Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  In 1991, when I was still on the City Council, I toured the shuttered Longfellow School in Roslindale with Brian Mooney of the Boston Globe, then running a five-part exposé of waste in the school budget. In the empty auditorium we found a grand piano. In the basement sat a $480,000 double boiler installed just weeks before the school closed in 1989. In a nearby room, eighty thousand sheets of paper rotted in puddles of water. Gesturing toward the paper, chalk, paints, and other supplies left behind, I said, “These are the things teachers tell us they buy out of their own pockets.” How could the School Department just abandon them?

  Court Street, shorthand for the city’s school bureaucracy, had overspent eleven of its last thirteen budgets, boosting outlays 87 percent in a decade. In just four years, salaries for bus drivers had shot up 433 percent. Administrators were generous to themselves, too, taking half the department’s fifty-two-car fleet home with them every night. Here, I told Mooney, was proof that “the dollar we give them isn’t precious to them. The school budget is like a hole you can’t get to the bottom of.”

  The elected school committee could not plug it. Instead, while planting their feet on the ladder of office, members argued over trivialities like whether the ad for a new superintendent should read “earned doctorate” or “earned doctorate preferred.”

  Ray Flynn had had enough. He held an advisory referendum on replacing the elected committee with a seven-member appointed one. The voters passed it, but by less than 1 percent. On that thread of support, in 1991 Flynn lobbied the state legislature to pass home-rule legislation creating an appointed school committee. The legislature attached a condition: The measure must pass a second referendum to be held in five years. The elected school committee was history.

  Going out the door, in virtually their final act, the members signed a new school superintendent to a four-year contract. Flynn had wanted to appoint his own person. But he was stuck with the committee’s choice. So was I.

  Before the struggle for the schools could be joined, I had to clear three hurdles.

  I had to settle the touchy issue of whether to renew Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones’s contract, which had nearly two years to run when I became mayor.

  I had to find a superintendent who shared my sense of urgency about the schools. Boston, I feared, would turn into a city of the rich and the poor unless the middle class could be persuaded to trust their kids to the public schools. The 1990 census revealed a doubling in the number of residents in the upper income brackets since 1980 and an exodus of middle-income families of all races. Boston risked becoming Manhattan.

  I wanted the Boston of the 90s and beyond to be a multiracial, multicultural version of my beloved Hyde Park of the 50s, a city of stable middle-class neighborhoods. Instead, it was increasingly a city of transients. Young couples moved in, stayed for five years, and when their kids reached first grade moved to the suburbs.

  Finally, I had to persuade the voters not to restore the elected school committee, something polls showed 7 in 10 of them ready to do in a referendum scheduled for November 1996.

  It was torture every day to stay on top of my homework. I was sobbing every time I was doing math. The frustration was like a nightmare. My friend supported me by cheering me up in my desperate times. . . . I passed fourth grade, but I wasn’t on my feet the next year. I got better, but still not enough to feel successful. I didn’t pass fifth grade, but I was making progress in math. I no longer felt like an inept person. . . . At the end of fifth grade I got an award for the most improved in math. It felt like a dream. Obstacles are walls that can be broken.

  —Every year, as part of the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum honoring an eleven-year-old Boston boy who died of leukemia in 1991, students submit essays on the meaning of courage. This passage is taken from an essay by Claudia Amador, a sixth-grader at the Patrick Lyndon Pilot School in 2007. It won a prize and was reprinted in the Boston Globe.

  In my 1994 inaugural address I noted that “for the first time since 1977 no African American holds a city-wide post.” I pledged to “be especially responsive” to minority concerns. It was the least I could do. Blacks supported me in the election by nearly 4 to 1.

  In 1990, when all but one of the white members of the School Committee voted to fire Boston’s first African American superintendent of schools, Dr. Laval Wilson, the four black members walked out in protest. A prime minority concern was the future of Boston’s only minority official, Wilson’s successor, Superintendent Harrison-Jones.

