Mayor Tom Menino has joked repeatedly during this long goodbye that he’s now free to tell “the truth.” That now seems to include confessing to the people of the city how he really feels about charter schools — and well, would you look at that, he still doesn’t have much use for them.
In a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce yesterday, Menino pledged to continue working on behalf of the Boston Public Schools.
“I’m not going to leave those kids. Those kids are too important. I have some ideas about doing things different than we have in the past,” he said.
But the mayor appears to have abandoned any pretense of support for independent charter schools — public schools that operate independently of the School Committee.
“In Boston Public Schools, we take every kid. We don’t discriminate. We take special education, we take English-language learners,” he said. “Some other schools? ‘Oh, no. We don’t want those kids.’ They dump those kids into the Boston Public Schools. They want 100 percent graduation rates.”
Now, Menino never mentioned “charters” specifically.
But is there a soul who believes he was referring to, say, parochial schools “dumping” kids into BPS?
Students who attend charter schools are, of course, selected by lottery. Every last child in the city is eligible to enter that lottery and the number of those entering is growing. Charter schools educate, yes, children with special needs and English-language learners. Indeed, those students have produced some of the most significant gains on test scores after enrolling in a charter school. Overall charter schools in the city have yielded impressive results.
Perhaps we should have realized that Menino’s brief support for charter school expansion was halfhearted and opportunistic, now that he is back to reading from the script of anti-charter zealots who are willing to foreclose educational opportunities for kids in failing schools. This attempt at a public shaming of the schools that serve as a lifeline for many Boston families is a regrettable coda to the mayor’s career.