E-Mail This Article to a Friend Chaos theory Maura Hennigan revives the school-committee debate BY ADAM REILLY
	The natural HOW DOES A PERSON convey self-assurance? John Connolly does it physically: there’s a looseness in his neck and shoulders that suggests the heightened confidence of the standout athlete (which Connolly was at Roxbury Latin), the student leader (which Connolly was at Harvard College), and the child of influential parents (which Connolly has always been). His biggest competitors in this year’s Boston City Council at-large race — Patricia White, Sam Yoon, and Matt O’Malley — don’t have this easy bearing. Neither, for that matter, do most council incumbents. Mayor Tom Menino has it. But he’s been running Boston for 12 years. Connolly’s hint of swagger could backfire if it edges into full-blown cockiness. But he seems self-aware enough to keep it under control. After his father, former secretary of state Michael Connolly, teared up during an effusive introduction at the campaign kick-off last Saturday, the candidate thanked him — and then, with perfect timing, offered a gentle tweak: "My father neglected to mention that I can fly, too." During his ensuing speech, Connolly announced that he’d been humbled by early support for his campaign and that he needed whatever assistance his backers could give him. About those backers: the Connolly campaign had promised (riskily, it seemed) that 500 people would fill the auditorium at Our Lady of the Annunciation, in West Roxbury, for Saturday’s event. The actual turnout appeared closer to 1000 — a remarkable number for any candidate, but especially so for one making his first run. The usual types were there: blue-haired old ladies, dumpy middle-aged guys who looked like they’d come for the buffet. But there were also affluent-looking twenty- and thirty-somethings — the same people, perhaps, who have made Connolly second in at-large fundraising to date, trailing only council president Michael Flaherty. Despite his enviable advantages, Connolly can look forward to a tough fight. His biggest challenge may be symbolic: can this white political scion situate himself in the "New Boston" paradigm — which, whatever its weaknesses, has become the dominant framework for understanding city politics today? In his speech, Connolly acknowledged this problem by riffing on Barack Obama’s remarks at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: "It’s not about the Old Boston versus the New Boston. It’s about one Boston." He hopes so, of course. But judging from the crowd at Our Lady of the Annunciation — which included Tim Schofield and Greg Glennon (ideological polar opposites from the recent 18th Suffolk special state-rep election) and Stu Rosenberg (campaign manager for soon-to-be state representative Linda Dorcena Forry) — maybe Connolly knows what he’s talking about. — AR

IT COULD BECOME the defining issue of this year’s mayoral race. Fourteen years ago, the city traded its elected school committee — which had presided over the ugliest stretch in the history of the Boston Public Schools — for one appointed by the mayor. Five years later, in 1996, Boston voters had a chance to weigh in on the change; they voted overwhelmingly to keep the appointed body.

The results have been mixed. While there’s been obvious progress (rising test scores, improved teacher training), Boston’s public schools remain deeply troubled; if they have enough money, many families — especially white ones — still flee to the suburbs when their kids reach school age. As for the school committee, which used to be a hotbed of racial tension and assorted bad behavior, it’s no longer an embarrassment to the city. Then again, it’s not much of anything. No one really pays attention to anything the school committee does these days, partly because they can’t (unlike city-council meetings, school-committee meetings aren’t televised) and partly because, in the eyes of some, the committee exists only to do Mayor Tom Menino’s bidding.

Enter at-large city councilor Maura Hennigan, a former appointed-committee backer who now plans to make the return of an elected school committee a focus of her improbable campaign against Menino. Given the long odds Hennigan faces against the mayor (Menino’s popularity ratings remain high, and at the end of March he had over $600,000 in the bank, compared to about $30,000 for Hennigan), this could be a smart political gamble. A broad swath of Boston voters might find Hennigan’s school-committee gambit compelling — and as reviled as an elected committee was, a case can be made for rethinking the status quo. Still, Hennigan’s proposal entails both political and educational risks. And if she mishandles this issue, it could doom her campaign.