  She had a rough time of it in Boston. Ray Flynn sniped at her. The Boston Globe editorialized against her. She got off on the wrong foot with me.

  It happened when I was still a city councilor. I was being interviewed by a television reporter in City Hall. Harrison-Jones was passing by. Hearing me mention a threatened strike by school bus drivers, she stopped in her tracks. Why are you asking him about that? she asked the reporter. He doesn’t know anything about it . . . After that introduction, I bet she hoped that Jim Brett would beat me for mayor in the ’93 election.

  Little more than a month after the election, new tensions arose between Harrison-Jones and me.

  On his way to a Dorchester Christmas party, Louis Brown, a fifteen-year-old straight-A student who dreamed of being the first black president, was killed in a gunfight between gangs. He was carrying a Secret Santa gift for a friend in Teens Against Gang Violence, the group holding the party, when he was shot in the head and dropped to the pavement, still holding the gift.

  I drove out to Louis’s house. Walking up the stairs, I remember thinking, What can I say? I rang the doorbell and Louis’s mother, Tina Chéry, came down to see who it was. “I’m here to help,” I said, and sat with her that night, listening to her stories about Louis. Consoling the loved ones of murdered children is part of a mayor’s job in gun-saturated America.

  The next day I attended Louis’s funeral at St. Leo’s Church. During the service, teenagers wearing black STOP GANG VIOLENCE sweatshirts stood in front of the wooden casket. In his sermon Bishop John Patrick Boles, Cardinal Bernard Law’s representative, honored their cause when he spoke of Louis Brown as a “gentle young man who saw that opportunity could only be realized in a city of peace and hope.”

  I had to respond to Louis’s murder and the contagion of gang violence. I proposed a twelve-month “boot camp” for fifty troubled (and troublemaking) teens recommended by school principals. I discussed it with the sheriff of Barnstable County on Cape Cod, who pioneered the state’s first boot camp for adult offenders. The sheriff would run it, an in-the-woods experience to instill self-discipline. After boot camp, to reinforce the character they had found in themselves, the kids would be matched with long-term mentors. I had read a remark somewhere that D-Day was won in the CCC camps that FDR started during the Depression. Dispirited boys came out of the woods proud young men. I wanted that transformation for Boston kids tempted to seek self-esteem in gangs.

  To me the boot camp was a matter of public safety. “It’s an alternative program for these kids to get them back in the mainstream,” I said. “It’s better to do this than spend $50,000 . . . putting them in jail.” Harrison-Jones saw it as an education issue—and met with me privately to complain that I had not cleared the idea with her. In the leak about our meeting that appeared in the press, “sources said she strongly register[ed] her disapproval.”

  Despite “the chilly winds that have blown between 26 Court Street and City Hall,” I invited Superintendent Harrison-Jones to join my cabinet. The Globe applauded this “powerful statement of the mayor’s commitment to educating the city’s children.” As I explained to reporters, this was “my way of reaching out. If we don’t do something in the next two years, the schools are gone.”

  In a speech to business leaders in August 1994, I called the coming school term a “test year in which our commitment to carry out our agenda for change will be closely scrutinized.” I had prodded the City Council to approve a $5 million increase in the sch
ool budget. A new teachers’ contract offering greater flexibility in the classroom would be in place. Through the summer, more than one hundred teachers, administrators, and parents had drafted a new curriculum to raise student performance, partly through training parents to teach study skills at home. Five elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools were gearing up to try it. Their principals were reportedly displaying “high enthusiasm” for the experiment. All systems were go.

  So I was disturbed to find out that because of “differences” between Court Street and the director of the Curriculum Renewal Team, the new curriculum would not be tried after all. There would be no test in the “test year.” Remedial classes would not be ended. Foreign language requirements would not be doubled. Algebra would not be introduced in the eighth grade. Parent activists would not be present in classrooms. The team director’s reassignment just before the opening of school was what one school-watcher called “a terrible blow” to the project.

