Introduction

Abstract

Boston schools won the Eli Broad Award in 2006 as the “most improved urban school system” in the nation. This was an impressive comeback from the negative publicity attending the burning of six Boston public schools in the 1960s and the stoning of Boston school buses in 1974 and 1975. How did Boston schools become revitalized? The scope of urban school reform includes the removal of corruption, abuses, and excesses, along with deliberate campaigns to treat more appropriately students, teachers, and other employees. New Massachusetts laws enacted in one key year, 1965, authorized two radical reforms, collective bargaining for teachers and the “elimination” of racial imbalance, two measures that in time generated traumatic conflict for school parents and union members. Over four decades, parents, teachers, and principals, elected officials, corporations, unions, universities, and foundations generated the ideas and energy needed to pursue serious school reform. Very rarely did they learn from predecessors about how or how not to help urban students succeed.