This could not have happened without a push from BTU—an AFT affiliate. Randi Weingarten, who heads the AFT, has been working overtime to promote her $$$ deal with tech bros to “train” teachers to bring this shit into the classroom: www.schoolsmatter.info/2025/07/aft-...
— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:31 PM
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After I reported that Roger Clap Elementary School would be spared from closure, the Boston Public Schools “Redesign” site appeared to be updated with a list of proposed closures and mergers. And now, about 10 minutes later, the list is gone.
We were able to grab the list before it disappeared. Here it is:
A BPS spokesman confirmed the list was published prematurely and the information is correct.
- Merge Lee Academy with Lee Elementary, create a K-8
Lee Academy would become a K0-1 program and Lee Elementary would operate a Grade 2-8 program. Both would exist in the same building as they do today.- Merge Alighieri and Umana
These schools would merge to create a K-8 in the Umana building. The Umana is also scheduled for a major renovation within the next two years, so the K-8 would be phased in.- Merge Urban Science Academy and Parkway Academy of Technology and Health
These schools would merge to create one school, led by USA. The programs would stay in the same building.- Merge Brook Farm Business & Service Career Academy and Media Communications Technology High School
These schools would merge to create one school. The programs would stay in the same buildings.- Merge Excel High School and Monument High School
These schools would merge to create one school, led by Excel. The programs would stay in the same buildings.- Expand Holland Elementary
Add one K1 classroom.- Expand Trotter Elementary
Add one K1 classroom.- Expand King K-8
Current East Zone ELC K1 and K2 students move to the King.- Relocate Community Academy of Science and Health
Relocate program to the Cleveland Building in Dorchester (East Zone).- Unite and expand TechBoston Academy
TechBoston Academy will become a unified Grade 6-12 program at Dorchester Education Complex, and increases high school seats.- Move Dorchester Academy
Program moves from Dorchester Education Complex to the Wilson Building.- Close East Zone ELC
Current K1 and K2 students are relocated to King K-8 if they choose- Close Fifield Elementary
Students have priority for available East Zone schools, after sibling preference is taken into account.- Close Middle School Academy
Program moves to the current Gavin building- Close Emerson Elementary
Regular education students have priority for available seats in the North Zone, after sibling preference. Cape Verdean SEI students move together to a different school.- Close Farragut Elementary
Students have priority for available seats in other North Zone schools, after sibling preference.- Close Agassiz Elementary
Students have priority for available seats in other West Zone schools, after sibling preference.- Close The Engineering School
Students have priority for available seats in other high schools, after sibling preference.- Close Social Justice Academy
Students have priority for available seats in other high schools, after sibling preference.- Clap Elementary becomes our first “Innovation School”
Students remain in the school but the program gets a “fresh start.” Apply for Innovation School status granted under new state law.- Convert Gavin Middle School to “Up Academy”
Current Gavin students are guaranteed enrollment in UP Academy as long as they fill out a simple application form. Incoming 6th grade students can apply from anywhere in the city.
Update: Afer BPS made the list officially official tonight, I see a new item:
- Expand Dearborn to a 6-12 STEM program
Dearborn Middle School will become a 6-12 STEM program, focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
The Boston Teachers Union is accusing city and school leaders of “meeting secretly’’ last week to offer charter school officials the chance to lease city schools slated for closure, even before parents and students at those schools knew their fate.
In fliers that its 7,000 members will receive today, the union said charter school leaders “are salivating at the possibility of leasing ‘surplus’ Boston School buildings.’’
Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said he was taken aback by the meeting.
“I don’t get shocked by much, but I was shocked that they met with these folks prior to a School Committee vote and having meetings with the schools,’’ Stutman said yesterday. “This is an economic decision, and this is a decision based on, I think, trying to give charter schools what they’ve desperately needed, which is space.’’
School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson recommended Thursday that more than a dozen schools close or merge as a way to plug a potential $63 million budget gap in a time of declining enrollment and charter school growth. The system has about 5,600 empty seats throughout the city and the suggested capacity reductions would shrink that number by about one-quarter.
