Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  From that meeting grew a group called Friends of the Mackey, and when the new principal, Francis Xavier Murphy, arrived that September, Susan Thomas was there to offer him help. Soon a dozen South End volunteers went to work at the Mackey, helping to establish a library, serving as tutors and teacher’s aides. Quietly they worked to transform the school, encouraging good teachers and supporting fresh ideas. But they had to tread carefully, for they lacked official standing, either as teachers or as parents.

  Late that winter they began recruiting families with children already at the school to form a second group: the Mackey Parents’ Association. The driving force among the parents was Albie Davis—wife of City Budget Director Dave Davis, who had introduced Colin to the South End—a strong-willed woman determined to provide something better for her children.

  Their strategy evolved into something very like the “good cop–bad cop” technique of police interrogation. Friends of the Mackey remained sympathetic allies of the school, doing everything they could to assist Frank Murphy and his overworked staff, while the Mackey Parents’ Association were more openly aggressive, demanding immediate measures to improve their children’s education.

  They knew what they didn’t want, but what kind of school did they expect the Mackey to be? It was still the sixties, a heady time in America when everything seemed possible. A committee that met that year decided that its object was “not just to make the Mackey a better school but to make it a Model Urban School.”

  Among its goals:

  “That teachers and all school personnel show respect for the dignity and potential of each child.

  “Such respect means that the authoritarian atmosphere of the public school and its emphasis on strict discipline must be replaced by an emphasis on self-discipline and responsibility.

  “Children must be encouraged to go beyond the present limited expectations to the extent of their interests and abilities.

  “In other words, each child must be treated as an individual with his own strengths and weaknesses. Only when these conditions are present can true enjoyment of learning be fostered; and only then can children grow to be truly productive members of their community.”

  Many of the parents’ ideas were drawn from the literature of “open education.” A loose bundle of educational techniques whose roots went back to Rousseau and Tolstoy, it stood, in almost every particular, 180 degrees from traditional public education. A teacher in an “open classroom” was less an authority figure than a facilitator and experimenter; instead of desks lined up before a blackboard, the “open classroom” was divided into several areas in which children could work individually or in groups on whatever interested them; the standard graded classroom was replaced by broader groupings—grades 1–3, for example—in which younger children often learned as much from older students as they did from the teacher; instead of being assigned pages from a textbook, students were given a wide choice from a variety of materials; traditional decor gave way to a riot of colors and textures, with paintings, games, tools, and other objects displayed on walls and counters; rigid schedules, fixed periods, bells, and recesses were replaced by a continuous stream of activity in which students were encouraged to make their own decisions.

  To most principals, “open education” was anathema, the worst sort of professional heresy. But not to Francis Xavier Murphy. A native of Charlestown who had gone on to Boston Latin and Harvard, Murphy didn’t shrink from innovation. When Albie Davis asked him for four open classrooms in the Mackey, he consented so long as they found four teachers to teach them. In September 1969 the “open education” program began in two classrooms at the Mackey and two at the adjacent George C. Bancroft School, an annex previously used for bilingual classes. One hundred students were enrolled and the South End’s experiment in model urban education was underway.

  It wasn’t an independent school yet, just the Mackey’s “ungraded program”; but already it was something more than a school, a community enterprise capable of attracting extraordinary commitment. Suddenly, it had more volunteers than it could use. Five parents served with two teachers on the Managing Committee, which made most of the decisions on how the program was to be run. Parents led neighborhood walking tours, taking students on expeditions to the firehouse, the Flower Mart, the Cathedral, and Blackstone Park, ending with cocoa and cookies at someone’s house. Other parents taught courses in weaving, pottery, bicycle repair, leatherwork, drama, poetry, and philosophy.

  As its reputation spread, the program had more applicants than it could accommodate in four classrooms. Murphy added a fifth room and moved all five open classes into the Bancroft building, where henceforth it was known as the “Bancroft Program.”

  Their appetites whetted, the parents focused on a new problem: the plight of children soon to complete their Bancroft education only to be plunged into the city’s junior high schools. Serving adolescents who were just beginning to rebel against authority, Boston’s junior highs were tumultuous, sometimes violent places. Bancroft parents had ample reason for wishing to extend their program to the seventh and eighth grades.

  They had Murphy’s blessing, but there was no space for additional classrooms. When their gaze fell on the adjacent Rice Building, then occupied by a language center teaching English to immigrants, veteran school officials denied their request for room there—the department was hardly inclined to bend yet another rule for the South End’s troublesome young professionals.

  That didn’t deter the parents. On the opening day of school in 1971, twenty mothers went to the Mackey, where Albie Davis told Murphy, “Frank, we’ve waited long enough. We’re going to form our own junior high.” Then they marched a block to the Rice Building and into a first-floor classroom, empty except for a white-haired woman named Madeleine Reilly, a former chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, now a teacher at the language center. Taking hammers and screwdrivers from their handbags, the mothers began unbolting desks from the floor. “You can’t do that!” Mrs. Reilly shouted, but the women didn’t stop until they had moved every desk and chair—symbols of the traditional curriculum they rejected—into the street.

