10-Year Upgrade Plan : Schools Left on Doorstep of Academia

Andrew Quigley, long-time politician and newspaper editor of Chelsea, the poorest town in Massachusetts, remembers the day a few years ago when he sat reading a woeful report on what experts predicted for American schools in the year 2000: droves of children dropping out, galloping illiteracy, rampant drug addiction, enormous numbers of minorities with only the dimmest grasp of English, classes crowded with unwed mothers.

Suddenly, Quigley recalls, it struck him that all the dire statistics sounded just like Chelsea right then. “All the problems they predicted for the next century we already had,” he said.

That revelation set the stage for an experiment apparently without precedent in American history, an experiment--if it gets off the ground--that is sure to be watched closely by a new administration in Washington that has pledged to focus attention on education.

Quigley persuaded a majority of his fellow members on the Chelsea school board--the School Committee, it is called here--to ask Boston University to take over and manage their schools for 10 years beginning next September.

Trying Something New

There is no record of another American school board having given up its power in this way. Nor has any other American university attempted to prove, through a practical demonstration, that it can do a better job of running a school district than the elected officials.

At issue is one of the most significant ideas in recent educational theory: the belief that the problems of American schools can be solved only through a wide range of costly, year-long programs that deal with children almost from birth and with their parents even before that.

In line with this, Boston University intends to provide Chelsea with prenatal medical care and literacy programs for parents, nurseries for infants, Head Start instruction for children ages 3 to 5, intensive instruction in English for foreign nationals, curricula with high standards of achievement and medical and dental care throughout the school years.

Grappling With Crisis

The radical nature of the proposal reflects both the dispiriting crisis in American education today and the belief that sweeping changes are needed to meet it.

Indeed, if George Bush is really serious about becoming the education President, Dr. John Silber, the outspoken president of Boston University, said over breakfast recently, Bush should adopt the Chelsea experiment as a national project.

But the idea, which has drawn support from prominent corporate executives troubled by the soaring cost of trying to train poorly educated workers on the job, poses a formidable problem for President-elect Bush. He already has embraced one novel idea in educational theory--a system of choice that would allow parents to select any public school for a child. “Choice” plans do not cost the federal government anything.

By contrast, a massive pre-school program of the sort planned here would entail enormous cost. During his election campaign, Bush endorsed preschool programs, but hardly of this magnitude.

Owen B. Butler, the retired Procter & Gamble chairman who heads the private Committee for Economic Development, recently estimated that it would cost almost $14 billion a year--$11.5 billion more than the federal government now spends--to support the prenatal, nursery and Head Start programs the country needs.

The Chelsea experiment has brought angry controversy to this economically depressed, mainly immigrant town of 25,000 across the Mystic and Chelsea rivers from Boston. The idea is under bitter attack from teachers’ unions and is being challenged in the courts.

The head of the Chelsea teachers’ union has filed a lawsuit in the state courts, protesting that the School Committee has no right under the Massachusetts Constitution to abdicate its authority to run the schools.

Quigley, 62, ridicules the complaint. “We had already abdicated,” he said recently, while pecking at a computer keyboard in his cluttered, antique office at the Chelsea Record. The School Committee, he insisted, long ago had given up trying to interfere with the way the superintendent ran the schools.

In any case, Quigley went on: “I would rather have Boston University hiring teachers than an old Irish politician like myself, or a wonderful housewife or any of the other members of the committee.”

On top of the challenge to its legality, the value of the experiment has been derided in withering public attacks by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. He contends that Boston University does not have the expertise or the resources to fulfill its promise to make Chelsea “a national model of excellence for urban public education” in 10 years.

“Boston University is making a bunch of promises that are irresponsible,” Shanker said in a recent interview. “Nobody has the right to make such promises. It’s a lot like going to a doctor who promises to cure your cancer. It’s irresponsible. It’s charlatan-like.”

This kind of attack infuriates Silber. He replies by accusing Shanker and the union of showing more concern for protecting incompetent teachers’ jobs than for improving education.

“The idea that a teacher should be competent is . . . a radical idea only in America,” Silber said. “Are we going to take the moral responsibility to do away with the system of organized child neglect?”

On the surface, Chelsea, more worn than tattered, does not look like a town in trouble. “This isn’t Boston or the South Bronx or Brooklyn,” said Joshua Resnek, a 38-year-old landlord, bar owner, reporter on the Chelsea Record and unpublished novelist whose grandfather came to Chelsea from Russia in the 19th Century.

“You can walk on the streets without being robbed. A kid can go to school without being knifed. A mother doesn’t have to live in fear when she sees her children off in the morning.”

Chelsea long has been home to immigrants. Irish, Jewish, Polish and Italian influxes crowded into the city in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, and Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Asians and other groups have followed in recent years.

“English has been the second language here for 100 years,” Resnek said. Eighteen languages, including Amharic and Khmer, are spoken here.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Chelsea was a bustling factory town of 50,000, but as industries failed over the years, the population dwindled by half and many of those remaining were unable to find work. Most Chelsea residents live in three-story houses that have been divided into small apartments. Although much of the town center was gutted by fire in 1908, some of the homes date from the 19th Century, leaving Chelsea with a pleasant, peaceful and aged look.

