Connolly for Mayor

Boston’s next mayor will inherit a school system in which over one in four students will not graduate high school. That rate is significantly higher among African-Americans and among Hispanic students, and among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The city’s next mayor needs to address the opportunity gap present in Boston, and the candidate with the best preparation to do so is City Councilor John R. Connolly.

As a City Councilor, John Connolly has championed education reform aimed at reducing the dropout rate and introducing greater equity into the city’s school system. Connolly was the only City Councilor to vote against a teacher contract the failed to extend Boston’s school day, one of the shortest urban school days in the country. As mayor, he hopes to keep students in school longer—and to fill the extra time with arts, music, sports, and extra support.

Connolly also deserves accolades for his support of broad reform to the structure of education. He was a vocal supporter of Massachusetts’ 2010 legislation to turn around struggling schools by increasing state financial support while providing greater flexibility in hiring, scheduling, and curriculum. Under current staffing regulations, the 2012 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year—who was teaching in a traditional, in-district Boston Public School—was laid off solely because of his lack of seniority. Any policy that results in the lay-off of a Massachusetts Teacher of the Year should be amended, and Connolly’s vocal support of turnaround schools and education reform suggest that he is the candidate to do bring about that change.

Structural reform should be coupled with greater support—financial and otherwise—for public education, and Connolly understands this. He specifically advocates for shifting more resources away from central bureaucracy and into individual schools, and he wants to strengthen the city’s teacher training and evaluation systems. When the city was faced with budget cuts, Connolly fought to protect the school system from crippling lay offs, understanding the paramount importance of education both to the economy and to our democratic society.

In many ways, both Walsh and Connolly support education reform, but Connolly’s record shows a greater tendency to take substantive action on the issue even when it is politically unpopular to do so. His vote against maintaining Boston’s exceptionally short school day, for example, drew sharp criticism especially from the Boston Teachers’ Union. Meanwhile, Walsh’s campaign is largely being funded by outside political action committees. The City can expect John Connolly to more effectively tackle difficult political issues on its behalf, regardless of the political cost of doing so.

The celebrated American philosopher John Dewey said that “only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase.” Both Connolly and Walsh seem to understand this. But Dewey also said that “constructive work [needs] to be done by the state . . . before all can have, otherwise than in name, an equal chance.” If Boston wants to improve on its educational achievements and truly nullify the inequities in opportunity that plague our education system, the city will have to do substantive work to address those inequalities. That work will be difficult, and may sometimes have to challenge dogmatically held beliefs. John Connolly’s record provides the City’s best hope to bring about this vision.