for most to achieve when they are living in such poverty and hopelessness.
Lower wage jobs are a rung on the ladder that will let future generations from those families to climb higher. I think that jobs and income are really the key, and no matter how many “opportunities” we provide, via things like scholarships, additional education, etc., those things are negated by a family structure that is decimated by extreme poverty.
We can affect the wages of service jobs by raising the minimum wage in the state. Our minimum wage is currently $8. Why not raise it to $9? Yes, we’d all pay a little bit more for our services, but it would put more money into the households of people who hold low-wage service jobs.
I said we’ll always need a range of jobs. I get that some people are not – right now – going to be able to land a high-skill, high-wage job. The rung on the ladder, as you say, should be there. And it will be. The growth in jobs in recent years, to the extent it’s existed at all, has primarily been in low-wage service jobs. Half of college grads can’t find anything else, and they’re talking jobs that would have gone to people who didn’t go to college It’s a lose-lose.
On the minimum wage, agree totally and I’ll raise you. I was out for 2 months collecting signatures to make it $10.50 and working now to get Bob DeLeo to pass the $11 the Senate already passed.
Whichever community you vote in and pay property taxes in, that is the community in which your children should attend school. Why do properties straddle town lines? Also, I would have liked to have seen the letter. I don’t know if it were quoted in the linked Herald article because when I clicked on the link I got to a page that just had credits on it as if the column were behind a pay wall.
you pay taxes to both towns, in proportion to the amount of you house that is in each. The town lines are arbitrary, why wouldn’t you build structures that straddled them? Especially when they cut at odd angles with the streets, which is more likely than not the case. As to voting, my understanding is that there’s some leeway, but generally it’s the town that the larger share of your house is in, though I have also heard of more ridiculous standards, such as where your bed is located.
is the interesting question. As I understand it, people whose property straddles a line pay taxes to both towns. Seems one of the people in the article I linked to (not the Herald piece), on the Brookline-Newton line, added on to the house to qualify for Brookline schools. I’d like to know more about the rules on this.
It seems they should, at least for local elections. Otherwise it’s taxation without representation and I can think of a certain Parliament that can tell you how well THAT goes over in Massachusetts!:)
I agree they should get to vote in local elections if they’re paying taxes there. Just as clearly they should not be able to vote twice for Pres, Congress, statewide offices and state leg, etc. How on earth would you monitor that logistically?
residents vote.
In MA, you can only reside in one town at a time. If your home straddles the line, technically you should reside in the city or town in which your bedroom is located, but as a matter of practice I understand that, essentially, you get to choose.
You don’t get to vote in both — Bill Galvin ensures that. If your property straddles a state line… I have no idea how that works!
You don’t get to vote in a town where you have a secondary residence, though you do pay taxes there.
It really irks me that arguably more regressive states like IL and VA have magnet high schools opened to the entire state. I personally know parents of friends that bought property in Boston just to get their kids into Boston Latin. It’s a great high school and offers a classical education experience every MA resident should be able to experience. It also boggles me we do not have an equivalent of an IMSA or Bronx Math and Science on the techie side. Granted, CRLS has finally gotten the recognition and rankings it deserves and I would love to send my own children there someday, but I think there should be statewide magnets. It would take a lot of sting out of these fights and help everyone across the state.
Of course reforming how we finance education is actually the biggest education question nobody is asking locally or nationally.
Even if Brookline is the Amherst of the East, I still think this article unfair.
As someone involved in municipal government, I feel compelled to point out that Brookline hasn’t made a decision. A sub-committee is developing a proposed policy change. If the school committee approves the proposed change, it might be justified to blame Brookline, but even then, elected boards sometimes act against the electorate’s wishes.
Eagan unintentionally does Brookline a favor by bringing this issue to the public’s attention, but blaming the town for the actions of a sub-committee is unfair.
I’d remind you that a hair more than 8 percent of housing units in Brookline are affordable. Those folks often have kids, and those kids go to the Brookline schools. I’d also add that over 300 Boston METCO students are educated in Brookline schools every day. Brookline (and its staff, board of selectmen, and town meeting) is far from perfect and far from perfectly progressive on issues of poverty and housing or anything else for that matter, but your spinning this as Brookline being anti-poor despite the facts says more about you than it does Brookline.
