By Gregory Maynard, Special to the Reporter
The reviews and analysis of Mayor Wu’s “State of the Schools” speech on Oct. 28 have mostly focused on what was not in the speech: clear goals or metrics for improving academic performance, more details on planned school closures, or discussion of controversial changes to exam school admission policies.
What has gone less remarked upon is what was in the speeches that night from the mayor, School Committee Chairwoman Jeri Robinson, and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper. Taken together, those three speeches laid out a vision for BPS anchored on a specific metric, albeit not one that has heavily featured in press coverage of the district or in the recently completed state intervention.
The metric that seems to loom largest for the current leadership in City Hall and the Bolling building? Superintendent longevity.
Robinson was the first to bring up the subject in her introduction of Superintendent Skipper, talking about her “over 16 years serving BPS.” Then Skipper spoke at length about the stable leadership atop the Menino-era BPS, explicitly contrasting the “one mayor and two superintendents” to what followed it: “three mayors and five superintendents over seven years.”
This theme continued in Wu’s speech, where the mayor explicitly contrasted Menino-era stability and post-Menino chaos in order to praise Skipper, saying that under her leadership “after years of instability, we’re seeing real, meaningful progress.”
Under Menino and that stable leadership, BPS did achieve great things, most notable winning the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2006. BPS won the award for being “the urban school district making the greatest strides in student achievement,” and the win was due in large part to the “steady teamwork between the city’s mayor and its school superintendent,” according to coverage from the New York Times.
The memory of this now 19-year-old award was echoed at the Oct. 28 event, with Skipper announcing she intended to make BPS “the best public school district in this country.”
In the story that Robinson, Skipper, and Wu told at the “State of the Schools,” it was stable leadership atop BPS that led to the district’s Menino-era success. In this telling, the various issues facing BPS can only be solved by a long-tenured superintendent who has the full faith and confidence of a long-tenured mayor.
From this perspective, the positive statistics reeled off by Wu about plentiful summer jobs, expanded after school programs, and the successful launch of Boston Family Days are important because they show that under the Wu-Skipper administration, BPS is able to do things.
Whether superintendent longevity is the key to solving the enormous challenges facing BPS is a question that Mayor Wu and Superintendent Skipper will have the opportunity to answer together. The mayor won a new four-year term on Nov. 4, and on Oct. 29, the School Committee approved a new contract for Skipper that extends her tenure until 2030.
Gregory Maynard is executive director of the Boston Policy Institute.