  Mrs. Reilly summoned William Meilen, director of the center, who called school officials, demanding that police be sent in to evict the mothers. But the officials—knowing how much political clout the Bancroft parents could muster—declined to intervene, and over the next few days, the mothers transformed the drab classroom. From their homes they brought a rug, floor lamps, and paintings. Later came puzzles, games, and toys. In late September, the Bancroft’s new junior high opened in the “liberated classroom.”

  The raid on the Rice was the talk of the South End that fall, a dazzling piece of guerrilla theater that served, like a neon sign, to draw neighbors’ attention to the gutsy little school in their midst. But Joan and Colin Diver had been aware of the Bancroft for some time.

  Like so many of their class who had settled in the South End, the Divers had regarded the Boston public schools as the principal peril of their new environment. “What in the world are you going to do with the kids?” a college classmate had asked Joan shortly before the move, and the Divers took the question seriously. It was one thing to sacrifice themselves for what they believed in, quite another to sacrifice their children.

  The short-term problem had been solved when they learned about the John Winthrop Nursery School, a private school in the Back Bay where many of the new South Enders sent their children. It was the kind of innovative institution the Divers had feared would be unavailable in the city—a nursery, kindergarten, and day-care service which, for a time, met their needs perfectly. But at best it was a temporary expedient. In the long run, the Divers knew, they couldn’t afford private schools. Moreover, they didn’t really approve of them. Except for Colin’s year at Deerfield, a concession to his class-conscious father, both were products of public education, and they shared Horace Mann’s vision of the common school, in which all segments of American society were educa
ted together. One reason urban schools were so bad, they believed, was that so many educated middle-class parents took their children out; they weren’t going to make the situation any worse than it already was.

  But even before they moved to West Newton Street in August 1970, the Divers had reason to believe that they wouldn’t have to send Brad and Ned to private school. They had heard intriguing accounts of changes underway at the Mackey, reports quickly confirmed by sympathetic neighbors. Many children who had completed kindergarten at the John Winthrop had gone on to the Bancroft, with impressive results. In October 1972—a year before Brad would be ready for the first grade—Joan arranged to sit in on the school’s primary classes.

  Lois Varney’s classroom was unlike anything Joan had ever seen before. The walls were covered with brilliant tapestries, Japanese cloth fish hung from clotheslines, and jugs of wildflowers brightened the bookshelves. The room pulsed with excitement. When the excitement threatened to become excessive, Lois shrewdly calmed her pupils with recorded music or round-robin songs. Joan was so pleased with what she saw that at once she enrolled Brad in Lois’ class for the following year.

  Joan knew Brad needed a sensitive teacher. A cautious child, he would dip his toes in the swirling waters of life before taking a plunge. Their first winter in the South End, he had spent his afternoons sitting at the window of his room, assessing the situation on the street below; only after months of observation did he venture out to make friends. When Colin bought him his first bike, Brad refused for weeks to get on it, waiting until he felt he was ready. Then one day when he was home sick and all the other kids on the block were at school, he went out and learned to ride. Once he had confidence in himself, he could handle almost anything, but Joan knew that if a teacher pushed him too hard, he would only get frustrated and turn off school.

  Lois Varney handled him deftly, never applying pressure, letting him take his time and feel his way into things. Gradually, Brad came out of his shell. One day, Lois’ students put on a little play for their parents. Brad played a duck, waddling around the room, quacking and squawking. Joan and Colin were delighted.

  When Brad was reassigned to the Carter, the Divers dreaded losing Lois’ gentle touch; when the assignment was reversed, Joan pledged to work still harder for the school. By late 1974, the parents were preoccupied with how the Bancroft would be treated in Arthur Garrity’s Phase II plan. All that winter and spring, Joan worked with the other parents, writing letters, circulating petitions, and calling on officials to urge that the school be preserved intact.

  Garrity’s masters and experts admired the Bancroft for “its exceptional achievement of quality desegregated education.” As dean of Boston University’s School of Education, Bob Dentler had supplied the Bancroft with student teachers, knew many of its founders, and admired its brand of education. But the masters envisioned only two kinds of schools: district schools, to which all students would be rigidly assigned by geocode; and magnet schools, offering special programs, drawing applicants from throughout the city, and guaranteeing only a quarter of their seats to the district in which they were located. The Bancroft could make a good claim for either status. Open education was a special program which should attract students from other neighborhoods. But the program had been founded by South End parents, enlisted enormous community support, and gained much of its character from the neighborhood.

  An early plan drawn by the School Department had granted the Bancroft magnet status, and Bob Dentler was inclined toward that solution, since it would maintain the principle of voluntary selection; any parents choosing the Bancroft would presumably want an open education for their children. But since a magnet would exclude some, perhaps many, of the students already in the program, Dentler decided to solicit the parents’ opinions. Which designation did they prefer?