According to an article I read, Brookline has 2,002 affordable units. I did a quick count from data on Brookline’s website and found about 1,075 units reserved for either elderly or special needs. Another 170 units were classified as “owner occupied”. About another 100 were single room occupancy. That doesn’t leave too many units for families with children.
although I’d add that plenty of special needs people have children. My son goes to day care with two girls, both of whose parents are blind*. Owner occupied may well be parents as well. The single room occupancy are Pine Street Inn type situations — boarding “halfway” houses. A huge chunk of the senior housing is Hebrew Senior Life.
You’re not wrong that a big chunk of the 8% of affordable housing isn’t targeted toward families. But I don’t think that’s the result of the town scheming to keep poor kids out of the schools; rather, I suspect it’s more the result of Hebrew Senior Life and the Pine Street Inn pursuing development of affordable housing in Brookline. The town just built two dozen “general” affordable housing units on Fisher Hill, and are building another 44 “general” units near Beacon St, for example.
Again, it’s hard to argue that the Town is working to keep poor kids out of the schools when 300 Boston kids come to school in Brookline every day through the METCO program.
* I have no idea if that family lives in an affordable unit or not.
Of course, METCO students bring over 5k of state money per student with them. And at least at the high school level, most of the METCO and low-income students are tracked into “level 2” classes so they don’t contaminate the level 1 classes.
Of course not only does it cost the Town far more than $5,000/student/year to educate them, but the growing enrollment will also require a massive capital expenditure to provide sufficient classroom space to educate the kids in the school system — including the METCO kids.
Nobody within the school department, School Committee, Board of Selectmen, or the Advisory Committee has even suggested cutting or killing off the METCO program, despite the fact that it costs the Brookline (not state) portion of the budget on the order of $1.5M a year, *plus* tens of millions in capital dollars to expand the schools by another 300 seats.
If your thesis was right — that Brookline is guilty of “good old-fashioned hatred of the poor” — you’d see a movement to nix METCO immediately. Instead, the Town is doing a soup to nuts review of budget and policy to make sure we’re spending every dollar as well as can be, so that we can ask for an override to tax ourselves more, all while preserving our policy of spending some of our tax dollars to educate (poor) kids from another community.
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for an apology for your wildly inaccurate diary and comments in this thread. Which brings me to my second point:
Put up or shut up. Show some evidence or quit making wild accusations.
Tens of millions of dollars to expand the schools for 300 METCO students? That sounds like a fabulously wild exaggeration.
I am under the impression that “choice-in” type students are money-makers for the district because they represent variable income in a primarily fixed-cost environment (adding 1 extra student to a class that has room results in small additional expenditure dollars, but $5,000 in income)
Brookline has 7,112 students in its schools. From what I could gather, there are 8 elementary (K-8) schools and one high school. Overall the district has 17.1 students per class. Dividing 300 students across 13 grades is about 23 students per grade. I don’t have data about how many classrooms there are per grade, but using 17.1 and applying to grade 6 (549 students – since K has smaller class sizes, high school has larger) that means there are probably about 32 sixth-grade classrooms in Brookline.
Since Brookline doesn’t redraw its school boundaries each year, I have to imagine that there is going to be some room across 32 classrooms. Room enough for 23 students.
I have to imagine that METCO students are assigned to a school, which means they are taken in where there is room.
We’ve got to expand the K-8 schools by many hundreds of seats, and we’ll spend north of $100M doing it. Without METCO students, we’d be able to eliminate at least one school expansion outright. That’s tens of millions of dollars.
When you’re going to build dozens of new classrooms and hire dozens of additional teachers, these are no longer “fixed costs” because Brookline, right now, is determining how many classrooms and additional teachers to procure. So, right now, those costs aren’t fixed at all.
In fact, we do, because many students live in so-called “buffer zones” where the system, not the student, chooses which school that student is assigned to. So a kid living on the top floor of a three decker could be going to School A, but the kid on the second floor in the same grade could be assigned School B because when that kid moved into town, his grade had more room per classroom in School B. But more to the point, because some K8 schools aren’t being expanded, some a little, and some a lot, the boundaries will be redrawn rather dramatically once the dust settles.
Here is an article from the Boston Globe, March 11 2013.. Here are some quotes:
The cost difference was noted in the article, without explaining that the $17,000 cost per student (which is absolutely astronomical, by the way) is made up of both fixed costs and variable costs.
