Some of Boston`s biggest businesses have decided to stop complaining and start giving a helping hand to the students of that city`s beleaguered public schools. In a public-private partnership other cities should examine, they are offering Boston`s high school students the deal of their young lives:
financial aid if they get into a college and a job if they graduate.
Under the common-sense theory that students work harder if they know what they are working for, the program pulls together several smaller ones to give the students a comprehensive set of incentives to stay in school and graduate. It includes small grants and professional financial counselors to help them pay for college, and another program guarantees that they will have a job after they graduate.
New England Mutual Life Insurance Co. donated $1 million for a college aid endowment and its chairman, Edward E. Phillips, helped beat the bushes to raise additional money from 40 Boston-area companies to build the $6 million program. More than 300 banks, insurance companies, law firms, real estate developers, retail stores and other companies have pledged to provide the jobs.
Once a model for the nation, Boston`s school system suffered problems not unlike those that buffeted school systems in Chicago and other big cities but with greater ferocity than most. It was battered by racial change, a busing controversy in the 1970s and large-scale defections by white and middle-class families. Now the system is mostly black and Hispanic, almost two-thirds of its public school students come from families on welfare and about three-fourths have a single parent at home. The system has shrunk by a third in the last 12 years to about 59,000 today and its high schools have a dropout rate of about 50 percent that has steadily grown in recent years.
The success of an earlier public-private jobs program, the Boston Compact, appears to have helped keep unemployment in Boston`s Class of 1985 to 4.5 percent, compared with 20 percent in the rest of the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Boston Compact helped spawn the latest marriage between business and the schools. Private efforts to plug widening gaps in public education may not solve all the problems that hold back so many of the nation`s students, but it is a refreshing start. No one can point fingers at anyone else in solving the problems of the nation`s schools. The responsibility rests with everyone.