  To the parents, it was an unpalatable choice; they could have either their cherished program or their beloved community, but not both. Many of them resented such alternatives. Why couldn’t they have both? one outraged mother asked Dentler. The dean bridled. He’d done everything he could for the Bancroft, but he was growing impatient with its endless demands for special status. No one school could be exempted from “root-and-branch desegregation,” which had to be enforced uniformly across the city. “Look,” Dentler explained, “we’re like a restaurant with two kinds of ice cream on the menu—strawberry and vanilla. A customer may want pistachio, but he can’t have what isn’t on the menu.”

  In mid-February, the parents gathered at the school to make their choice. Colin and Joan were deeply torn. If they opted for a district school, some families assigned to the Bancroft might not be in sympathy with its educational style. But what good would a magnet program do the Divers and other South Enders if their kids were assigned elsewhere? Reluctantly, they voted with the majority to become a district school.

  The judge acted accordingly, but his May 10 plan abruptly eliminated the Bancroft’s hard-won junior high classes. Once more the parents mobilized. Letters flooded into Garrity’s chambers, this time accompanied by appealing photographs of the school’s pupils. Finally, on June 5, the judge reversed himself. As a special concession to its unique program and thorough integration, the Bancroft was the only school in the system permitted to remain kindergarten-through-eighth grade. The parents celebrated, their children wrote thank-you notes to Garrity, and the Bancroft adjourned for the summer, convinced it had fared extremely well.

  A month later, 90 of its 175 returning students received notices assigning them elsewhere, while 140 new students were designated for the school. The parents were stunned. Only weeks before, parent representatives had spoken with Bob Dentler, who had assured them that the Bancroft district would be drawn so that the maximum number of students would be retained. Now the court had substantially reshaped the district. Most of the white middle-class families in the “gentrified” sections of the South End remained, but the plan excluded the district’s former black neighborhoods, Methunion Manor and other buildings north of Columbus Avenue, replacing them with several housing projects in adjacent Lower Roxbury. As a result, while most white students were happy with their assignments, most black families who had wanted the Bancroft’s open education were to be supplanted by blacks who did not.

  On August 5, the Bancroft’s Managing Committee sent Garrity a heartfelt appeal: “We have spent much time pondering why a school voluntarily integrated for six years by children of mixed races from the same neighborhood who sought a particular type of instruction would be torn apart in the name of integration…. Please, Judge Garrity, do not destroy what we have all tried so hard to build!” The committee urged Garrity to transfer thirty students whose families had voiced objections to open education and to readmit forty former students. The judge declined.

  The Divers got the assignments they wanted—Brad was among the white children remaining at the Bancroft, while Ned was to enter the primary class that fall. Nevertheless, Colin and Joan found Garrity’s order dismaying, a double threat to the program they had been struggling to preserve. First, it would overwhelm the school with families hostile to its basic premises, undermining the consensus on open education which had been at the heart of the Bancroft’s success. Moreover, since most of the dissenting families were black, the order threatened to erode the racial harmony that was equally central to the Bancroft experience.

  Although the school’s founders had been largely white and middle-class, racial integration was one of their first principles. When enrollment in the first few years threatened to become overwhelmingly white, the parents had fanned out across the South End, knocking on tenement and housing project doors, soliciting black and Puerto Rican children. And they had met with considerable success. Many blacks found the Bancroft an attractive alternative to the Irish Catholic orthodoxy of other public schools. By 1974, the school had 85 white students, 47 blacks, and 33 “other minorities” (principally Chinese and Puerto Rican).

  Brad’s class was evenly b
alanced and, once he overcame his initial shyness, he made friends with black and white classmates alike; after school, he often brought his friends home to play. Colin hung a swing in the backyard, which quickly became a favorite gathering spot for kids from the school and neighborhood; many afternoons, the Divers’ house and yard were filled with South End children—black, Hispanic, and white. Brad and Ned were particularly friendly with two black brothers, Hamilton and Gregory Williams. One day, Joan stood at her kitchen window and watched Gregory, who was somewhat older than the others, teaching Brad to pass a football. She watched Gregory wrap his long fingers around Brad’s hand, showing him how to grasp the ball along its seams. And she saw the smile of delight on Brad’s face as he lofted the ball into the bright autumn sunlight. What a beautiful scene! she thought. This is why we’re in the city, this is what it’s all about.

  Occasionally, there were less pleasant scenes. One of the Bancroft’s black students was Bobby Mallory, whose mother was a stripper at the Normandy Lounge in Boston’s “Combat Zone.” While she was at work, Bobby stayed with his godmother at 146 West Newton Street, and he was often a visitor at the Divers’ house. He was an awkward, sensitive child who, having little of his own, was awed and puzzled by the relative plenty of the Diver household. Joan once found him drinking a bottle of salad oil from the refrigerator. Another time, she discovered him hunched in an easy chair before their stereo, Colin’s earphones clamped to his head, frantically clicking all the dials on the amplifier. Then, one winter morning, Bobby found his mother strangled to death with her own panty hose. The murder—committed by a jealous lover she had brought home from the nightclub—became an instant cause célèbre at the Bancroft. As white families rallied around Bobby to ease him through his loss, the murder became an occasion to demonstrate the Bancroft’s commitment to a multiracial community.