Silber's Chelsea legacy

Better schools, angry parents

If John R. Silber’s going to run state education the way he’s run the Chelsea schools, parents can expect to see dizzying changes meted out with an abrupt hand.

The Chelsea record: plummeting dropout rates. One of the country’s best early-childhood and teacher-training programs. Excellent reading programs.

And legions of furious parents.

“Parents were completely excluded from the process – that goes against every reform proposal I’ve heard about,” complained Marta Rosa, one of the Silber’s most outspoken opponents in Chelsea.

When Chelsea went into receivership in 1988, Boston University stepped in to run the school system.

Since then, it’s served as a showcase for BU President Silber’s pet theories on education.

His favorite topic is preschoolers.Make sure young children are healthy and well-taught, and the school’s job will be much easier down the road, Silber theorized.

So the Chelsea school system set up an early-childhood program that even his most grudging opponents admit is second to none.

In special education, Silber speculated that too many students without any learning disabilities slip into expensive special programs – simply because their schools have failed them.

So the Chelsea schools have put many special-education students into regular classes.

And Silber scolded bilingual education for becoming a crutch that keeps immigrants from moving into the mainstream.

In Chelsea, where English is the second language for 61 percent of the students, the school system has exerted strenuous pressure to keep the students from speaking their own tongue in school.

The last point has riled Hispanic parents and groups.

Last year, the Chelsea Oversight Panel – which monitored BU’s operation – found the school’s treatment of foreign speakers “of great concern.”

Chelsea Superintendent Douglas A. Sears calls the report “a crock” and “a series of falsehoods and misrepresentations.”

But since the report was aired, there continue to be “very tense relations between the university and the Hispanic community,” said Martin Kaplan, chairman of the state board of education, whom Silber will replace in January.

“He’s made enormous progress,” Kaplan said of Silber last week, “but there’s enormous progress still to be made. It shows just how difficult a system is to reform.”

Among other things, daily attendance in high school remains stubbornly poor.

On average, 22 percent of the high school students were absent from classes on any given school day in 1993-94, the last year in the state’s files. That’s twice the statewide average.

But the dropout rate has plummeted from 20 percent in 1989 to only 1.3 percent in 1993.

And the number of seniors going on to college has risen 21 percent, as almost three-fourths of graduates pursued further education last year.

Seniors at Chelsea High School say much of the credit for the dropout rate should go to the high school principal, Albert Vasquez.

And the teachers “take more interest,” noted Eric Soto, a senior. “Classes are more challenging in a way, but they make it interesting.”

Yet many students complain they’ve been put through a wringer by all the changes wrought by the university.

“It’s like we’re guinea pigs, or something,” complained Jennifer Pavlos, 17.

Superintendent Sears scoffed at the complaint.

“As far as I know programming is quite consistent,” Sears said “That’s an old saw.”

For his part, Silber blames many of Chelsea’s stubborn problems on Chelsea’s high student turnover. Last year, 350 students moved in, and the same moved out of a high school of only 850 students.

The lessons for the state are clear, Silber said. Give intense instruction to young children and the teachers themselves, and have the patience to wait for results.

Asked whether there were any lessons he’s learned from Chelsea that he wouldn’t repeat at the state level, Silber stopped short:

“Don’t go into a city that’s about to go bankrupt,” he said simply.



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