  It was also a blow to a teacher whose proposal to require courses in African and African American history had been approved by the curriculum team. In words that stung me to read, he told a reporter: “The project was nothing more than a political statement to the public about making change. A lot of people were very excited about this project. It seemed a new era was developing.”

  My aides needed no prodding to leak the news that Harrison-Jones “has fallen out of favor with Menino.” I expected that item to draw comment from African American politicians quick to defend Harrison-Jones. Mel King, a former state legislator who had run for mayor against Ray Flynn in 1983, went there: “We won’t allow her to be lynched.”

  In the days leading up to the annual Martin Luther King Day breakfast held in the Marriott Copley Place ballroom, I braced myself for George Wallace comparisons.

  David Nyhan recorded the moment: “The biggest needles of the day were reserved for Mayor Thomas Menino, who sat stoically through the 2½ hour extravaganza, whilst being on the receiving end of considerable advice that he rehire the Boston school superintendent, Lois Harrison-Jones, who sat at a floor table near Menino’s end of the head table.”

  I was in a grim mood. Backstage, I’d exchanged hot words with Gareth Saunders, the city councilor from Roxbury. I don’t take accusations of racism well.

  I glanced at Governor Bill Weld sitting beside me, his face frozen in a “there but for the grace of God go I” mask. Weld’s cuts in social services made him a target for this crowd. But not today; not with the bull’s-eye painted on my back. Thanks, pal, I thought.

  The speakers talked up Harrison-Jones’s achievements—a falling dropout rate, four balanced budgets in a row, improved labor relations, and more. So why, they asked, did a School Committee member encourage her to apply for a teacher-training position in Virginia? Later that day, to a crowd of vocal supporters in a South End church, Harrison-Jones gave her answer.

  She was “a victim of an unreachable standard of perfection.” Boston was notorious for replacing school chiefs—eleven in twenty years—before they could show results: “I care too much about your children to roll over and play dead because someone says I should.”

  She was talking about me. Me implicitly in speaking of Boston’s “peculiar fanaticism, an obsession with change for change’s sake. [Officials] dart to and fro trying to find some . . . quick fix.” And me directly: “People said there is need for the mayor to have his own person. That is political. The educational decision should have been based on whether there is movement. . . . The movement is there. . . . If Boston is to take its schools seriously, it has to get the politics out of the schools.”

  Substitute “accountability” for “politics” in that sentence and see if you still agree with it.

  The crack about those wicked “politics” aside, Harrison-Jones made a strong case for patience. For giving the next superintendent time to follow through. She was right: There was no quick fix. School reform was steady work. Beneath her swipes at me, she was passing along earned wisdom.

  Two days after the Martin Luther King Day breakfast, I was relieved to read in the Globe that “Boston School Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones said yesterday that she does not intend to wage a public fight to stay on after her contract expires in June, a move that appeared to defuse a budding confrontation with Mayor Menino over her future.”

  In February the School Committee voted against extending Harrison-Jones’s contract for an additional year. Committee chair Felix Arroyo said a lame-duck superintendent could not push through the changes the system needed.

  I happened to be in Florida, which raised eyebrows. That wily Menino! “He walks away from this whistling like a Charlie Chaplin character,” said Mike McCormack, a former colleague on the City Council. “She has been surgically removed without his hand being seen on the knife.” If only I were that deft.

  It’s true I hated letting people go. I know what losing a job means when you have a mortgage and kids. But my vacation was scheduled in advance of the School Committee’s vote on Dr. Harrison-Jones. And it was no secret that, in major matters, the committee acted for me.

  From Florida I issued a statement: “I deeply appreciate all the superintendent has done for the children and families of Boston. She has demonstrated complete and total commitment and caring.”

  At the Martin Luther King Day breakfast Harrison-Jones received a standing ovation. She deserved it.