That look, however, hides great poverty. Many apartments house Puerto Rican mothers living on welfare, each with several children and no husband. Officials also describe the town as rife with drug addiction.

The atmosphere of the schools also hides gritty problems. Chelsea has one high school, one junior high school and three elementary schools--all built between 1893 and 1928. Though all but the high school lack cafeterias, the school buildings are kept scrupulously clean, with old fireplaces and lovely mahogany fixtures. There is no sign of rowdiness or even graffiti. The pupils--more than half of them Latino, Asian or black--are quiet and disciplined.

The statistics tell a depressing story, however. One-fifth of the 3,300 students in the Chelsea schools cannot do class work in English. Test scores rank near the lowest in the state in every subject. A sixth of the high school enrollment drops out every year, and teen-agers here have the highest birthrate in Massachusetts.

Those who know these schools well say that some teachers have given up trying to teach anything.

Pointing to the names of famous Americans chiseled on the classical portico of the high school, Resnek said: “I don’t know if the kids would know who Emerson is, who Lincoln is, but their names are there.”

The Boston University program stems, in part, from a running feud between the 62-year-old Silber and the Boston School Committee. Silber, a Texas-born professor of philosophy who has been president of Boston University since 1971, has long believed that the Boston committee is too ridden with politics to run a school system.

Silber’s frustration over the Boston schools reached a climax six years ago. “The School Committee rolled over and died whenever the unions said something,” Silber said. “Trying to run that school system was like trying to fly a 747 without an instrument panel.”

An angry Silber proposed in 1983 that Boston University run the public schools instead.

The Boston School Committee dismissed the proposal contemptuously, but other school districts in trouble began to toy with the idea. Quigley, a former mayor who has served on the Chelsea School Committee 30 years, finally asked Silber two years ago to consider taking on the Chelsea schools.

Silber agreed. He prepared a study and submitted a proposal. After a rancorous meeting last November, the School Committee voted, 5 to 2, to accepted the Boston University plan.

Two themes appear to power the educational philosophy of Silber and the university’s Chelsea program. The Boston University president, who intends to instill a standard of excellence in Chelsea, believes American educators have turned away from excellence in recent decades, out of an aversion to elitism, out of a feeling that education must fit the mood of the average student.

“That perverse attitude is what is ruining education and everything else in this country,” Silber said. He added, with a good deal of sarcasm: “There’s nothing wrong with letting dogs and horses run faster and basketball players jump higher, but you can’t do that with students. That’s elitism.”

While that theme may stamp Silber as a conservative, his second theme is less pleasing to conservative ears, for he believes that a significant increase in money--provided it is well spent--is vital to the improvement of American education.

In an open letter to Bush and Democratic candidate Michael S. Dukakis during the presidential election campaign, Silber chided what he called “the tendency of liberals to solve educational problems by increased funding of programs which are already failing.”

“If $1 is being spent on the wrong thing,” he wrote, “spending $2 on it is no help. . . .”

Silber chided conservatives as well, for failing to “understand that money spent on education is an item of investment rather than consumption.” He said that conservative theorists look on education as a service to students instead of as an investment in the national economy much like the $400-billion interstate highway program.

“Can anyone doubt that a first-class system of education is just as important as a first-class system of highways and that, were one forced to choose between them, the choice should be education?” he said.

Silber, in the recent interview, said the Chelsea School Committee, with an operating budget of $11 million a year from the city and state, spends $3,400 per student. “When they spend $5,000 a year on each child,” he said, “they will have a great school system.”

Boston University hopes to raise an extra $2 million to $2.5 million each year for the Chelsea schools from federal programs, state grants, foundations, corporations and individual donors. On top of this, the university plans to include its services--management, teacher training, curriculum development, medical care, dental care and legal aid--free of charge.

Under the 10-year plan, a university management team led by Dean Peter Greer of the School of Education, who last year left the post of deputy undersecretary of education in the Reagan Administration, will operate the schools with sole authority to hire and fire teachers and other staff members.

To help foster its idea of educating children from infancy and their parents as well, the university intends to build a new high school and a new elementary school, set up what it calls Family Learning Centers for parents, sponsor a network of social services for each school, institute a mentor program in which adults or older students have responsibility to guide each child, and add a category of highly paid, special teachers to coach other teachers.

In five years, the university promises, it will raise third-grade reading, writing and mathematics scores to the Massachusetts average, cut the dropout rate by a third, increase the number of high school graduates by 10%, reduce teacher absenteeism by 20% and raise teachers’ salaries to the statewide average.

Although Boston University insists it will not attempt to break current union contracts, the leaders of teachers’ unions obviously are worried about the School Committee transferring its authority to hire and fire teachers.

Once a final contract on the schools is signed, the Legislature must validate it. Boston University and Chelsea officials expect to sign within several weeks, and say they envision no problem with the legislators.

They are worried, however, about the American Federation of Teachers’ lawsuit and the incessant attacks on the program made by Shanker, the federation president. Superior Court Judge Walter Steele, though he has not ruled the transfer to Boston University unconstitutional, has said that he sees “enormous problems” with the pending contract.

“When Al Shanker decides to be the obstacle,” Dean Greer said in an interview in his office, “that’s rough.”