Boston City TV, MA Boston School Committee, 1 Nov 2017

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From YouTube: Boston School Committee Meeting 11-1-17

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Boston School Committee Meeting 11-1-17

A

Serve their country in the US military tonight we have the special privilege of honoring chief, petty officer, John Joseph Ensco. So will you please come up and join us.

A

So Mr Ensco left Roxbury Memorial High School in 1947 to serve in the US Navy, but what was going to be a short stint and ended up being a career serving around the world with the US Navy he served 30 years in the new US Navy and then followed that by serving 29 years with the Boston Police Department right here in Boston, so with most of his career spent right here in Roxbury is b2 district. We are forever indebted to mr.

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NCO for his tremendous sacrifice in service and tonight we are honored to present him with his official Boston public high school diploma.

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We all have to look right here. This is just Ottoman life.

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So mr. Ensco, since you were clearly the valedictorian and class president of the Roxbury High School class of 1947, as as honored in 2017, we're going to ask you to say a couple of words. If you'd like.

B

Well, as my daughter-in-law said just say a couple of words: that's it well I want you to know this is the privilege to receive this when I first went into the Navy. I was only 16 years of age, but when I signed the papers of giants join I just happened to be 18 years of age, but I didn't Forge.

B

My boobs I forgot I, wouldn't do a thing like that: I just used my brother's birth certificate, so when I did turn 17 I was on a ship over in the middle of torini and I told him what I had done and they changed my name from John Michaels, the Joseph patrich I continued to serve I was due to get out in September in 1950 President signed. The declaration freeze and everybody know discharges so now that I'm stuck I figured I'll continue in Mecca.

B

This career I did I made it a career started studying made my advancements, I retired, as a chief, petty officer in United, States Navy as high as I could go and I think I achieved quite a thing, but I want to thank you. People here tonight very much, thank you.

A

And superintendent I'm not sure if you want to have a say word as well.

C

Boston is always so rich in its history, and this is the first School District in the country and just always incredible to hear the legacy of this school district under people who've gone through the system, whether they were grad or not, a grad or just now, a grad of Boston, Public, Schools and just just always proud to hear the stories behind this incredible school system. But I want to thank you personally for your service and and then next week we celebrate Veterans Day and we just got to keep this in mind.

C

This is why we celebrate Veterans Day it's to honor people like you. Thank you so much.

A

By the way, is anyone else noticing how fantastic he looks in his uniform right now. Congratulations thank you for joining us this evening, 87 wow. Thank you, sir.

A

As I told chief, petty officer Ensco, when we walked in and I saw him, my dad also served in the Navy in the South Pacific in World War, two so I walked in and saw the Navy uniform and had a big smile. So congratulations, sir. Thank you for joining us. We'll move on now to the approval of minutes.

A

Oh, miss Sullivan, we'll be making a minor change to the minutes to better characterize the testimony at last week's public comment other than that, so you will be able to access of the minutes tomorrow on the bps website other than one minor would change that she is making to better characterize the testimony of last week's public comment. Are there any other changes requested?

A

Any now, I'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes of the October 25th 2017 school committee meeting as amended Thank You T moms in a second by Miss, Robinson. Okay, great any discussion, objection the objection to approve in the amended minutes, yai by unanimous consent. Here we know Mia many minutes are approved, we'll move on out of the superintendence before I present you, our superintendent, dr. Tommy Chang, a.

C

Good evening, everyone the evening School Committee and good evening, all those who are in an audience take a little smaller audience today. I think others are getting ready for Game seven of the World Series tonight, I'm sure.

A

Not ask we're ready for a nice leisurely meeting I.

C

Have several bright spots to start us off with I want to start off by just giving congratulations to the Mildred Avenue k-8 school in Mattapan.

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Today this morning they won to add vesser's 2017 Pompeii's on school, on the move, and this is the annual $100,000 prize for schools in Boston, Public Schools or a particular School in Boston, Public Schools, and there you see a picture of of the staff and the leadership at the Mildred K to eight principal Andrew bonds, and his staff should be incredibly proud of their work, they're, alkyl, academic outcomes, the work they've done around building a culture of collaboration and the work they've done to truly authentically engage families and community.

