brendan halpin

My experience with urban education is pretty much limited to Boston, but a lot of what I’m going to say will apply to many urban districts.

So let’s start with Boston (or, you know, insert city here’s) “failing schools.” There seems to be a general idea that if you only want it bad enough, you can turn urban schools into suburban schools where everybody graduates, everybody attends four-year colleges, and everybody scores really well on standardized tests.

Let’s start with the standardized tests because this is going to explain a lot. First of all, did you know that standardized testing was invented by the same American eugenicists who inspired the Nazis? It’s true! You could look it up! (well, it’s hard to find, actually, because one of said eugenicists was Carl Brigham, who went on to invent the SAT, so people have been a little stingy making that connection. ETS had a building named after this dude until 2012. Check out his book A Study of American Intelligence, in which he states that his completely objective test he gave to everyone in the army demonstrates pretty conclusively that white people will get dumber if they interbreed with other races, which by the way included Poles and Italians at the time he was writing.)

Okay, okay, but standardized testing is good now, right? No. Of course it’s not. It’s impossible to measure creativity and critical thinking with a multiple choice test, and it might be possible to reduce some of the racial and class bias in the questions, but it’s certainly not possible to eliminate it. So these tests are rigged against many of the students at urban schools, but wait! There’s more!

Because let’s talk economies of scale, shall we? Let’s take Needham, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb with roughly 5000 students, as opposed to the roughly 50000 students in Boston. If Needham has a kid with a particular set of profound challenges, they’ll likely ship that kid out to a private placement because it’s cheaper for them to pay 1 kid’s tuition than to pay salary and benefits for ateacher to teach one kid.

BUT—statistically, it’s likely Boston will have 10 such children. And now it makes more economic sense to hire a teacher, a paraprofessional, and as many one-to-one aides as the children need than it does to send 10 kids to a private placement. So Boston has to figure these children in to its aggregate test scores, whereas Needham does not.

Add to this the fact that Boston has large immigrant communities and so will always be welcoming students from other countries who do not speak English and are therefore at a disadvantage and will naturally face some challenges, especially on standardized tests, until they acquire fluency. They’re counted on the standardized tests as well.

But of course that’s not the only thing going on. Because Needham is an affluent suburb, most of its students have a quiet place to study after school and no responsibilities other than to extracurriculars or part-time jobs they do for fun rather than out of necessity.

Whereas in Boston you’ve got some kids with quiet places to study and no responsibilities, and other kids who are literally pulling 4 to midnight shifts after school so their parents can afford to keep a roof over their head. Really? Yes, really! There are also kids being full time caregivers for younger siblings so their parents can work second shift jobs because child care is too expensive.

If you’ve never been broke or poor, you probably don’t have any idea of all the complexities it involves. But some people need to work 2 jobs, which means they can’t be around to supervise kids after school. When rich people get addicted to drugs, they go to fancy rehab facilities. When poor people get addicted to drugs, they go to jail. Losing a parent to the carceral system is pretty disruptive to a kid.

Basically everything is harder when you’re broke. A car repair can take on the dimensions of an existential crisis. You’re scrambling all the time, and so sometimes kids are late to school, or you have to keep one home to watch another one who’s sick because you can’t miss a shift or you’ll get fired. This is all actual stuff that happens to actual people.

And so I think it’s particularly cynical to call Boston’s schools “failing.” Because everyone knows you can’t wave a magic wand and turn Boston into Needham. If you are going to have public schools that serve everyone, they’re going to have to serve the kids that are harder to educate. And unless you’re going to provide free health care, dental care, child care, and public transportation, you know that those costs are going to have a disproportionate impact on the family lives of people who don’t have a lot of money and therefore also on the schools their kids attend.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. In Boston, anyway, the school buildings are in dire need of an upgrade. Most especially in the area of ventilation. As of right now, according to BPS’s own website, only 38 out of 125 school buildings have central HVAC systems. The rest have steam heat, some with “limited ventilation,” some with no mechanical ventilation.

Proper ventilation leads to fewer sick days for both teachers and students and is a quick way to improve outcomes in schools. But it’s expensive and it doesn’t allow anybody to frame themselves as an educational innovator, so nobody has done it.

Pay attention to this. If anyone’s proposals to improve an urban school system with an aging physical plant don’t start with ventilation, they’re fundamentally unserious.