The day before Johnson made her recommendations, her staff met with city and charter school leaders to start strategically planning for the growth of charter schools in Boston, instead of just ignoring them, school officials said. The group discussed about two dozen issues, including transportation and students learning English. Capacity was only a sliver of the discussion, school officials said. . . .You expect this kind of corrupt privatization in areas where disaster capitalism has used economic or natural emergencies to rush in with its shock and awe solutions, but here in the shadows of MIT and Harvard? How unseemly, indeed. Tsk tsk.
BOSTON — Hundreds of parents and teachers turned out Tuesday night to protest a Boston Public Schools plan to close or merge eight schools.
The district says the cuts are necessary because of an expected $50 million shortfall next year. There are also as many as 5,000 unfilled school seats because so many kids have transferred to charter schools.
WBUR’s Monica Brady-Myerov joined Morning Edition Wednesday to break down the meeting.
Bob Oakes: What was the mood like at the meeting?
Monica Brady-Myerov: It was loud and angry. Before the meeting started, a crowd was chanting, “Save our schools.” This chanting went on for about 20 minutes. Several hundred parents — some with their children — and teachers came with signs and T-shirts. When the meeting started, they charged the stage as school committee members started to take their seats. Boston school police had to get in front of the stage to keep them away.
This shows how hard it is for any district to close a school because every single one of the schools had a representative there Tuesday night, and they’re fighting this.
What has the school committee told these parents about why their schools need to close or merge?
Tuesday night was a hearing, so the committee members didn’t speak, but in previous communications they’ve told parents their top priority is giving students access to stronger programs. And the schools they want to close just aren’t good enough. So the district is citing MCAS scores or the high-school dropout rate to explain why each school should close, but I should note that none of the schools selected by the district are on the state’s “under-performing” list; they’re not in turnaround status. So there are many schools that are doing much worse in the district and they’ll stay open.
What did the teachers, parents and students tell the school committee?
They each had very personal stories, but the message was the same — these schools are being misrepresented by the district as under-performing as an excuse to be shut down. Kenny Jervis, a parent at Roger Clap Elementary School, says he was taken by surprise when he learned his child’s school would close:
Never before have us as parents, our administrators or those children been told they were an under-performing school. We find we had a bad year. Many people, many things, many teams have bad years. The answer is not closing.Parents also said they learned about these closures through a notice sent home in their kids’ backpacks in early October, and the note said there’d be a meeting that night. They say it’s just all happening too quickly and it’s not fair.
So, what are they asking for now? And are the committee and officials listening?
The parents want the process to start over. The school committee is scheduled to vote on this plan next week and they say the schools would close by the end of this year. And Tuesday night they didn’t say anything about it, so they say they’re listening, but they’re voting in a week. So it’s unclear how much they heard is going to affect their vote.
Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, spoke for teachers:
To close these schools primarily because they are small, or because they want to reuse their buildings or give them to a charter school, is a disservice to all of us who care about good schools, and it will only drive more people away from our schools, especially those schools that work.Superintendent Carol Johnson shows she is listening to some people because she changed one of the plans Tuesday night: She said the district would not close the Community Academy of Science and Health (CASH School) in the Hyde Park complex. They didn’t give a reason why, but the school officials believe it’s because they refuted the district’s numbers and showed that they do have high MCAS scores. So they’ve shown a willingness to change their minds, but the vote is next week.
So there’s no indication at this moment that they’re not going to ram this thing through?
That’s right.
A new study of Boston charter schools shows them to be more mirage than the miracle that the Boston Globe and the Boston Foundation would have the public believe. The clip at left from page 17 (click it to enlarge) shows exactly how the Commonwealth Charter Schools have recently been shown to edge out the Boston Public Schools in MCAS scores.The state’s largest teachers union released a report today documenting very high attrition rates and low enrollment of high-need students in Commonwealth charter schools in Boston. The report warns that expanding the number of charter schools without addressing these enrollment practices threatens to separate students based on language proficiency, special education status and poverty.