  In my case, courage meant to tell my friends about a religion that they knew little about.

  On a September day in 2001 as I was walking home, I felt sadness in the air. I walked inside my house and saw my whole family glued to the news on TV. My mom walked toward me and said, “Ya, Allah (Oh, God)” and gave me a hug. . . .

  I showed courage by going to school and telling every student and teacher who may think of me as “different” because I wear a scarf on my head that I am a Muslim, not a terrorist.

  —from a prizewinning 2005 essay in the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum by Shukri Abdillahi, then a sixth-grader at the James P. Timilty Middle School

  “WANTED: Boston School Superintendent. Brainless, featureless doormat wanted to revive dead school system. Short-term position. Must be willing to be buffeted about unmercifully by clueless pols.” Written by a columnist close to the African American community, that ad spoofed a perception I had to change. And do it before the November referendum on the School Committee.

  My only course was to hire an outstanding new superintendent. Someone universally respected in education circles. Someone whose reputation for independence signaled that he or she would not be buffeted about by a “clueless pol” (me). Someone who would not stay in Boston if the voters brought back the old committee.

  A distinguished search committee began vetting candidates who applied for the job, and I relied on their professional judgment. Then Senator Ted Kennedy called me to recommend a candidate who had not applied.

  When Ted spoke, I listened. I loved the guy. I miss him. A sad moment in my life came in August 2009, when Angela and I stood in front of City Hall to watch Ted’s funeral procession as the Faneuil Hall bell tolled forty-seven times, once for each year Ted served in the Senate.

  Once we were both scheduled to speak at the opening of a photonics lab at Boston University. Ted leaned over to me prior to the press conference:

  TED: What’s photonics?

  ME: How would I know? You got the grant.

  TED: What are you going to say?

  ME: Whatever you say, pal. I’m not going to deviate from your script.

  Boston had no warmer friend in Washington than Teddy Kennedy. In 1994, when he was in trouble running for reelection in a Republican year, Boston had his back. The race will be won in the city, I told my people. Get out the vote for Ted Kennedy! Late in the campaign, a senior member of my administration informed me that he was voting for Ted’s opponent, Mitt Romney. He could have hit me with a mallet. You work for Boston’s mayor, I shouted, yet you won�
�t vote for Boston’s senator? I had appointed this guy? I ordered him to be at one of Boston’s busiest traffic circles at seven the next morning. A KENNEDY FOR SENATE sign would be waiting for him. I expected him to stand out on that rotary holding that sign all day, and told him I’d drive by to check. But I didn’t say when.

  Ted’s candidate was Assistant Secretary of Education Thomas Payzant. Ted’s Education and Labor Committee had approved Payzant’s appointment in the Clinton administration. Payzant’s job was to promote school change. It seemed too good to be true.

  Tom was a local boy, from nearby Quincy, educated at Williams College and at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, whose first teaching job was in suburban Belmont. A decade later, at age thirty-two, he was heading the Eugene, Oregon, school system. He stepped on toes there, transferring politically connected principals who were not doing their jobs. He moved on to Oklahoma City, where he mobilized parents to get involved in the schools. In San Diego, his last stop before Washington, he won both praise and criticism for his focus on raising student test scores.

  I called Payzant to encourage him to apply. He sounded up for it. We were both scheduled to be in New York on the same day. So we met for lunch at the Carnegie Deli. I didn’t hire by résumé. I always loved that part, “references will be furnished upon request.” Who ever gave a bad reference? You give your mother-in-law, your wife, your three kids. I went more by my gut. I didn’t interview candidates for jobs. I met them. We talked. Usually about everything other than the job—the kids, where they lived, their other interests. When we didn’t click, it was like you threw a ball and no one was there to catch it. Tom Payzant caught it. One of my aides sat with us until we tucked into our corned beef sandwiches. When he came back an hour or so later, we were talking like old friends.