Boston Schools Chief Out After Short, Rocky Tenure

BOSTON — When Mayor Martin J. Walsh picked Tommy Chang to be the superintendent of Boston’s schools in 2015, he said he had good chemistry with Chang and had faith in his abilities.

“You have to have somebody you have complete confidence in,” Walsh said at the time. “I felt that with him.”

But after a tumultuous three years, that confidence has eroded, and the mayor and the superintendent have reached what they say is a mutual decision for Chang to step down now, two years before his contract expires.

His departure was announced a day after a lawsuit raised questions about whether the school system was providing information about the immigration status of students to federal officials, but city officials said that issue had no bearing on Chang’s leaving. Earlier episodes, including a fiercely debated plan to change the time that school would start and an audit of school finances, raised concerns about Chang’s commitment to transparency and his ability to connect with people in the school community.

“The superintendent had an inability to communicate effectively with families in the district and with his own team,” said Annissa Essaibi-George, a city councilor who heads the education committee and who formerly taught in the city schools. “He wasn’t able to motivate individuals to get the job done.”

Chang, 43, declined an interview request Monday.

Rumors had been swirling for months that Walsh was steadily losing faith in him.

At one point last year, Chang announced support for changing school start times, making younger children start earlier and allowing teenagers to start later. Parents were outraged. Many said that the plan would upend their work schedules and child care arrangements and had been sprung on them with little warning. In response, Chang delayed the changes for at least a year.

In another instance, an IRS audit found that some schools had been mismanaging student activity funds. Chang delayed informing Walsh, and the mayor later upbraided him during a news conference.

“We’ve had a conversation — myself and the superintendent — and it won’t happen again,” Walsh said, with Chang standing silently at his side.

The mayor also has expressed frustration that student performance has not improved quickly enough. In an interview last week with CommonWealth magazine — before Chang’s resignation was made public — Walsh was blunt. “They’re not performing anywhere near where they need to be,” the mayor said of the district’s open-enrollment high schools.

In a farewell message on the Boston Public Schools website, Chang said the schools had made improvements under his leadership. He said graduation rates had increased to 72.7 percent in 2017 from 70.7 percent in 2015, and dropout rates had dropped to 3.6 percent last year from 4.4 percent in 2015.

Last week, the city and Chang were sued by civil rights groups that say the school district appeared to be giving information to federal immigration authorities. In one case, the lawsuit said, information from the district — a report by a school police officer — was used as evidence in deportation proceedings against a high school student.

Nearly half of the Boston school district’s 56,000 students — who come from about 140 countries — speak a language other than English at home. School systems are barred from asking students about their immigration status.

In a letter issued Monday, Chang, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan as a child, said the schools had no practice of providing student records to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But, he said, the district had complied with requests from law enforcement agencies that were “investigating gang-related murders in East Boston over two years ago and provided relevant school police reports, which did not contain any student immigration information.”

Matthew Cregor, a staff attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said that while the committee was focused on city policy and not on Chang, his letter nonetheless raised concern. “There are exceptions to federal education privacy laws that allow for some information sharing,” he said, but the letter suggests “the city is speaking out of both sides of its mouth.”

Some national news reports suggested that the lawsuit had led to Chang’s departure. But the mayor and Chang had met last week, before the suit was filed, and had already agreed on Chang’s departure, according to a city official who requested anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.

In a statement Friday, the mayor indicated that his decision had been a long time coming.

“Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the progress we have made to improve education in Boston,” he said in the statement. “After several conversations with Tommy Chang about the future of Boston Public Schools, we have mutually agreed that there needs to be a change in leadership at BPS.”

He said he would appoint an interim superintendent this week.