Mayor Wu hailed her “state of the schools” address on Oct. 28 as a “historic” first, but it followed a series of high-profile moves by her predecessors to exert leadership over Boston’s public education.
The setting for the speech, a 435-seat auditorium at the Josiah Quincy Upper School in Chinatown, was smaller than the recent venues for the annual “state of the city” address. But the school for grades 6-12 is grounded in decades of community initiative for better education. And its new home, a six-story building that opened last year, was a showcase of modernization and possibility that extended to the auditorium’s ceiling, studded with points of light — a structural order of heavens that inspired a flight of symbolism.
Mayor Wu addressed a packed auditorium in the Josiah Quincy Upper School in Chinatown on Oct. 28. Above them is a ceiling that resembles a star-lit night sky. John Wilcox/Mayor’s Office photo
“It’s a fitting tribute to the depth of our teacher’s care and the height of our expectations,” Wu rhapsodized. “As mayor, my goal is to connect every resource in our city to form the constellations of opportunity, support, and accountability for every one of our students to shine.”
The nearest precedent for Wu’s speech was the “state of the city” address delivered almost thirty years ago by former mayor Thomas Menino at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester. Less than nine months earlier, due to sub-standard performance and insufficient resources, the Burke’s certification had been rescinded by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, which had also placed four other Boston public high schools on probation.
For Menino’s speech, the Burke was a showcase of failure that he vowed to reverse through education reforms. “I want to be judged as your mayor by what happens in the Boston public schools,” he declared. He went on to add, “If I fail to bring about the reforms by the year 2001, then judge me harshly.”
In 2025, Wu was presiding over one of many public school systems struggling to recover from learning loss associated with shutdowns and other disruptions related to the pandemic. But problems in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) had been identified even earlier, in a scathing review that the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) released in early 2020.
As a result of the review, an oversight agreement with DESE on corrective actions was signed by former BPS superintendent Brenda Cassellius and former mayor Marty Walsh. In 2014, at the beginning of his first term as mayor, Walsh had signaled his own commitment to education by promising to visit every BPS school. In 2017, he issued a ten-year facilities plan that would more than double the city’s capital outlay for BPS buildings, including the Quincy Upper School.
In 2022, during Wu’s first full year as mayor, DESE and Boston agreed to a revised oversight memorandum, but with goals less explicitly aligned with academic outcomes. In March of 2025, at the end point for a three-year “systemic improvement plan,” state officials acknowledged “mixed” results, while crediting Boston with “moderate progress” and a “really concerted effort.”
In her address, Wu cited improvements in the percentage of school buses running on time this year, as well as continued reduction of the rate for chronic student absenteeism. For 2025, the rate, at 33 percent, decreased at all grade levels, allowing the BPS to fall just shy of the state’s maximum accountability score. The rate was down from the highest figure, three years ago, at 42.2 percent, but still above the 2018-19 figure of 25.2 percent, which DESE’s 2020 review had considered “staggering.”
Though Wu listed multiple gains in outcomes and new steps to improve learning – “After years of instability, we’re seeing real meaningful progress” – she acknowledged that “we’re not yet where we need to be.”
In her opening remarks, the mayor framed her address as “a call to action for every sector of our city to invest in Boston success by stepping up for our families and our future.” She made a plea for new partnerships with businesses, institutions, colleges and hospitals, but warned of new threats from changes in federal education funding and policy under President Trump and his administration.
BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper addressed the crowd before the Mayor’s speech. John Wilcox photo
“Boston has been a target in the federal political storm,” Wu said. “We’ve had grants pulled, funding cut, and even as we do everything we can to protect our communities, we have some hard decisions to make. These next few years won’t be easy. But, as we know, Boston doesn’t back down. The Trump administration tries to dismantle public education by neglect and by force. We are doubling down on setting the highest standards for student achievement by getting the operational details right.”
The details included more enrollment in advanced coursework, more programs for English language learners, more summer jobs, and more programming before and after school. The BPS would also increase the use of teaching practices with a more active role for students.
“In the past, when some students struggled, too often the response was to lower expectations, to settle for easy wins instead of pushing every student to engage with rigorous grade level content,” Wu explained. “But the research is clear. When we shelter students from challenge, we stunt growth. When we expect less, they deliver less. So, yes, students will be supported, they will have fun, they will be part of a community, and they will also be challenged.
In its latest accountability ratings, DESE gave the BPS high scores for progress by “multilingual learners,” along with high marks for math achievement in grades 3-8 and math growth at high school level.
Though Boston’s results on the MCAS exam surpassed the performance by ten peer school districts, including Worcester and Lowell, there was only small improvement for grades 3-8. Compared with five years earlier, MCAS scores for these grades have declined in the BPS, though by fewer percentage points than the drop in statewide results.
Among BPS 10th graders, the math score was almost the same as in 2024, but the share of students meeting or exceeding expectations for ELA was down by more than 2 percent. The largest declines over the past year were for Black and low-income students.
Officials have cautioned that the latest grade 10 results are the first since passing the test was no longer required for graduation. The change resulted from a referendum last November, leading to speculation that students and teachers would take the ensuing test less seriously.
