The Activist Politician: Tito Jackson's Victory with Voters in Jamaica Plain

Boston news media covering the results of the Boston Preliminary Election held on September 25th focused primarily on the predictably low turnout, without any self-awareness that stories written in the months and weeks leading up to the election made them complicit in this outcome.

One striking omission from every mainstream newspaper covering the election results was that Councilor Tito Jackson won Jamaica Plain easily in the September 25th Mayoral Preliminary. Jamaica Plain is comprised of Wards 11, 19 and 10; Jackson was victorious in both Wards 11 and 19, as well as neighboring Ward 12 in Roxbury. [See all data here]

In the days since the election, I’ve been reflecting on the many reasons why Jamaica Plain voters supported Tito Jackson and one explanation is abundantly clear: We are a neighborhood that’s been both protected and nourished by the tireless efforts of grassroots activism for so long that we recognize our fellow activists when they walk among us.

We are a neighborhood raised by the community organizers that formed the Jamaica Plain Expressway Committee, successfully stopping Interstate 95 from bisecting our city. We are the activists that formed the Southwest Corridor Coalition, resulting in miles of walking and biking paths and the stabilization of the neighborhood. We established the Franklin Park Coalition to cherish this emerald jewel suffering from decades of neglect.

Jamaica Plain Historical Society: http://www.jphs.org/transportation/people-before-highways.html

We are the home to three of the seven plaintiffs in the 2003 Supreme Judicial Court Lawsuit Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, resulting in the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. It comes as no surprise that we voted to support a leader who has never marched in the South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in the years when they excluded our LGBTQ neighbors.

Boston Pride Parade, June 10, 2017. Photograph by Kristin Johnson

Jackson marched with us in the Women’s March, to Fight Supremacy, and to support our Muslim neighbors when President Trump issued his travel ban. He stood with affordable housing activists when they protested the mayor’s controversial JP/Rox development plan. He advocates alongside homeless activists for the re-opening of the Long Island Homeless Shelter, closed abruptly by Mayor Walsh in 2014.

Councilor Jackson’s 2015 subpoena of the Boston Olympics bid supported the work of activists from No Boston 2024 and No Boston Olympics, saving Boston taxpayers from millions of dollars in costly overruns. Enhancing the work of the Make GE Pay activists, Jackson has been outspoken about the enormous tax breaks given to GE and the outrageousness of offering GE a municipal helipad while we have budget cuts in our schools. He supported adult cannabis activists in the passage of Question 4 long before it was politically “safe” to do so.

As Chair of the Committee on Education, Jackson has steadfastly supported the youth of Boston Public Schools when they protested Walsh’s school budget cuts. Last year, he was the undisputed champion of the grassroots No On 2 campaign, which spared public schools statewide from the financial devastation that Question 2 would have wrought. He received the Massachusetts Teacher’s Association “Friend of Education” award as a result of these efforts.

No On 2 Rally, November 1, 2016. Photograph by Kristin Johnson

If you put your ears to the ground of this fertile southwest corridor of Boston, you can hear the seeds of change taking root here once again. The Democratic establishment would be wise to tune their ears to hear the calls of our grassroots leaders or risk future political irrelevancy.

Jamaica Plain recognizes a leader who is more likely to wield a megaphone with fellow activists than a shovel at a developer’s groundbreaking.

Beacon Hill after the Muslim Ban Protest, January 29, 2017. Photograph by Kristin Johnson

Who is Impacted by #BPSBudget Cuts?

The Boston City Council continues to consider the FY18 budget passed by the Boston School Committee in March that will reduce the budgets at 49 Boston Public Schools. While these budget reductions are largely due to shifts in enrollment, the educational needs of the students who are left behind have not changed (read here and here about how the McCormack will feel the impact of their $935,000 budget cut). As we mentioned in our last post about the BPS budget, the current funding structure creates a system in which half our schools are either “winners” or “losers."

We were interested in examining who is left behind at BPS schools facing budget cuts, and as a result, are experiencing reductions in staffing, supplies and programming. We analyzed all BPS schools funded through Weighted Student Funding and correlated each school with the current state DESE level (1 is the highest performing category, while 5 is the lowest performing category). Next we examined the student populations within each school and compared them to the districtwide average for each group. 