The committee is accurately calculating and reporting the benefits and costs of eliminating METCO, as a matter of course. It’s a large program, it’s optional, and it is therefore prudent for the committee to carefully measure the impacts of METCO on the school system before finalizing a school expansion proposal with an accompanying override and debt exclusion.
But, the fact is, neither Mr. Morse nor any of the other school committee members I’ve spoken with [more than half], nor any member of the Selectmen I’ve spoken with [more than half], nor any AC member I’ve spoken with has given any indication that they are open to the idea of reducing or nixing METCO. METCO has broad support by the decision makers in Brookline.
I’m on deadline, I don’t have time to support this with links.
I lived in Brookline (Coolidge Corner) from 1999 to 2010. During the time I lived there, the state killed or attempted to kill METCO altogether. My recollection is that Brookline chose to continue it on its own. I am also under the impression that Brookline was a leader in creating METCO in the first place.
Brookline has its problems. Hating the poor, at least as this thread alleges, is not among them.
My school has METCO, but not at the level of Brookline, which is probably bigger than East Longmeadow. It’s a great program and worth whatever it costs schools, which isn’t likely to be very much. Incidentally, the Commonwealth, not the sending district, pays the bill for METCO.
Here’s info on how much money each community gets for METCO.
Generalizing about METCO is precarious in my experience. I teach both Honors and regular classes. I have METCO students in both groups. I have to METCO girls in my Honors English 11 and one boy in my regular English class. In my experience, the distribution of kids mirrors that of the general school population. The kids’ individual demographics also vary. Some are low-income; some aren’t. One of my best students ever was a METCO student; she was the first student I had who went to Harvard. Another former student was involved in drugs in addition to his legitimate contracting business and was murdered.
Longmeadow, the richest community in Western Mass, once considered getting rid of METCO. To make a long story short, they still have it.
I want my kids going to school with other kids from high-achieving families, not with kids who have uneducated parents.
I can’t blame parents for this – I’m pretty sure parental education levels is an excellent predictor of student achievement, as is being with other highly motivated peers.
What bugs me is when parents pretend otherwise, as if, oh, it’s only the magical abilities of Wellesley teachers and administrators that are responsible for “good schools” there and not largely an environment where most kids come from wealthy homes with highly educated parents. Please.
But as long as you fund schools largely by local property taxes town by town, communities are incented to want as few school-age kids as possible. And as long as real estate values are tied to standardized test scores, what homeowners want to welcome students who might bring down those averages?
… When I was first given my secret liberal secret decoder ring (and complementary achievement trophy… yea me!) the VERY FIRST thing I decoded was “good schools”… and it said that “good schools” is a synonym for “every teacher is a marxist who overtly wishes they could be a better, more empowered female (even the males) for the christmas they don’t believe in.” So THERE.
Looks like they packed that substitution cipher pretty tightly…
Hm… I wonder what happens when I plug in ‘BMG’… “Bolsheviks Must Gab.”
Yep, it is still workin.
I suppose “good schools” is one of those terms that can be used in quite different ways. We used to live on the South Shore. I taught for 16 years in the town in which we lived, and although the school system was not what you would think of as a “prestige” system, I had a great deal of respect for the teachers there, and would have been happy to have my children have them as their teachers. And that’s exactly what we planned to do.
Then Proposition 2 1/2 passed, and 25% of the teachers were fired. Class sizes soared, and lots of students who would formerly have been supported and worked with started falling through the cracks. And parents almost universally blamed either the teachers or their own children. So a few years later we moved to West of Boston. We thought the teachers where we had lived were fine. We thought if you took those same teachers and put them in Brookline or Newton they would be regarded with awe. But they were being put in an impossible situation, and we didn’t want our children to have to bear the brunt of it.
That’s never stopped me from arguing forcefully and persistently for greater support for public schools and public school teachers. We didn’t leave for racist reasons or because we didn’t like “that kind of people”. In fact, we still regard some of the people we knew there as our very best friends, and continue to get together with them. We truly have a lot in common.
These questions unfortunately don’t have simple answers. What one does with one’s life is important. There are many ways of doing it. The important thing is to do it.
Either that, or they send their kids to private schools. While few if any districts are swimming in resources, there sure is a difference between places like Weston and Wellesley and lower income communities.
