Report on school construction from Mass Inc and WRRB

 This was released yesterday

How great is the clever title?
A building foundation...the foundation budget?

The upshot is that if Shrewsbury has nine schools, and Worcester has fifty schools, and each can build one new school at a time, when we get to the end of any set of time, Shrewsbury can rebuild all of its schools before Worcester has rebuilt a fifth of theirs.

If we add to that the massive unequal abilities of local communities to fund school construction, which parallel in many ways the massive unequal abilities of local communities to fund their local school operations, we end up with:

Boston and the Gateway Cities have been significantly underrepresented in the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s Core Program, which distributes large grants to help communities build new schools or fully replace or renovate existing buildings.  

Together they make up nearly a third of all schools in Massachusetts, yet they have received less than 19 percent of invitations to the Core Program since 2015, the report says. Suburban projects accounted for 57 percent of Core Program invites, despite accounting for just 43 percent of schools in the state. 

Or as in State House News Service: 

"We're seeing, just based on the invitation outcomes, who's being invited to do these significant rebuilds or these significant renovation projects. We're seeing suburban districts benefiting more than our urban and gateway city schools," Anthony Clough, research associate at the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, said Tuesday at a briefing following the report's release. 

This has the built-up-over-time result one could expect: 

The report also looked at the demographics of students more likely to attend schools with inadequate learning conditions, finding that Black, Hispanic and low-income students are more likely to attend overcrowded schools, schools with inferior physical conditions, and schools lacking learning features that are deemed essential to education.

You can also read coverage in the Boston Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette,  and even the Boston Herald, which headlines with something to make this sound like the fault of the cities, because it's the Herald.

In any case, I'll add here that while school construction is very popular, conversations about our school districts being inherently unequal in how they are set up are not, and having that conversation at the state level, especially at the Legislature, is...I think unpopular is an understatement.

There's a reason we're here, and it's because we're not nearly as good as we think we are.