Common Ground (67 page)

T
he mail was splayed across the hallway floor. Returning from work on a muggy July afternoon, Joan Diver stooped to retrieve it, then sank onto the couch to sort through the stack. Ripping open a small envelope marked “Boston Public Schools,” she read: “Official student notification: Bradford Diver is assigned for the school year 1974–75 to the Carter School, 496 Northampton Street.”

There had to be some mistake; it made no sense. Brad was attending the Bancroft, an elementary school scarcely two blocks away on Appleton Street. Although, strictly speaking, the Divers weren’t in the Bancroft district (the district line ran down the middle of West Newton Street), they and fifteen other families in that slice of the South End had routinely sent their children to the school under the city’s “open enrollment” program. For the Bancroft was a most unusual school, an experiment in ungraded, unstructured education, wrenched from a skeptical school system by a group of determined South Enders. Now, after years of skirmishing, the department finally seemed reconciled to the aberration. Moreover, since the South End was the most diverse neighborhood in the city, the Bancroft was one of the few schools in the system already naturally integrated—whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese attended in something very close to their citywide percentages—and the parents had been assured by their friends in the State Education Department that the Bancroft would therefore be exempt from Charlie Glenn’s racial balance plan. Since June, when Arthur Garrity had accepted Glenn’s plan as the basis of his Phase I order, they felt confident that the judge’s decree would leave their children untouched.

Now Brad was to be shunted from the Bancroft to the Carter, of all places, a makeshift school assembled in 1971 from portable classrooms to alleviate overcrowding in the heart of Lower Roxbury’s black community. It was eight long blocks away; to get there, seven-year-old Brad would have to walk down
Columbus Avenue, past the Methunion Manor housing project and a line of ramshackle tenements, then across the notorious intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, sometimes called “the drug capital of New England.”

As she sat in the fading light of that summer afternoon, holding the notice in her hand, Joan smoldered; it seemed so silly, so pointless, so unfair. And as she told Colin about it when he got home from work an hour later, he slammed his briefcase down on the dining-room table.

Racial equality had remained one of Colin’s passionate concerns. For a decade he had followed Boston’s school wars with mounting sympathy for the embattled blacks. Only three months earlier, he had watched in distaste as thousands of white demonstrators swarmed across the Common demanding repeal of the Racial Imbalance Act, and after urging the Governor to stand fast, he had been dismayed when Frank Sargent opted for a discredited “freedom of choice” plan. But six weeks later his chagrin had turned to satisfaction as Arthur Garrity cut through the State House debate, finding a clear violation of constitutional rights, and adopting the racial balance plan as a first-stage remedy. He had read the judge’s massive opinion, relishing—as only another lawyer could—the richness of its research, the logical ordering of its arguments, the craftsmanship with which Garrity had marshaled his judicial precedents. At last, Colin thought, the full weight of the federal courts had been thrown behind black demands for racial justice in Boston.

But precisely because he knew the history of the battle so well, Colin found Brad’s assignment inexplicable. The racial imbalance law had been designed to reduce the heavy concentration of Boston blacks in crowded, inadequate ghetto schools by mixing them with white students huddled in their own overwhelmingly white schools. Colin and Joan had once lived in Brighton, one of the city’s white neighborhoods. They had looked at houses in other such communities—Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, and Charlestown—where the schools were almost completely white. Instead, they had chosen to live in Boston’s only integrated neighborhood and to send their children to a fully integrated school. Now they, and others who had made the same decision, were being penalized. Here was Charlie Glenn’s plan, which affected fewer than half the city’s schools, breaking up the Bancroft! What purpose, Colin asked himself, could possibly be served by tearing apart precisely the kind of school that Glenn and Garrity were supposed to be fostering?

Colin was still seething when he went to work the next morning. He had left the state administration that May to manage Bill Cowin’s campaign for Attorney General. They had set up a small office on Boylston Street, from which they were waging a shoestring effort as the underdogs in a three-way race. When Colin told Bill what had happened, his friend couldn’t resist a few gentle jabs. “Ah ha!” he exclaimed. “The brave urban liberal hoist by his own petard!”

