Mayor for a New America by Thomas M. Menino Page B

school budget. A new teachers’ contract offering greater flexibility in the classroom would be in place. Through the summer, more than one hundred teachers, administrators, and parents had drafted a new curriculum to raise student performance, partly through training parents to teach study skills at home. Five elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools were gearing up to try it. Their principals were reportedly displaying “high enthusiasm” for the experiment. All systems were go.
    So I was disturbed to find out that because of “differences” between Court Street and the director of the Curriculum Renewal Team, the new curriculum would not be tried after all. There would be no test in the “test year.” Remedial classes would not be ended. Foreign language requirements would not be doubled. Algebra would not be introduced in the eighth grade. Parent activists would not be present in classrooms. The team director’s reassignment just before the opening of school was what one school-watcher called “a terrible blow” to the project.
    It was also a blow to a teacher whose proposal to require courses in African and African American history had been approved by the curriculum team. In words that stung me to read, he told a reporter: “The project was nothing more than a political statement to the public about making change. A lot of people were very excited about this project. It seemed a new era was developing.”
    My aides needed no prodding to leak the news that Harrison-Jones “has fallen out of favor with Menino.” I expected that item to draw comment from African American politicians quick to defend Harrison-Jones. Mel King, a former state legislator who had run for mayor against Ray Flynn in 1983, went there: “We won’t allow her to be lynched.”
    In the days leading up to the annual Martin Luther King Day breakfast held in the Marriott Copley Place ballroom, I braced myself for George Wallace comparisons.
    David Nyhan recorded the moment: “The biggest needles of the day were reserved for Mayor Thomas Menino, who sat stoically through the 2½ hour extravaganza, whilst being on the receiving end of considerable advice that he rehire the Boston school superintendent, Lois Harrison-Jones, who sat at a floor table near Menino’s end of the head table.”
    I was in a grim mood. Backstage, I’d exchanged hot words with Gareth Saunders, the city councilor from Roxbury. I don’t take accusations of racism well.
    I glanced at Governor Bill Weld sitting beside me, his face frozen in a “there but for the grace of God go I” mask. Weld’s cuts in social services made him a target for this crowd. But not today; not with the bull’s-eye painted on my back.
Thanks, pal
, I thought.
    The speakers talked up Harrison-Jones’s achievements—a falling dropout rate, four balanced budgets in a row, improved labor relations, and more. So why, they asked, did a School Committee member encourage her to apply for a teacher-training position in Virginia? Later that day, to a crowd of vocal supporters in a South End church, Harrison-Jones gave her answer.
    She was “a victim of an unreachable standard of perfection.” Boston was notorious for replacing school chiefs—eleven in twenty years—before they could show results: “I care too much about your children to roll over and play dead because someone says I should.”
    She was talking about me. Me implicitly in speaking of Boston’s “peculiar fanaticism, an obsession with change for change’s sake. [Officials] dart to and fro trying to find some . . . quick fix.” And me directly: “People said there is need for the mayor to have his own person. That is political. The educational decision should have been based on whether there is movement. . . . The movement is there. . . . If Boston is to take its