Last week, a group of Boston parents gathered at Roxbury Community College to share our concerns about the state of education in Boston with state Senate President Stan Rosenberg and a number of state senators, including Linda Dorcena Forry, Sonia Chang-Diaz, Anthony Petruccelli, Sal DiDomenico, and Will Brownsberger. This meeting was the

Boston leg of the Senate President’s “Commonwealth Conversations” tour – a series of listening sessions and community forums in cities and towns across the state.

We told the senators about the unfortunate reality faced by far too many of our kids, particularly children of color. Across Massachusetts, there are currently 77,000 students stuck in schools where fewer than one in three students can read or do math on grade level, including 19,000 in Boston. In my corner of the city, the majority of schools are chronically underperforming, and not nearly enough has been done to turn these schools around.

However, though I remain deeply concerned about the state of the Boston’s public schools, I’m encouraged by Mayor Walsh and the Boston School Committee’s decision to name Dr. Tommy Chang as the next superintendent.

Dr. Chang has an impressive record of turning around chronically underperforming schools in Los Angeles. In the LA Unified School District, he led the Intensive Support and Innovation Center, a group of 135 schools targeted for turnaround efforts. In just two and half years with Dr. Chang at the helm, graduation rates went up 15 percent.
To me, the selection of Dr. Chang is a clear sign that the mayor is committed to the type of bold transformation that parents know the BPS needs to close the achievement gap and attract families back into the system.

The recent announcement that five more BPS schools are slated for closure was the newest example of parents “voting with their feet” to leave the BPS. Families who have the means are fleeing the Boston Public Schools, and those who can’t are too often stuck in schools that offer no one’s idea of a quality education. This is why tens of thousands of parents are on charter wait-lists and even more send their children to private school. The BPS must innovate to keep up.

Mayor Walsh knows this. Dr. Chang knows this. That’s why both of them so heavily emphasized innovation when they spoke about a new strategy for turning the BPS around. For the first time in several years, I feel that the right team is in place to implement the type of change that we need to see in Boston.

But Boston parents will not be patient, and will hold this team accountable for their promises. As we told the senators we spoke to last week, parents are going to demand more from state and city education leaders. Our message is simple: the quality of your education shouldn’t depend on your zip code. Every kid deserves the opportunity to go to a school where they are understood and challenged.
Donnell Singleton is the Roxbury Chapter leader of Families for Excellent Schools.