“Get off my back, Bill,” Colin growled.

“No, really, this is funny,” Bill went on. “All these years you’re the big
liberal, the dedicated city guy, going to change the world. Then the first time they put the screws on you, you’re just like anybody else.”

Bill was enjoying himself, as he often did, at Colin’s expense, a loose irreverence central to their friendship. But his teasing that morning had a cutting edge. Bill was no less supportive of Garrity’s order than Colin was, but he would never have chosen to live in the city, certainly not in a crazy neighborhood like the South End, and he had always been somewhat skeptical about Colin’s insistence on living out the implications of his urban liberalism.

Colin was stung. He knew that he and Joan had options which few other city dwellers enjoyed, and perhaps they were guilty at times of seeking to preserve their advantages at the expense of their ideals. But not this time. The Bancroft was the most thoroughly integrated school in Boston, probably more integrated than the Carter would ever be. In objecting to Brad’s school assignment, the Divers weren’t seeking to avoid integration; of that, Colin was certain.

It was a potent argument, one which the Bancroft parents skillfully mobilized in their struggle that summer to get the school assignments reversed. Only fifteen or so families out of about 150 in the school had been affected by the shift to the Carter, but they included some of the most active participants in the Bancroft experiment. The others rallied around them, barraging school officials and Garrity’s clerks with petitions, letters, phone calls, and personal visits. Joan Diver—who had delivered a petition that spring asking that the Bancroft be preserved intact—weighed in again with calls to friends in city and state government. Eventually, the parents’ hard work and good connections paid off. Late in August, a letter arrived from the School Department stating that any student who had attended the Bancroft the year before would be permitted to return in 1974–75.

The Divers, of course, were enormously relieved. Here was a victory, they thought, not only for common sense and justice, but for the vision of the South End community which they and the other young professionals had cherished. Indeed, the Bancroft was a cornerstone of the New South End; without it, or something very like it, the Divers might never have moved there, and unless it could be preserved they would find it difficult to remain.

By the late 1960s, many Boston parents regarded the public schools as a hostile environment, a rigid, authoritarian structure ruled by shriveled spinsters and timeserving bureaucrats. This perception had originated in the black community, an outgrowth of its long, wearying battle with the School Committee. By 1966, many black parents had abandoned hope of getting a decent education for their children in the public schools and had begun to search for alternatives. Some, like Rachel Twymon, turned to the Catholic schools. Others sent their children to the white suburbs under the Metco program. Still others formed “free schools,” private academies run by black parents but funded by white foundations so that needy students could attend free of charge. The first
of Boston’s free schools was the New School for Children, which opened in Roxbury in the fall of 1966 with Jonathan Kozol—late of the Gibson School—as its guiding spirit. Quickly three other black free schools sprang up in Boston.

The blacks’ distrust of the public schools soon converged with a similar brand of white suspicion. Even more than blacks, the young professionals who had staked out a beachhead in the South End in the mid-sixties expected a great deal from education. Most of them were products of suburban school systems or New England private schools who had gone on to college and then to graduate school. When they turned their backs on their parents’ suburban world, their chief misgiving was usually the public schools. Few had school-age children when they began restoring their dilapidated rooming houses, but they realized that it was only a matter of time before they would need a decent school. The problem was particularly acute in the South End, where the public schools were notoriously bad.

One night in August 1967, two dozen young professionals gathered in a Union Park town house to consider founding a private school. As they haggled over curriculum, Susan Thomas whispered to Piers Lewis, “If we put a fraction of this energy into a public school, I bet we could make it into what we want.” Lewis blurted out her proposal and others quickly agreed. Someone suggested that the nearby Charles E. Mackey School might be receptive since its implacably orthodox principal was being replaced by a more flexible man.

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.”