Schools: Boston’s Backwardness

In Boston last week, a Negro Paul Revere on horseback led a march of 10,000 up to a 93-year-old school in protest against a sad fact—Boston has not only the nation’s oldest public school system, but also its most senile.

The so-called “Athens of America” seems impervious to the idea that big cities need the best schools in the country. At last count, 38% of Boston’s 90,000 pupils attended schools more than half a century old, including one built in 1847. Many are ill-lit, malodorous fire traps. Boston’s schoolchildren are jammed in tight—40 to a class at many schools. It takes three or four years to build a school in Boston, and systematic overhauling is unheard of.

One reason is that school construc tion and the school budget are largely in the hands of the mayor, who holds down on school expenses to keep the rest of the city running. This leaves the school committee (Boston for “board”) with reduced responsibility, but it keeps busy. Its five members are elected every two years and have long used the job as a springboard for higher office.

Academically, the public schools are left to flounder. The Roman Catholic schools, with nearly half as many students as the public system, draw off most of the brightest. The public system has only 43 remedial-reading teachers, although students at all levels are at least six months behind the norm on standardized reading tests. In an area that cries for electronics techni cians, vocational schools still teach cabinetmaking. In all of Boston’s high schools, there are only 18 guidance counselors, and only a quarter of the graduates go on to college. Of this number, more than half are supplied by three schools: Technical High and the two Latin schools (Boys and Girls), which in recent years have lost much of their academic glamour.

Status Quo Vote. Boston’s critics clamor for lively innovations, but standardized guides still rule the classrooms. A Ford Foundation project hopes to start upgrading a few have-not schools, but nearby Harvard is given almost no chance to help. Not until last year were a handful of Harvard student teachers even allowed to practice in Boston. “There is no place in the country where a graduate school of education has had less influence on a city school system,” says Harvard Education Professor Herold Hunt.

Boston pays teachers on a par with its richer suburbs, but working conditions are antiquated. Teachers must still munch lunch at their desks while policing the kids. Young teachers avoid Boston, and the average age of teachers is close to 50. Apathy, fed by authoritarian administrators, wreathes the system like a cloud of poison gas.

Back in 1855, Boston became the first major U.S. city to outlaw school segregation. Today, about 30 of its 190 schools are de facto segregated—85% or more Negro. Although Negroes complain loudly of inequities, the school committee is uninterested—and it hard ly has to care. In last week’s primary, despite intense Negro campaigning, Boston’s heavily Irish Catholic voters gave the incumbent committeemen such a whopping plurality that the same old policy seems inevitable.

A Hell of a System. The primary results pleased Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, a matronly lawyer who currently chairs the school committee and repeatedly charges that Negro criticism of schools embarrasses “the home town of the President.” Equally happy was Committeeman Joseph Lee, scion of the Lee Higginson investment house family, who calls the schools “damn good.” Now largely up to them is a crucial decision: finding a successor for School Superintendent Frederick Gillis, 70, who retires this week.

Most thoughtful Bostonians yearn for a topnotch outside educator to come in and start rebuilding Athens. But no outsider has been brought in since 1912, and most candidates would sniff at Boston’s salary ($26,000). Odds are that an inside war horse will get the job and try to swallow Committeeman Lee’s boast that “we’ve got one hell of a school system”—a statement that many critics dryly regard as right on the button.