C

The two other finalists were Donald McKay ke and the Patrick J Kennedy Elementary in East Boston. Both those schools should be also commended. They were both finalists. This year's all three schools were recognized for their strategies to support the whole child, recognizing both academics and social-emotional learning as critical for student success. I want to give us this year, thanks to Ed Bester's, for providing this incredible gift. This gift has been going on for 12 years and I. Thank the leadership of Ed vest, errs and Laura Burrell. Our CEO is here so Laura.

C

Thank you so much for your leadership as well.

C

And definitely a special thanks to the selection panel and all those that have been involved. All those that have given ed Bester's continues to take donations to help support their work, and so just want to make sure that folks know that they are always open to more donations and again, I want to congratulate the Mildred ka ma, ka and Ephesian.

D

C

Second highlight and want to share I want to thank everyone who came out this past weekend to DPS all open house. We had several impactful discussions during this open house. We talked about the stem workforce to the future and how it bring more diversity to the stem workforce. We talked about great configurations, no Rappaport, Institute, co-sponsored event.

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Osteria morning where we talked about great configurations. We had updates around build DPS. We also had a working group around school start time end times. There were also just a lot fun activities, allow workshops for families and for students and just as importantly, we also collected three bins of clothing and supplies to benefit and families from Puerto Rico and, as of today, 72 students from Puerto Rico have enrolled into the yes.

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Since Hurricane Maria.

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The donations from the open house are, in addition to another large donation you receive from Patos crayons this week. They increase their donation to BPS, to 900, coats and hats, and a thousand backpacks.

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C

Thank you to kratos, a crayon. I had an opportunity to thank.

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A lot of the volunteers on sunday morning, while they were frantically stuffing all these bad guys getting these supplies ready for delivery on Monday. So.

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um I want to thank everybody attending the open house. I want to give a special thank yous, a document even McCreary, and her team, who put the open house together and I, shall thank you to angly.

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Who, without you know a speaker during the luncheon and and CLE, is obviously the president.

D

C

Next bright spot, over the last week, more than 1,100 students at three of our middle schools have received iPads and free internet access due to a new partnership with Verizon. Those three schools are the Edwards. The two multi and the McCormack I had the opportunity to and had the rollout and the launch of this at the McCormick's at the Timothy, where students and their families picked up their iPads mayor Walsh joined the festivities.

C

This past Saturday additional T Bryson was there to teach students about technology, and there was tons of just like fun activities for young people by 2022. There will be more than 9 million jobs in stem, and it's critical that we are removing all barriers to success for our students. So for the students at these three schools they will have access 24/7 to a piece of technology that is more powerful than what was used to take men to moon and I want to thank Verizon for of being a particle partner in all this work.

C

So that is my last bright spot. For today, it's a little bit shorter, given that we.

C

Yes, I do have one last thing: Thank You, chairman El Nino, for reminding me this last this past week, one of our high schools is going has been going through. The anisa needy, ask accreditation process and that's East Boston high school. This is a video that they put together and launched their work this week and their presentation just week to the visiting committee and it talks about their core values. So one is shared this video because it was actually put together by the staff of students.

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In character, passion for learning have empathy and compassion, she'll cry.

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C

So now that concludes my remarks for this evening. Thank.

A

C

Superintendent, any.

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Questions or comments for the superintendent on his report.

G

Some people miss their calling clear.

G

H

Please thank them for their hard work, doc.

A

Teary-Eyed, no any other questions or comments, I will say: I a school couldn't remembers, they always try to have at least one school couldn't remember, attend the first day of the New York PNL meeting to talk from a school committee viewpoint and I was honored to attend that on Sunday, along with a number of other people and I have to report to my fellow members of I've done this a number of times and the student and teacher of faculty presentation that was made that morning to kick off the piano visit was mind-boggling.

A

It was unbelievable and I have to tell you. I, have never seen high school cheerleaders cheering about a two and a five year plan and.

E

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Teachers and improving the bathrooms and.

E

A

Food it was, it was so creative. It was so well done. The niak panel was actually literally speechless at what they saw and they said that when they met with us directly and the spirit that you pick up up about, what's going on, east boston, high school and, quite frankly, a bunch of the other East Boston schools as well.