We appear to be in agreement that in most cases, “good schools” means “relatively wealthy, upscale community.” These are attractive because of available community resources for the schools as well as the high-achievement-oriented student bodies (influenced by parents’ socioeconomic status).
It is certainly possible for low-income students to do well academically. But IMO it takes more teaching skills and more resources for this to happen, while these districts tend to have less-than-average resources.
All else being equal, students in higher income communities are likely, on average, to do better. And, as a commenter noted above, parents who want to give their kids what they believe are the best possible odds for success often prefer having their kids around peers who come from higher as opposed to lower income families. If we didn’t have so many socioeconomically homogeneous communities, this would be less of an issue. My preferred solution given current residential patterns that are unlikely to be changed anytime soon would be to put the necessary resources into lower-income school districts, including pre-school and parental support.
…which I never understood, correlating class to ability. My understanding is that Title I funding for academic support is based on the number of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch. What sense does that make? Besides, the American Dream is supposedly based on the idea that ability can overcome class.
It originated with Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1965 with the ESEA, the most recent incarnation of which was NCLB.
The expresss purpose was to “distribute funding to schools and school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I
environmental factors that either encourage or put up barriers toward students being able to reach their full potentials. As a family member of mine who has worked for many years in social services was telling me just last weekend, kids who are hungry are less likely to do well in school. Kids from poor families are more likely to feel pressure to work to help support the family instead of having the luxury of devoting all their free time to studying. And so on.
Look at the first chart on Sen. Jehlen’s post here Monday and tell me that socioeconomic factors in a community don’t influence school results.
but it’s not exactly the case. In part, the quality of a school is code for a lot of things.
I live in Granby where school spending is low. We lack a lot of things other districts take for granted such as post-diluvian buildings and working technology. The numbers at the high school are such that AP courses are limited to 2 or 3. The majority of kids go to uncompetitive colleges, mostly community colleges. One issue I have witnessed is the lack of students who think seriously about college. If a kid goes to East Longmeadow, where I teach, there are not only more classes, but there is a critical mass of kids thinking about college. Smart kids in Granby lose out on important enculturation. Like me, my kids go to Granby, but there are costs as well as benefits to going to school with kids who have a different background from my students in the suburbs. It’s not that there is something wrong with their classmates, many of whom will go to college, but there are costs to our working-class culture.
We moved from Medford to Belmont in 2012, and enrolled our kindergartners in the Belmont schools in 2013. The school district comparison was the major factor in that decision. Let’s look at the figures.
Medford ranks #253 out of 319 school districts in MA, and is 78% white. Belmont ranks #24, and is 84% white. The difference in rankings is obviously not because of a pretty nominal 6% difference in the proportion of the population that’s white. I am white, and perhaps because I’ve lived in Californian cities, both Medford and Belmont feel pretty darn white to me.
This is not about poverty either. Medford scores very poorly despite having a median household income, at $69,581, that is above Massachusetts’ ($62,859).
Nor is this about spending. Medford actually spends slightly more per student on education ($13,032) than Belmont does ($12,259).
Truth be told, if you can’t achieve at least state-average outcomes with a median household income of $70,000 and spending $13,000 per student per year, then your problem is not poverty. Sure, Belmont is richer, and I’m sure that that accounts for part of it, but there’s no reason to suppose that better teachers, better management, and better community support don’t play a major role.
Jamaicaplainiac is wrong on this. As a guy who grew up in a very low-income family, I’d be insulting myself if I made my decision based on not wanting my kids to associate with kids like I myself once was. People’s choice to move to a better school district doesn’t necessarily imply “hatred of the poor.”
38% of the adult population in Medford has a college degree, according to a quick check on Movoto.com. That figure is 68% in Belmont.
I wish I had the time and data to do a correlation of parents’ educational achievement and school results, whether percent going onto college, graduation rates or standardized tests (which I am not at all a fan of but people seem to think indicates “good schools “). I think it would be pretty striking.
A couple of generations ago, there was significant educational mobility in this country. Given the staggering cost of college these days and the general economic stagnation among all but the wealthy, I suspect that’s no longer the case.
It would be a far more just country if it were.
I agree that people having college degrees makes it more likely for their children to attend college. But on the other hand, not going to college yourself doesn’t doom your kids to fare poorly in school. My parents (in their late 60s/early 70s now) didn’t go to college; but they were very anxious for their children to do well in school.