View all collected data here. View high resolution figure here. Source: BPS and DESE

Among the schools facing budget reductions due to declines in enrollment this year, 66% have a higher concentration of Economically Disadvantaged Students (ED); 72% have higher numbers of High Needs students (HN); 60% have higher amounts of Students With Disabilities (SWD); 42% have higher amounts of English Language Learners (ELL); 46% have higher numbers of First Language Not English (FLNE); 54% had a higher than average number of black students; and 26% have more Latino students. Every indicator of students within the achievement gap was overall higher within the group of schools facing budget reductions. 

As we mentioned in our last budget post, there is a troubling number of level 3, 4 and 5 schools receiving budget reductions. Not surprisingly, our research revealed that schools that are facing budget cuts -and- have a high DESE level also have significantly higher concentrations of Economically Disadvantaged, Students with Disabilities, African Americans and High Needs students. View the entire data set here.

While our teachers are expected to deploy differentiated learning strategies, using targeted interventions when a student is falling behind, the BPS administration does not use these indicators of a school in crisis to allocate budgets or provide extra supports. We only have to look to the closure of the Mattahunt to know this is true. Imagine a doctor taking all the vital signs the nurse has given him, throwing them in the trash and then giving the wrong prescription.

We are leaving the students facing the greatest challenges behind by cutting their schools year after year. For the 3rd consecutive year, Brighton High, Dorchester Academy, the McCormack, the Perkins, Edison K-8, the Timilty, the Tynan and the Winship are all facing budget reductions and all of them are Level 3 and 4 schools.

It was of great interest to us that on the same day that the Boston School Committee voted to pass this budget that will create deficits at 48 schools, the Supreme Court ruled that public school districts must provide funding for a “free appropriate public education” under the IDEA or Individuals with Disabilities Act.

Quoting from the 8-0 ruling on the matter:  A “…child’s educational program must be appropriately ambitious in light of his circumstances, just as advancement from grade to grade is appropriately ambitious for most children in the regular classroom. The goals may differ, but every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives. It cannot be right that the IDEA generally contemplates grade-level advancement for children with disabilities who are fully integrated in the regular classroom, but is satisfied with barely more than de minimis progress for children who are not.”

When our district’s most vulnerable schools and students are facing a budget that does not even live up to, in the words of Chief Justice Roberts, “barely more than de minimus progress,” something is going terribly wrong. The Citywide Parent Council, Black Educator’s Alliance of Massachusetts, and the District’s own Opportunity and Achievement Task Force have all voiced their opposition to this budget because it will harm our most vulnerable students. Lower performing schools need more support, not less, to break the cycle of under-performing schools and assist students already facing socioeconomic and educational challenges.

We urge the members of the Boston City Council to consider who is being left behind at under-funded and under-performing schools when you pass “de minimus” budgets year after year after year.

When Donors Choose, Some Win and Some Lose

As BPS parents, we know the budget cuts we experience year after year after year have increased the amounts that we're being asked to contribute for basic supplies. While it’s impossible to quantify how much is being spent on direct supply donations to the classroom or through community fundraising efforts, we are able to quantify our teachers’ reliance on crowd-funding to provide schools supplies. 

The website DonorsChoose was established in 2000 by a history teacher in New York City who hoped to connect the needs of his students with potential donors. For research purposes, DonorsChoose has more recently established a companion site with the open data they have collected via donations made through the site. Using their data browser, we examined the impact of budget cuts on teachers’ demand for supply money supplementation and were shocked by what we found.

*School year 2016 - 2017 still in progress. Data collected in March 2017.

Between FY12 and FY16, donations to Boston schools through DonorsChoose increased 12-fold from $40,050 in FY12 to nearly $500,000 in FY16. We’re now a little more than halfway through FY17, and already DonorsChoose has collected $450,000. There are currently almost 300 open records with over $417,000 in unfunded projects pending and more are added daily.

Why is it that we expect our teachers to bear the responsibility for resourcing our underfunded classrooms?
Also troubling to us are the equity issues raised by increasing our reliance on this method of crowd-funding. As we browsed through the open asks in DonorsChoose, we noticed that many projects expire unfunded, while requests from schools supported by more affluent parents are often quickly completed. We’ll talk about this more later in the post.

CASE STUDY: School Year 2015 – 2016 (FY16)

The FY16 budget season was difficult for Boston Public Schools. Faced with a $42M - $51M dollar shortfall, the budget that passed included the closure of the Rogers Middle School and the Elihu Greenwood, a reduction of 130 positions in the Central Office, as well as staffing and supply cuts on the school level. We analyzed donations via DonorChoose for FY16 to see how these budget cuts impacted teachers’ needs for supply supplementation. 

