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JOHN GRADY's avatar

I remember Charlie Glenn from afar back in the day. I lived on Schiller Street in Jamaica Plain, one block from the Bromley-Heath Housing Development. Our kids had been attending the Hennigan Community School for about four years. Many of us in the neighborhood first became aware of Bussing, when we heard that many of the kids in our school were going to be bussed elsewhere, while other kids were going to be bussed in from other parts of Boston. It was ironic. The Hennigan -- if I remember correctly -- was about 85 % minority (most African-American) -- and there was a lot of energy put into gaining community control over this newly built school (which we and other white parents had fully participated in), with a lot of community facilities in it. But here, a sizable portion of the Black students were being bussed out, while mostly white students were being bussed in.

There was general outrage at a community meeting at the Hennigan School chaired by either Milt Cole or Bill Gaines (from the Bromley-Heath Tenants Association). No one wanted it. We agreed to meet in a week when we figured out what was going on. At the next meeting Milt and/or Bill told us: "We've got a problem! This plan is baked into the desegregation decision. If we don't support it, we will end up supporting continued segregation in the Boston Schools. It's not a good plan, but we have to go ahead with it. In the best of circumstances it is is going to be five really difficult years, which we have to be prepared for." I was president at the time of the Hennigan Home and School Association (PTA) and suggested that we might try to improve the plan; play with the numbers and see if we could reduce the number of kids bussed.

We then convened another meeting at the Hennigan that I will never forget. There must have been close to a hundred people there from the neighborhood. It was surreal, but in a good way. We did simultaneous translation into Spanish and English. Some who spoke both languages -- or thought they did -- translating what people were saying to the group as a whole into the other language. As a group we committed ourselves in the meeting to come up with an alternate plan that bussed as few people as possible, and bussed those people to better schools. As it stood, the bussing plan called for bussing 20% our kids somewhere else. We reduced it to 8% and everyone who was bussed was bussed to a better school in Jamaica Plain, and maybe a little beyond. We had a blackboard to record our calculations, which were actually done by one of the fathers who was a mathematician, and very adept at, believe it or not, with an abacus. We then voted on the plan and everybody supported it unanimously.

We sent it on to Charlie's office, where it was summarily dismissed because it either made things worse with their system-wide calculations, or just would have been too hard to integrate with their earlier planning. I don't know if any of our number became anti-bussers. I doubt it. Milt or Bill had made the case against opposition to bussing too well and too convincingly. But there was no one among the people we knew in our neighborhood circles who had any faith in the State Board of Education after that, or trust that they would do right by our children.

I should add that when we talked about choosing better schools, we had no clear idea of what that might mean, apart from good teachers, safe classrooms, and kids learning a lot. So, our focus was on physical infrastructure mostly, on the (probably mistaken) assumption that they would clearly invest more effort and resources in newer schools. In our modest little neighborhood plan we bussed kids to one of the two new community schools: the Henningan, and perhaps (if I remember correctly) the Ohrenberger in nearly West Roxbury.

One of the things that the State (and its various minions) said during this process is that they were going to involve all of the universities in improving the Boston Public Schools as part of the desegregation decision. At the Henningan, as it turned out, this meant that Lesley College showed up and was going to help our teachers orient the curriculum around Multi-Cultural Education. That was what was going to make us special. I remember asking, as the President of the Hennigan Home and School Association, why this was different. I thought more cultural sensitivity was supposed to be a goal for the whole system. Their response was a lot of educationbabble double talk. At the time I was teaching at Emmanuel College and found out that our college was at the Ohrenberger and was going to orient the curriculum around behavior modification. It turned out that it was the Psychology Department at Emmanuel that was spearheading the effort and chose this orientation because this was what they specialized in. A glance around at other University-school partnerships seem to reflect the same pattern: what a school got was what a University was willing to offer (and benefit by) in the partnership. My sense was what the State initiatives mostly contributed to in the end was the Balkanization of the system, and the fragmentation of whatever educational coherence it might have had. If there were good principals (like Kim Marshall at the King, where one of my sons went for the 5th and 6th grade,) then the school worked well. Many other places weren't so hot.

A decade or so later, I was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Roxbury Community College where I served for 11 years. Most of the students enrolled at RCC at that time came from the Boston Public School System. We were, and probably still are, an open-admissions college. If you have a diploma or GED, you were automatically admitted. One of the deans at RCC confessed to me that they discovered, when they administered proficiency exams to newly admitted students in order to assign them to an appropriate English or Math course, that close to 95% of them had to be assigned to a remedial course, and the median grade level for reading was somewhere between 4th and 6th. It seemed to me that students like these were clearly unprepared for anything like college work and that many of them probably just wouldn't be able to hack it, in the absence of something like a remedial year where every learning objective built toward integrated skill development or something like that. The dean told me that a faculty committee had in fact met and designed such a program, so long as participating in it was voluntary. When the time came to implement the program only one faculty member signed up for it. God knows why!

I'm not sure what to make of all this, but what was going on in the schools and the surrounding city was troubling, traumatic and at times terrifying. One thing for sure, though, the Social Justice Warriors get very nervous when you tell these stories and really don't want to hear them. Looking back, I think Charlie was a good guy, but we needed a lot more people like Milt Cole and Bill Gaines to get us through what people like Charlie Glenn helped to unleash.

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tobe berkovitz's avatar

I had the honor to be a Dean at Boston University when Charlie was also a Dean and had many excellent discussions with him. He is incredibly smart and always respectful. Thanks Glenn for posting his essay.

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