We’re talking only about performance in the primary/secondary system here anyway when comparing Belmont and Medford; so what are we really saying? That non-college parents are just less keen on average on their kids doing well in school?
Not going to college yourself, doesn’t mean you don’t want your kids to do well in school. It just means you didn’t go to college.
That the probability of your kids going to college is lower.
There are many families where parents want their children to have higher educational achievements than they themselves have. But there are others where that’s not the case. There are still others where the parents would like their kids to go to college but it’s not financially feasible – more likely in lower education households because income is probably lower.
Having parents who didn’t go to college doesn’t mean you won’t go. Nor does it mean your parents don’t want you to. But the fact is that a higher percentage of high school seniors in Weston go off to college than do in Boston. Is that due to family income? Parental education? Better teachers in Weston than Boston?
If the cause is income then it’s still true that parent education helps predict whether a kid goes to college, simply because parent education predicts household income. Keep in mind that “helps predict” does not mean “causes.”
to remain in their parents income group. There is more mobility up and down the middle class.
But when it comes to inter-generational poverty, it’s very hard to move up because
I thought about this a bit more as I drove to work this morning.
I don’t think that people are fully conscious of their desire to segregate by race or class. I think that it is more of an innate thing, that people want to be with people they are most comfortable with, people they share things in common with. That happens to primarily translate to race and class.
However, we need to recognize more that this is a bad thing, because of some serious negative impacts.
For example, if you live your life without spending any time around black people, by the time you’re in a position to interview and hire people, you will likely continue your trend of picking people you’re comfortable with – and that won’t include black people. Or, if your company is progressive enough to point out the inadequacy of its hiring, you’re likely going to resent having to hire “those” people.
Given that we fund local services via property taxes, it should be obvious that putting all the poor people in some communities and all the rich people in other communities will result in a huge disparity of opportunity.
By segregating, we lose empathy. We can’t comprehend that people are suffering because, “hey, I see plenty of opportunities [for people like me], so if people can’t make it, it must be because “those” people [not like me] are lazy”. Can anyone here fully comprehend the concept of families living in motels, or children being raised by foster families, many of which are primarily offering that service because of the state payments (and not out of a desire to help children with no parents)?
It’s not enough to just let people make individual decisions that are perhaps most convenient and good for the majority, but seriously impact the minority. Although I don’t think we should overtly force people to integrate, I think that we need to take a harder look at state policies that encourage segregation, and we need to create larger incentives to combat it.
Exibit A is a family in Medford (or Waltham) moving to Belmont for the better school system. Why not give the same opportunity to poor kids in Medford, allow a voucher to a private school (assuming Medford schools are low performing).
The most common solution in Medford for parents concerned about the school system is to try to get their kids into one of the local Catholic schools (we’re not Catholic!). Having that option available doesn’t seem to make the system as a whole better.
I would look at the ethnicity of the student population, my guess is Medford and Belmont would have a greater variance than 6%
Statistics on that are not readily available. But look at it this way. The heavily African-American district of West Medford, where I used to live, is also in the district of Medford’s best-performing elementary school. So I really don’t think the explanation is a racial one.
The state publishes statistics on its school districts here.
Medford district is 62% white, 16% black, 10% Hispanic. 24% are first language not English. 33% are low-income.
Belmont is 72% white, 4% black, 4% Hispanic, 15% Asian. 15% are first language not English, 7% are low-income.
The difference in “quality” (largely reputation based, determined by “common wisdom” of the community) may be district that is much more White/Asian versus Black/Hispanic, much less poor, and much more English-speaking.
This belies the fact that Cambridge is one of the most diverse districts in the country and one of the best. Achievement and equity are achieved thanks in large part to consistently high education funding and controlled choice. We have massive performance gaps among some of our elementary schools and the push to a concentrated middle school model should alleviate that. The old model just wasn’t working anymore. But this should stabilize the system and introduce equity. CRLS is a top performer again and really has turned around extensively, k-6 is still strong, its 6-8 that was weak and will now be addressed.
I am incredibly proud to have a diverse array of friends and former classmates from a wide variety of backgrounds all doing relatively successful. BPS and other urban districts should emulate this.