In FY16, our teachers asked for over $1.015 million in supply donations in DonorsChoose (up 30% from FY15), but only 49% of the projects were successfully funded. 450 projects totaling $520,000 expired without being funded and 520 projects totaling $495,000 were successfully funded.

Next we analyzed the FY16 donations by zip code and were again discouraged by the results. Not surprisingly, the highest amounts of DonorsChoose donations were collected by schools in affluent zip codes in Boston’s Downtown, South End and Back Bay neighborhoods, where students benefited by an average bump in supply spending of $77 to $123 per pupil.  

View high resolution figure HERE; See our collected data HERE

The Quincy Lower school accounted for all of the donations in zip code 02111*, which totaled $97,519, resulting in an average per pupil spending bump of $123. Students in Roxbury Crossing (02120), home to Madison Park, Fenway High, and O’Bryant Math and Science, saw an average per pupil increase of only $3.81. Some schools such as the Tobin in Mission Hill, the Timilty in Roxbury, the King K-8 in Dorchester and the Chittick in Mattapan, among others, did not collect any donations by this method, while some BPS schools did not submit any requests at all. It would be interesting to talk to teachers at these schools to see why they don’t use the site.

The projects for PreK to grade 5 classrooms were funded at a rate 35% higher than grades 6 - 12. This can in part be attributed to the lower cost of Pre-K to Grade 5 projects vs the technology heavy grades 6 - 12 classroom projects. There is also the impact of parent agency in how funding requests are amplified across networks, as well as the impact of more affluent social networks to support these project requests.

We aren’t asking our teachers and school leaders what resources they need to provide a world class education. Instead, the BPS budget continues to create an austerity environment that forces teachers and students into the marketplace of donor dollars. This budgeting environment perpetuates a power dynamic that those “other kids” need to beg for basics. Donors get to feel like they are helping poor students without having to really address the funding mechanisms that created these glaring disparities.

Another issue with this method of funding, which is in most cases for the most basic of school supplies, is it compels teachers to “sell” the worth of their students to the users of DonorsChoose. When teachers are forced to convey the exceptional nature of their specific students, this continues to perpetuate the “othering” of marginalized students.

Crowd-funding maintains the power dynamic of those with financial means deciding who the “winners” are based on the donor’s perception of the value or need of that particular classroom. Even the language of the project proposals emphasizes how deserving, hardworking and smart the students are, further marginalizing underfunded classrooms. This type of language is common for poor, urban students who have to prove they’re worthy of receiving resources at school, and the impact of this framing is felt by students, families and communities that read these descriptions about their children and communities. Contrast that to suburban, primarily white students whose schools are far better resourced simply because of the belief that those children are entitled to a robust public education as a pillar of American democracy is yet another example of how racism plays out in Boston.

In addition, each donation requires that the donors contributes to the cost of running DonorsChoose. If the funding isn’t fully met, the project isn’t funded, even partially. The money stays with DonorsChoose to be used either in a future project requested by the teacher or for a different project. This is a waste of philanthropic resources that may never reach the intended recipient.

Again, the burden of all of this sits squarely on the shoulders of the students and families with the fewest economic resources. In addition to this type of direct giving to teachers, many programs across BPS already rely on the largesse of foundations and corporations. As the city continues to fail to fully and equitably fund our public schools, we force our students with the greatest needs into a philanthropic Hunger Games where outside players with financial means get to decide who the winners are. This continues to widen the equity gap across the city with those schools that have a higher percentage of high poverty students from Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester and East Boston receiving fewer and fewer resources and then being blamed for failing to maintain the same results as better resourced schools.

This significant rise in crowd-funded schools supplies confirms that budget cuts are not “strategic reinvestments.” When there are reductions to the budget, whether they are via changes to student weights or fluctuations in enrollment, costs do not go away. The needs of the students and their teachers do not go away; they are either shifted elsewhere or result in detrimental impacts to classroom learning.

The proposed FY18 budget does not address these issues, and without a significant increase to our budget coupled with a restructuring of our budgeting procedures, this will only get worse.

This post was researched and written in collaboration with BPS parent and fellow blogger Tonya Tedesco. You can find her on Twitter @TonyaTedesco.