Urban Education Commons^™

Introduction, Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

America faces a reckoning, a crucible of what Reinhold Niebuhr observed more than eighty years ago. Our democratic principles and traditions are imperiled by the power of financial oligarchs and unfettered money flows, which have contributed to massive inequality that, in turn, has given rise to political unrest and a sense of cultural unmooring.

The articles presented here are both descriptive and normative, setting forth a complex social problem with seemingly bottomless proportions and then offering a design or set of remedial actions to alleviate them. Drawing on my professional experience going back to the mid-1970s, I wrote these pieces …

Getting Power Back: Court Restoration Of Executive Authority In Boston City Government (1985), Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article, originally published in 1985, is based partly on the author’s experience with the Boston school desegregation case, but goes beyond it. It chronicles some of the events that occurred when a state and a federal court attempted to disengage from active jurisdiction over two Boston public systems: the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Housing Authority. It makes three proposals, which, if enacted, would help to keep the courts out of day-to-day management of municipal operations. It also makes some generalizations about the court-agency interplay that are relevant to the post-remedial phase of institutional reform litigation. The author …

Success Boston: College Completion Initiative, Liliana Mickle

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

2008: Initiative launches in response to Northeastern University study finding – only 35.5% of Boston Public School (BPS) graduates enrolled in college earned an Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree within 7 years (despite BPS having one of the highest college enrollment rates in country).

2010: 38 colleges/universities in MA accepted UMass Boston Chancellor Keith Motley’s invitation to join the initiative (25 submitted specific plans). Chancellor Motley is co-chair of Mayor’s Success Boston Task Force.

July 2010: UMass Boston implements Success Boston Embedded Model: Collaboration with American Student Assistance (ASA), Freedom House Inc., Bottom Line and Hyde Square Task Force to provide …

A Social Justice Approach: Exploring Umass Boston’S Service Learning Partnership With The Boston Public Schools To Develop High School Students’ College And Career Readiness, Laura Hayden, Amy Cook, Robert Gracia, Jason Youmatz, Elizabeth Walsh

Counseling, School Psychology & Sport Faculty Publication Series

Through partnership with two BPS high schools, school counseling graduate students engage in service learning and participate in organized experiences that meet school needs and are coordinated with graduate students' learning goals. School counseling students meet with BPS students individually and through classroom interventions to assist in the college/career process and prepare them for post-secondary educational options. This session will describe the partnership, including direct experiences shared by graduate students.

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Everyone who knew Robert Wood — LBJ's man to develop the Model Cities Program, President of the University of Massachusetts, Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, and author — has an anecdote about him.

He was that kind of man. You remembered him and if it was not quite in a way that was always warm and fuzzy, that delighted Bob for whom the battle of ideas was fought on a terrain where he, at least, did not know the meaning of running for intellectual cover. Nor, for that matter was he much inclined to take prisoners of sloppy thinking.

This …

Looking Back Without Anger: Reflections On The Boston School Crisis, Robert Wood

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is taken from the unpublished autobiography of Robert Wood who served as Superintendent of Boston Public Schools from 1978 to 1980 during the difficult period when U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity was overseeing court ordered desegregation of schools. After leaving the University of Massachusetts in January 1978, Robert Wood spent six months at the Harvard Graduate School of Education working on a book and considering a possible run for the United States Senate. Suggestion as to his next assignment, however, came from an unexpected source, as he describes below.