I am surprised Medford is doing so poorly, but it may be an issue of mismanagement in the administration.
Framingham has a substantial immigrant population, particularly Brazilian. It is more cost effective to have bilingual teaching and other resources (counselors, nurses, etc.) for that population at some schools instead of all schools. But if you do that, and concentrate the lower income, non-native-English-speaking students in some schools, you by definition “segregate” and have test-score gaps. What should be done about that? (I think Framingham still has school choice for elementary schools. The issue is moot for high school since there’s only one high school.)
Should we not compare whites growing up on the Lawrence Street section of Medford (the rich section) to the scores of white students in Belmont, most of whom are not well-to-do. Do the same for black and Hispanic kids and then compare the scores of the low income students (based on those getting free lunch I guess).
I have read where black and Hispanic kids living in TX outperform their counterparts living in Wisconsin, but since WI is mostly white, the overall test scores in WI are higher than TX.
I know a teacher in Lawrence and I’m sure his kids score lower than those in Belmont or Medford, but I would say he is a great teacher, despite the scores his kids put up on MCAS. I’m a soccer coach and when coaching U8 kids, you can luck out having a bunch a good players and going undefeated, or kids who have no clue about the sport, and barely win a game. Both have happened to me, doesn’t make me a genius or bad coach.
I’m trying to quantify the feelings that people have with one district over another. The statement was made that Belmont and Medford aren’t that different from each other. The stats above show how the schools are substantially different in demographics. Those demographics are what make people choose one district over another.
The quality or qualifications of the teaching are rarely mentiond when describing a district (when is the last time someone quotes the aggregate experience of teachers, or the percent that are certified, or the scholastic background of the teachers)? – It is usually the characteristics of the student population (including scores) that people mention.
My dad & I lived in an apartment where the town line went through our front hallway. I went to Brookline High School & was never questioned about it.
What’s with the line about overnight parking affecting poor people? We were poor & like the other poors, we couldn’t afford a car & took the T everywhere. If you live in Brookline & have a car, you have money.
The reasons for the overnight parking ban in Brookline are many and complex, and have nothing to do with inflating the cost of living. After all, owning an auto costs more than using transit, so an overnight parking ban serves to lower transportation costs, or at least induce self-selection amongst its residents — Brookline becomes relatively more attractive for folks who don’t own a car. Personally, I’m a fan — the areas of town where parking is scarce are well-served by B, C, D, 65, 66, Elderbus, Hubway, ZipCar, and taxi queues, and there’d certainly be an increase of car-ownership in Brookline were the overnight parking ban eliminated. With that increase comes more roadway congestion, more conflicts with pedestrians and cyclists, slower bus and B and C Line runs, and more air and noise pollution.
The idea that one can privatize 7′ x 18′ of public space for the vast majority of the hours in a year for $20 or $50 a year — in a community where both public parking and public parks are scarce — boggles my mind.
I have been known to spew foam, (I think–not familiar with that expression, but it reminds me of the Spider-Man Crazy Foam dispensers of my youth), but I actually do think the parking ban is classist. First of all, allowing people to park on the streets in the pre-dawn hours is not privatizing the space–it’s simply allowing the public to use a resource they are already paying for. What’s the town doing with the streets between 2 and 6 AM anyway?
Secondly, it’s an anti apartment-dwelling policy. People who live in houses in Brookline with driveways can park at no extra cost, whereas people who live in apartments have to shell out extra to find parking. It’s effectively a surcharge on multi-family dwellings.
Plenty of low-income people do have cars and need cars to get to and from work. With Brookline putting a hefty surcharge on car ownership, those undesirables will be sure to move elsewhere.
The use of a parking space is mutually exclusive. When one person’s car is using it, nobody else can use the space.
More precisely, it’s allowing the subset of the public who own a car to use a resource (land) which could otherwise be used to expand parkland (for parking spaces adjacent to parks) or used as extensive tree lawns and bioswales (for an improved aesthetic and air and water quality enjoyed by all). In a community where nearly every adult owns a car, then the benefits are widely spread. In Brookline, fewer than half of adults own a car. The benefits aren’t spread equally.
