Report on Black exodus from BPS inconclusive

Critics unhappy with outside investigation findings

The inconclusive findings of an investigation into Boston Public Schools’ treatment of senior administrators of color have left critics frustrated.

The long-awaited report, which was presented at the Boston School Committee’s meeting Aug. 30, stemmed from an internal BPS complaint brought forward in August 2022 alleging a trend of senior administrators of color being put on paid administrative leave at a higher rate than their white counterparts.

Similar allegations were outlined in a letter sent to BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper more than a year ago by a collection of 15 retired “concerned educators of color” who had heard from about a dozen central office administrators affected. Allegations in the letter included concerns about the use of administrative leave as well as other aspects of the disciplinary process.

Last fall, Skipper tapped outside counsel, Natashia Tidwell and Janki Viroja of the law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, to conduct an investigation.

At the Committee meeting, Tidwell said that due to limited data, she was unable to draw a reliable conclusion as to whether and to what extent race was a factor in decisions on the disciplinary outcomes resulting in administrative leaves.

In the course of the report, Tidwell collected data between the fall of 2019 and summer of 2022 on internal investigations into senior leadership conducted by the Office of Equity and the Office of Labor Relations — the two BPS entities that conduct them. She and her team determined the “senior leadership” included administrators in the district’s central office as well as school leaders like principals and heads of school.

Two signers of the 2022 letter criticized the inconclusive report.

“I think it insults our intelligence. I think, given what we know, as it relates to the 14 or 15 of us who signed that letter, with the background information we have, and then looking at what was in that report, I felt it was an insult,” said Barbara Fields, a former director of the equity office.

She said that, given the limited data the report worked with, Tidwell should have interviewed more people to come to a more solid determination.

The report states that Tidwell and her team conducted interviews with internal and external stakeholders, but two of the “concerned educators of color” pointed to who was left out of those interviews. Both Edith Bazile, another of the letter writers, and Fields said none of the affected administrators they had spoken with were contacted for the report.

“They didn’t have large enough numbers to come up with any conclusion, yet I don’t know one person they interviewed, and I know people intimately engaged in this whole [investigatory] process for over a year,” Fields said.

One former BPS administrator of color, who left following the pressure of an internal investigation, said the lack of interviews with affected staff negatively impacted the report. The administrator asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

“The lawyer is not a statistician; her job was to take a look at why there were so many more Black [investigations] proportionately than whites, and people of color proportionately than whites. But, again, there was no qualitative analysis,” the administrator said.

From early on the process, the district said Tidwell was being brought on to conduct a data analysis, rather than investigate individual cases. In a reply sent in November to the “concerned educators of color,” Skipper said that Tidwell’s job was to determine whether investigations and discipline occurred at a disparate rate.

Despite Tidwell’s inconclusive findings, both the former administrator and Bazile also pointed to data released in the report as an indicator that there had been disproportionate investigations into staff of color.

Signs at an Aug. 24 rally outline community concerns about Boston Public Schools’ treatment of Black staff. A new report into allegations of disparate disciplinary action against Black senior administrators in the district concluded there wasn’t enough data to identify whether race played a factor in disciplinary actions. BANNER PHOTO

The report found that, of the investigations conducted by the BPS Office of Labor Relations, which handled more of them over the three-year period, 61% that resulted in paid administrative leave involved staff of color. In contrast, averaged over the three years covered by the data, about 54% of BPS administrators and school leaders were people of color, the report said.

Over the three-year period, the annual percentage of Black administrators alone hovered at or below 35%. In that same time, Black employees made up about 46% of cases of paid administrative leave among senior administrators.

The authors of the letter also expressed concerns that the district wasn’t transparent in describing the origins of the investigation. Throughout the process, Fields said she never received any indication that it was looking only into an internal BPS complaint.

“I was surprised to hear that [the investigation stemmed from the internal complaint], because during this year we never heard that,” Fields said.

During the presentation of her report, Tidwell acknowledged confusion around the origins of the report and said Skipper was working to provide clarity about the scope of the review.

While Tidwell said there was not enough data to draw definitive conclusions, the report offered a series of recommendations, including better tracking of misconduct investigation procedures; regular audits to identify trends and potentially problematic patterns; and specific, published criteria for paid administrative leave. Currently, there are no district-wide fixed criteria for determining when a staff member is put on leave.

At the meeting, representatives from the Office of Human Capital and the Office of Labor Relations outlined an action plan to attempt to implement the recommendations.

Separately, at-large City Councilor Julia Mejia filed a hearing order Aug. 9 to audit the city’s hiring and firing practices including, but not limited to, BPS.

Mejia said the work started before the letter from the 15 “concerned educators of color” was sent in August 2022, but the allegations of the treatment of senior administration within the district’s central office piqued the interest of her office, providing a specific example of the issues she hears about as chair of the Council’s Committee on Labor, Workforce and Economic Development.

She said she hopes the hearing will help develop an understanding of what issues exist, as well as what benchmarks should be measured to track progress.

“We need to be able to, in this hearing, identify what is the data that we want to measure?” Mejia said. “Not just the number of complaints, but what else is there that we should start thinking about? And then based on the hearing, identify what that framework looks like and then advocate for that.”

The hearing, which was originally scheduled for Sept. 5, was postponed until later in September to ensure the mayor’s and the BPS superintendent’s offices can be present and available.

The former BPS administrator who spoke with the Banner said Mejia’s hearing cannot be effective unless the process includes the opportunity for affected BPS administrators to express their concerns anonymously, without fear of retribution from people within the district.

Bazile pointed to Mejia’s hearing as a next step to dig deeper into an issue she said the Tidwell report didn’t effectively address.

“This investigation [by Tidwell] was a nothing-burger,” Bazile said. “It was not intended to break open or to truly interrogate the hiring, retention and firing process in Boston public schools. I believe that this is a to-be-continued.”