The report documents that enrollment in Boston’s charter high schools falls precipitously over the years. Fewer than half of the students enrolled in charter high schools as freshmen are still enrolled as seniors. This attrition pattern can be captured by snapshot of any single year. In 2008, for example, there were only two seniors for every five freshmen in the charter schools, while there were four seniors for every five freshmen in the Boston Public Schools.
"Far too many charter schools have established enrollment and exclusion practices that have winnowed out students with greater needs," said Kathleen Skinner, director of the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s Center for Education Policy and Practice. Skinner authored the report, Charter School Success or Selective Out-Migration of Low-Achievers? "By law, public schools are supposed to serve all students in the Commonwealth. In practice, charter schools do not fulfill that mission. We need to face this reality as the Legislature and the public begin debating whether to increase the number of charter schools in this state."
The report focuses on Boston’s charter schools because they have been the subject of recent studies that claimed to find they were doing a better job educating students than the Boston Public Schools. Recent national studies, by contrast, continue to find that most charter schools perform the same or worse than comparable district schools.
"This report shines a light on the shocking loss of students in most Boston charter schools between the year of initial enrollment and the final year," said MTA President Anne Wass. "Students who are not meeting a school’s academic and behavior standards are being sent back to district schools or to the streets, and then exaggerated claims of success are being made based on the small number of students who remain.
"U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently described as ‘dropout factories’ schools where two out of five of their freshmen are not enrolled at the start of their senior year," Wass continued. "By that standard, Boston’s charter high schools are among the worst ‘dropout factories’ in the state."
One way to look at the high school attrition rate is to compare the number of students enrolled in grades 9 and 12 in a given year. In Boston’s five charter high schools in 2008, there were only two seniors enrolled for every five freshmen -- a reduction of 57 percent. By contrast, the senior class in BPS high schools that year was four-fifths the size of the freshman class -- a reduction of just 19 percent.
Looking at it another way, how many students leave Boston’s charter high and middle-high schools from the year they enroll (generally grade 9, but earlier in some schools) until the start of their senior year? Again, the loss is dramatic.
For example, the MATCH school is often cited as a success story since the school claims that 99 percent of its graduates are accepted at four-year colleges. However, that is 99 percent of a greatly diminished pool of students. For the class of 2009, 72 students were enrolled in grade nine but only 34 were enrolled by grade 12, a loss of more than half of MATCH’s students.
The report also provides new details on the major differences in student characteristics. It has been reported previously that charter schools enroll fewer special needs, English language learner and low-income students than their sending districts. This report breaks down the data further, showing that the special needs students enrolled in charters have far fewer disabilities and that their low-income students are less poor.
ELL: ELL students comprise one in five BPS students -- 19 percent -- but only one in 50 (2 percent) in Boston charter schools.
SPED: Twenty percent of BPS students have special learning needs compared to 15 percent in the charters. More significant, however, is that the charter school students on Individual Education Plans have milder special needs.
Special needs students are classified by levels: full inclusion (mostly educated in the general education classroom), partial inclusion (in the middle), and substantially separate (mainly or exclusively taught outside the general education classroom). Students with the most severe needs are placed out of district.
Nine out of 10 (91 percent) of the special needs students in Boston’s charter schools are full inclusion compared to only one-third (33 percent) of BPS students. Nearly half (48 percent) of BPS SPED students are either taught in substantially separate classrooms or placed out of district, compared to only 3 percent in the charter schools.
Type of School % Full Inclusion % Partial Inclusion % Substantially Separate % Out of District BOS 33 19 41 7 Boston Charters 91 6 3 0 FRPL: Charter schools claim they serve nearly the same number of low-income students as the BPS system: 71 percent versus 74 percent. But a closer look reveals that they serve fewer very low-income students.
The family income limits to qualify for a free lunch are significantly lower than those for a reduced-price lunch. Two-thirds (65 percent) of BPS students qualify for a free lunch while only half (52 percent) of Boston’s charter school students do.