Sweeping. Plowing. Getting a head start on trash. Keep in mind that one of the results of the overnight parking ban is that every single car on-street must be moved every day. That guarantees that (a) every car is operable and not a junker stuck in the same place for weeks, and that (b) the parking spaces are “reset” every day, so the daytime availability of the spaces in front of your home aren’t impacted by somebody who leaves their car parked for weeks at a time. Also, (c) because the cars need a “place to live” at night, the amount of cars parked on the street during the day in residential areas is much less. This means that guests, delivery trucks, contractors, etc. can find a space on the street far, far easier than in Boston neighborhoods.
No, it’s an anti- 70+ year old apartment dwelling if you own a car policy. That’s far from the same thing. More recent multifamily construction has minimum parking space requirements. Most of the apartments are very close to public transit. Beacon and Harvard St areas of Brookline have far better access to public transit than much of JP. It’s *easy* to live in Brookline and not own a car, far easier than much of JP.
I’d add that those people who own parking [be it in a condo or a driveway in a 1/2/3 family home] paid for that parking. It wasn’t free. And, of course, there is opportunity cost. If parking spaces are desired, they have a market value. If you own a parking space and choose to use it with your own car, you’re foregoing rental income on that spot.
No, it’s effectively not a subsidy for car-ownership for all people, regardless of housing status. For those who don’t own a space but own a car, it means they’ve got to rent a spot. For those who do own a space and own a car, it means that they’ve got to forego rent. Both car owners are out the exact same amount of money each month.
But the same is true of the family who owns two (or three!) cars but can’t find a house with that much parking [plenty of houses in Brookline have only room for one car per household]. It means the wealthy emptynesting couple who doesn’t want to give up either car doesn’t move into the $1.3M condo on Beacon Street either, instead choosing Newton or the Back Bay. There’s no question that the overnight parking ban impacts which people choose to live in Brookline, but it’s not about income or wealth or desirability. It’s about car ownership. If you “need” to own a car, you need to pay for garaging it somewhere. That’s your responsibility, not the community’s.
and have for years. I’m not actually sure why those exist but it’s certainly not only affluent communities in Mass. that have them.
My youngest son chose to move from his mother’s home in an affluent north shore suburb to my home in Somerville. He changed schools after the first semester, and finished his junior year at Somerville High School.
By all the metrics cited here, and generally tossed about in discussions about school “quality”, the school he left wins over SHS — hands down.
My son got a better EDUCATION in his year and a half at SHS than he could have gotten had he stayed in the suburbs. He learned, first hand, about life, ethnic diversity, poverty, racism, and a host other experiences he COULD NOT GET in the suburbs.
I believe in education and I believe in funding public education. I also think that it’s nearly impossible to separate the effects of poverty from the effects of racism (not to mention sexism and host of other prejudices). We have had three decades of class warfare waged by the top one percent against the rest of us. The bottom 25% of our population are the victims. The 25-50% quartile is the current front line.
Do folks here appreciate what it means that FIFTY PERCENT of Americans are one paycheck away from POVERTY? Think about that while you listen to Mr. DeLeo (who alleges to be a lunch-bucket Democrat) tie a minimum wage increase to the meat-axe he wants to wield against unemployment compensation.
The problems in our public schools are best addressed by funding our public schools. The best way increase the funding of our public schools is get some WEALTH back into the wallets of the bottom half of the economy — wealth that they will SPEND, creating more taxes and more jobs.
I had a few moments to do some research to support my statement about Brookline and METCO up-thread. While somewhat dated (2004), I suggest that its data about, for example, income distribution in Brookline is largely unchanged.
First, Brookline CREATED METCO. From the above:
The insinuations you make about Brookline are simply not true. Again from the above paper (emphasis mine):
I suggest that you revisit the assumptions and stereotypes you assume in your thread-starter. The data about Brookline do not support the hostility, towards both the poor and minorities, that you allege.
Further, Brookline School Superintendent Bill Lupini and the Brookline School Committee reaffirmed Brookline’s committment to METCO in response to the article you cite.
It appears to me that you (and apparently David) have been snookered by yet another grossly distorted right-leaning piece of garbage published by the new Globe. Apparently the new Globe should stick to football.
I realized, after posting, that my final cite refers to an article published in March. I guess the Globe was publishing garbage before John Henry’s purchase. In any case, the final cite was responding to a different piece than that cited in the thread-starter.
I have even less confidence in the Herald, and especially Margery Eagan, then I do in the Globe. I suggest several deep breaths for all of us.