June 24 - Boston has a new superintendent of schools who will have the same problems in reforming Boston schools that every superintendent has had.
Carol Johnson, Boston's next school superintendent, will confront far different obstacles here than the ones she'll leave behind in Memphis -- including a powerful teachers union that could block her reforms, standardized tests that are tougher to pass, and thousands more students who speak English as a second language.Stunning failure figures.
Less than 60 percent of Boston's students graduate from high school in four years. About 20 percent -- mostly black and Latino students -- drop out. And, for the past six years, half of the city's sixth-graders flunked the state's math test.Look at the stunning comparison of Boston and Memphis schools in a chart at right at story.
-Black and Latino students make up 76 percent of Boston students.
- Less than half of Boston's black and Latino 10th- graders mastered math and English last year, scoring at least 30 percentage points behind white and Asian students.
- Some 18 percent in Boston who are mostly Latino are not fluent in English.
TT - At Greatschools.com you can compare the 11 public high schools in Boston. What you find is that the school with the highest teacher-student ratio of 22 is rated 10. Of the 23 high schools, only one is rated 10, the rest are 4 and below.