As in past years, the grade 10 totals for the BPS also reflected stark disparities between schools. Among 10th graders at the city’s three exam schools, the share of students meeting or exceeding expectations for Math and ELA ranged from 71 to 91 percent. At the Quincy Upper School and East Boston High School, the figures were between one-quarter and one-third, while some other open-enrollment high schools had figures less than 25 percent. At the English High School, the numbers were in single digits.
Though Wu pointed out that more BPS schools were singled out in 2025 for high student achievement and growth, education blogger Will Austin, in his Oct. 17 post on “Boston Focus,” summed up the MCAS data as “pretty alarming.” Even according to a BPS presentation to the Boston School Committee on Oct. 8, the number of schools requiring “targeted” or “comprehensive” intervention had increased over the previous year, from 44 to 45.
The presentation also showed that MCAS totals for BPS students were still below statewide figures. As framed by Austin, the “majority” of BPS schools were below average, with roughly one-third of the students in schools where MCAS results were in the state’s bottom 10 percent.
BPS officials reported more success with accountability points in grades 3-8. Despite some points for student growth, upper grades registered the worst accountability outcomes for achievement and high school completion.
Officials also correlated lower performance with lower attendance. According to DESE figures for 2024-25, the chronic absenteeism rate was above the BPS average for low-income students (38.6 percent) and even higher for students with disabilities (41 percent). For “Hispanic or Latino” students—the largest enrollment group in the BPS—the rate was 40.7 percent.
At the Oct. 8 meeting, School Superintendent Mary Skipper reported “positive outcomes” from “targeted investments.” But some School Committee members focused on continued struggles with performance, with Brandon Cardet-Hernandez reasoning that the absenteeism contributing to under performance could also be one of its consequences.
“I do think we need to think about promotion more generally,” he suggested, “because I think we are just sending the problem further down the pipeline for kids’ experiences. I think there is a correlation between why we’re seeing half of our kids in school and the connection to their proficiency levels.”
Jeri Robinson, the committee chair and a member since 2017, summed up the MCAS data as “very sobering,” stressing the need for urgency and accountability.
“As we take this information back to individual schools and teachers,” she asked, “how do they think about those two words and the work that needs to be done, reviewed, or moving forward so that we don’t have fourth grade reading in the ninth grade? We know that happens much too much. And we get these reports year after year, and people look at them, and they nod, and we still get those kinds of outcomes.”
Skipper mentioned one additional obstacle to progress: enrollment flux within schools, which could increase the mismatch between academic remedies and student needs. DESE figures going back to 2008 show no steady increase in “churn” for the BPS, but Skipper said the flux could be seen “very clearly” in under-performing “transformation schools.” The latest churn figure for BPS, in 2024, was 18.6 percent, but Skipper estimated the rate for some schools ran as high as 40 or 50 percent.
Also affecting enrollment is the statewide drop in the school-aged population, starting long before the pandemic, and with BPS numbers declining since 2018-19 by 10.4 percent. Boston’s school-age population has been shrinking for decades, in a trend also linked to the high cost of housing and the decrease in the city’s middle-income population.
One set of BPS figures, for the past three years, shows that enrollment increased by 93 students, during a large influx of new immigrants. During the same period, DESE shows the number of Boston students attending charter, private and parochial, or public schools outside the city increased by 2,772.
Like Wu’s presentation, Menino’s 1996 address at “the Burke” called for higher standards and new strategies. At his five-year deadline, in 2001, the share of Burke students with “proficient or higher” MCAS scores would be only 13 percent in Math and 9 percent in ELA.
The Reporter’s coverage of Mayor Menino’s speech in 1996. File photo
Though voters in the 2001 election did not judge Menino harshly, “the Burke” would eventually be hailed as a turnaround success story, winning a top award from the school improvement organization EdVestors in 2015. By that time, Menino had passed, after having served a record five consecutive terms as Boston mayor.
In 2017, the state introduced a more challenging version of MCAS, more aligned with the goal of college readiness. As officials predicted, the higher standards initially resulted in lower scores throughout the state. By 2025, “the Burke”—renamed last year for a former principal, Albert D. Holland – had an enrollment of 399 students, less than half the total thirty years earlier. But ELA and math scores on the “new generation MCAS” were almost as low as the abysmal figures of 2001.
In 1996, Menino could look back on his predecessor, Ray Flynn, who tried to exert more control over the BPS by leading a successful campaign five years earlier to replace the elected school committee with an appointed body. Two years after the turbulent start of BPS desegregation, his predecessor, Kevin White, had made an unsuccessful attempt to change the make-up of the committee and increase mayoral control over the School Department.
Fifty years after White won his third term as mayor, Wu was poised to win her second term, with no remaining opponent in the final election. At the end of her address, she drew on her perspective as a BPS parent, reflecting on the pace of growth for her own children, and the pace of change in the BPS.
“Our families can’t wait around for our schools to catch up,” she said. “We feel every day how fast our future grows up. We are the oldest public school system in the nation, and together it’s time that we make it the best.”