Type of School % Reduced Lunch % Free lunch BPS 9 65 Boston Charters 18 52 Wass said that charter schools were first established to be laboratories of experimentation. "Over time," she said, "they have changed into something else -- essentially a state-managed system of publicly funded private schools." She noted that many are opened by the state over the objections of the local residents and taxpayers who must fund them.
"If we are to have charter schools paid for with public dollars, they should serve all students," said Wass. "They should be accountable to their communities. And they should be funded in a way that does not hurt the quality of education provided to students who remain in the district schools."
Report: CHARTER SCHOOL SUCCESS OR SELECTIVE OUT-MIGRATION OF LOW-ACHIEVERS? Effects of Enrollment Management on Student AchievementLast modified: Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, which funded the research, was more direct. "There is no justification for keeping a charter cap in place that is denying urban, mostly black and brown children the opportunity for a demonstrably better result," Grogan said.After all, Grogan's non-profit Boston Foundation (with almost a billion dollars in non-profit) paid for the study and has a huge vested, shall we say, interest in removing the cap on charter schools, thus removing the top on the tax credit cookie jar for all those hungry edu-entrepreneurs seeking to do good. But it is unconscionable that the Boston Globe offer such a one-sided presentation of a schooling situation that is anything but one-sided.
Charter Schools also serve a smaller proportion of special education students, free- and reduced-price lunch students, and English learners than do the traditional BPS schools. In addition, high school Charter students tend to come in with substantially better math and ELA performance on the MCAS than those in traditional BPS schools (.412 standard deviations higher in math and .412 standard deviations higher in ELA) (p.15).The authors of the study further concede that
students who go to Pilot and Charter Schools are different in important ways from those that do not. We need to take account of these differences before judging the relative effectiveness of these different school models” (p. 18).In an earlier section the authors entitled “Caveats,” they go further:
Each design is described in detail on page 8. This study is limited by the constraints of our two research designs. The observational study includes all schools but does not control for unobserved differences in background characteristics. The lottery study controls for all differences in students’ background, including unobserved differences, but does not include all schools.The second research design is what the authors call a lottery study. Students who applied for and were selected into pilot and charter schools were compared to students who applied and were not selected to attend. Their individual test scores were tracked over time to compare the effect of charter schools, pilot schools, and BPS schools. Quite ingenious in design, but extremely limited in the sampling—as noted in the Caveats above. What results is a skewed picture based on a handful of the most popular charters compared with pilots with a much more limited lottery selection compared to the BPS who accept any student who walks in the door (remember public schools?).
A second caveat relates to the observed control variables used in our study. These include indicators for participation in special education and limited English proficiency. These broad categories may disguise large differences in student groups. Special education students range from those needing intensive all day services to students needing a little extra time in a resource room. English learners may know no English at all or have some proficiency. It is possible that Pilot and Charter Schools serve different proportions of these subgroups. Unfortunately, our state data set does not provide finely detailed breakdowns for these two variables in a manner consistent or comprehensive enough to be useful for this study (p. 6).
. . . it's important to keep in mind that while the lottery study uses a stronger research design than the observational study, both the Charter and Pilot lottery results come only from schools and years in which the demand for seats exceeds the number of seats. Our Charter lottery results also omit schools and years for which lottery records are missing or incomplete. These considerations have the largest impact on the sample of Charter middle schools in the lottery study, where the estimated test score effects are largest.And the non-experimental results, remember, are the ones from the observational study that the authors told us that we have to take with a big grain of salt. What does this mean? It means that this study, the one that the “bold reformers” are crowing about did not include test data for students from the lower tier of charter chain gangs, where, of course, the scores are most likely to be equally bad or worse than they are in the poorest public schools that the edu-preneurs don't give a damn about. If they did, they would be putting their money where their mealy mouths are.
On balance, our lottery-based findings provide strong evidence that the charter model has generated substantial test score gains in high-demand Charter Schools with complete records. On the other hand, these results should not be interpreted as showing that Boston Charters always produce test score gains. In Charter Schools with lower demand and incomplete lottery records, we have to rely on non-experimental results (p. 39).