THE BEST-KNOWN legacy of the elected school committee was the busing crisis of the 1970s, which took the city to the brink of genuine civil war. Morgan v. Hennigan — the 1972 lawsuit that forced court-ordered busing in Boston — wouldn’t have happened if, at a September 1971 meeting, the school committee had heeded a state mandate to integrate three new elementary schools. But when John Craven — a committee member who happened to be running for city council — changed his vote at the last minute, the committee ended up flouting the state in a 3-2 vote. (James Hennigan, Maura Hennigan’s father, voted in the minority.)

Then, after creating the crisis, the school committee intensified it, with committee members Louise Day Hicks and Pixie Palladino fanning anti-busing sentiment and the committee as a whole rejecting a desegregation plan that could have resolved the situation. Later, even as relative normalcy returned to the Boston Public Schools, the elected committee continued making itself look bad. School-committee minutes from the mid 1980s often read like case studies in organizational dysfunction: "This was the first of two September meetings which lacked substantive issues.... An unexpected and loud argument erupted.... The meeting ended abruptly when the superintendent — angered by the vote-switching and defeat — suggested that the Committee begin the search for a new superintendent."

Given this tortured history, the question is obvious: why? Why should Boston voters even consider bringing back the days when committee members — not all, but too many — focused on padding their résumés, pandering to the worst instincts of voters, and padding their taxpayer-funded staffs instead of serving Boston’s schools?

Hennigan’s answer hinges, in part, on race. "A lot has changed," she argues. "What was particularly significant [about the 1996 referendum] was that voters in communities of color did not want to lose the elected body. Since that time, we now have a majority of people of color in the city. And we continue to have a school system that [serves] predominantly people of color." (The 2000 Census found that Boston had become, for the first time, a "majority-minority" city, one in which whites make up less than half the population. Approximately 85 percent of Boston’s public-school students are black, Asian, or Latino.)

The subtext of Hennigan’s argument is clear: if Boston’s minority voters use their newfound clout to make Hennigan mayor, she, in turn, will help them democratize the school committee. It’s a neat line of reasoning, one that deftly transforms Hennigan — an Irish-Catholic from an old Boston political family — into a champion of the oft-invoked "New Boston" (see "Winner’s Circle," News and Features, September 24, 2004).

If elected, Hennigan promises, she will use the mayoral bully pulpit to build support for replacing the seven-member appointed committee with a five-member body that would be elected at large — that is, by voters from across Boston. This, incidentally, is the same structure the school committee had from 1905 (when Yankee reformers, who’d winnowed the committee from 116 to 24 in the face of mounting Irish influence, downsized it again) until 1983 (when the school committee adopted the city council’s current 13-member, district-based model). However, Hennigan says she’d consider further tweaks — e.g., staggering elections so that only two seats would be contested during a given election, thereby guaranteeing some level of continuity. "I’m more than happy to talk to people about this," she says.

This openness points to another aspect of Hennigan’s proposal. Her call to revive the elected committee is partly race-based, but it also relies on a flexible populism that could transcend racial lines. One of her favorite campaign themes is that Menino, now entering his 12th year as mayor, no longer listens to ordinary Bostonians — and her school committee argument is part and parcel of this larger critique. "There has to be accountability in the school system," she says. "One of the weaknesses I’ve seen in the Menino administration is a real lack of community input, and, in the case of the school system, a real weakness in the desire to communicate with parents who have children in our system. I have received so much dialogue from parents, irrespective of their child’s race, who just find it very disappointing that they do not have a voice."

Note the key phrase: irrespective of their child’s race. African-American parents who bristled at Menino’s determination to reduce busing last year (see "Bus Stop," News and Features, February 13, 2004) could see themselves as part of Hennigan’s voiceless public. But so, too, could Irish-Catholic parents from West Roxbury who were disappointed when Menino’s push failed.

The notion of these two groups making common cause on this issue may seem far-fetched. But "the record, so far, says that the appointed committee isn’t the answer," says former mayoral candidate Mel King, a bona fide liberal who met recently with a more conservative former mayoral candidate, Joe Timilty, to discuss reviving the elected committee. "There’s a strong movement to close the achievement gap [between black and white public-school students] and it’s not getting enough attention on the part of the mayor.... I think Hennigan has an excellent campaign issue here."