Reports highlight flaws in Hub public ed system

Upon learning that just over one-third of students from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) class of 2000 had earned a college degree as of 2007, Mayor Thomas M. Menino challenged the local educational community to step its collective game up. The mayor called for a 50 percent increase in the graduate rate for students from the BPS class of ’09 and a 100 percent increase — meaning double the graduates — for students set to finish high school in the year 2011. (Banner file photo)

St. John Barned-Smith

City Councilor-at-Large John Connolly, a former public school teacher who has taught in Boston and New York, said the pair of recent reports show that the achievement gap between white students and students of color is “getting worse overall.” (Photo courtesy of the Office of City Councilor-at-Large John Connolly)

Two recent reports have offered sobering lessons on the state of students in the Boston Public Schools (BPS).

Coming on the heels of a study released last month by the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC), a wide-ranging report unveiled last week by the Boston Foundation illuminates the depth of the challenges facing the city’s public school system, and underscores Boston’s struggle to prepare its public school students for success  in college and beyond.

The first report, prepared for the PIC by the Center for Labor Market Studies  at North­eastern Uni­versity, earned headlines for its revelation that little more than one-third of students from the BPS class of 2000 had earned a college degree as of 2007.

During that seven-year period, 64.2 percent of the city’s 2,964 grads from the class of 2000 had enrolled in either two- or four-year post-secondary programs. Just 675, or 35.5 percent, had graduated.

In Boston, officials responded to the PIC/Northeastern study with calls for drastic corrective measures.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino challenged the local educational community to meet a pair of lofty goals — a 50 percent spike in the college graduation rate for students from the BPS class of ’09, and a 100 percent graduation rate increase for students set to finish high school in 2011. Menino also called for the implementation of a number of tools, such as offering more Advanced Placement classes and expanding support for BPS grads now in college, to help increase student success.

The focus on student achievement continued last Thursday, when the Boston Foundation released a detailed study of the city’s entire public “education pipeline,” from early-child­hood care all the way through entering the job market.

The study says the BPS is “demonstrably among the best of the nation’s large urban school districts,” noting that the system received the 2006 Broad Prize for Urban Education for overall performance. But it also identifies a host of problems, including the troubling graduation rates cited in the PIC/Northeastern report.

The report “finds that while Boston’s education pipeline is among the very best in the United States, with a proud record of achievement and promising new initiatives, being the best is no longer good enough,” Boston Foundation President and CEO Paul S. Grogan wrote in a letter prefacing the results. “The pace of progress must be accelerated.”

There were encouraging results, like the continued increase in passing rates on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests and the fact that students in the BPS system scored well above the average for urban school systems at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. But alongside those successes, the report cites dropout rates that remain the same as they were in 2000, and a lack of improvement in important areas such as grade-level performance in reading by third-graders and math by eighth-graders.

City Councilor Chuck Turner, a longstanding proponent of improving public education, attributed flagging college-completion rates for BPS graduates in part to economic hardships.

“I tend to think economics are playing a very significant role,” said Turner, who also noted that many of the students who haven’t graduated in the seven-year timeframe are still pursuing degrees. According to the PIC/Northeastern report, there are 267 students from the BPS class of 2000 still enrolled in college; if all of them graduated, that class year’s graduation rate would rise to 50 percent.