A

It's probably no surprise that two were the three finalists this morning at ed Vestas for East Boston School, there's something special going on out there in the water in East Boston right now, and we're trying to figure out what it is, but East, Boston high school I was so pleased for them. They have so many good things going on in that video captured it right there. So congratulations to headmaster, a brandy, Forte, an assistant, headmaster, Judy, Blanco and I believe her husband, actually who's.

A

A teacher at another school actually wrote wrote that song, so it was. It was great to see so congratulations to them any other questions or comments for the superintendent's. On its report. Hearing none I'll entertain a motion. Should we see the superintendent report? Thank you. Miss Robinson is there a second second.

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A

You Dean Roberts in any discussion, objections to motion any objection to receiving the superintendent report by Unanimous Consent any none. The motion carries we boo before we move on to general public comment, as we had said before, once a month now for our first meeting each month, we're gonna be inviting our student representative, mr. yandere McClay, to provide his monthly update on the Boston student advisory council. Mr. macclay.

I

Good evening, so, in the last month, beside conducted its annual listening project, where we has 14 students and 7 adults go out to three bus stations, collecting feedback from students and parents about their experience with school discipline. We got highlights from students like some of the dumbest things that they've ever been suspended for once to do was suspended for throwing a paper airplane. Once you were suspended for dropping a pencil, we how we as students, how many peers do you know that I've been suspended.

I

Some said too many to count and we look forward to putting together a package for the school committee with some of the feedback and results from that, and you guys get that in in the next few weeks, so also recycle, celebrating having 12,000 or surpassing 12,000 uses of our boss student rights app, and we look forward to working with you all as we continue to gain traction with that all right and then also on October 30th, with Mary and Creighton and her department.

I

We got to discuss with some of our bee sex students about later school start time and end times we got to well. We also appointed to students work with us working group around that issue and also we got to express our opinions about looking at how students want to see more emphasis around looking at extra curricular activities, sports work and also family life, and how do we support them in that?

I

Then? You also nominated one student Nicholas heads to work with the opportunity chief Nagata this year opportunity we got task force to be serving his second year, also a highlight. We have two students from peace, a colonic Kendra at West, Roxbury Academy, who hosted their annual retreat at the school where they had over 30 students working on civic engagement projects and also how to be more active members in their school in the community and also supporting peers. Another be psych update. We have 48 students and be sac representing over 21 schools.

I

We will continue to work to identify restaurants, some of the missing schools, and we made progress working with office of engagement, high schools liaison and instructional superintendents.

A

Excellent Thank You mr. Murphy any questions or comments for him.

J

I'm getting up to 21 school, what's your plan about the missing like four or five so.

I

Missing for five, so we've been reaching out to Headmaster's just saying: well, we have spots open for representation from your school and we can help you identify students and also we look at student government's and saying what student stand out. What students do you think would fit into this role, although we are open to all students to come.

A

So, thank you. Oh I'm, sorry, mom, I,.

H

Was just gonna ask what's the follow-up from the Headmaster's some.

I

Of the Headmaster's have sent as you we've gained for school since the last school committee meeting, so some Headmaster's are actually trying. We just ask for more support and pushing them and actually having someone back that up with them.

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A

Gonna suggest that as well, maybe at the next meeting, the first meeting in December, you could tell us what schools sending a student and maybe we can help encourage them.

G

They have one month.

I

A

Fantastic, the other question I have: could you share with us just a little bit more, you said you had a conversation at v-- sect about different start times for high schools anamarie. You know we have had students express interest in it, but also concern over the impact on jobs, maybe doing some family care at home, internships, sports clubs, etc soap. Some of those concerns. It's raised you just a little bit on some of the pros and cons that you've heard from students well.

I

Some of the pros they one of the major things they said we get to sleep later in the morning. We get more rest, but also more students who are obligated to work after school and provide.

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I

Help provide for the family or take care of family members or students who just want to be engaged. They find that if we get out later in the evening, we're missing out on opportunities, because it's already 4 o'clock and it's getting dark outside. So imagine if we gallon school later, then transportation doing peak transportation, so everyone's getting off of work, most students are getting out of school, so they looked at that I.

I

Wouldn't take that into consideration, saying well how much time would we actually have to do this before it's like 9 or 10 o'clock at night, and you have to go home and still have to.

A

Go home and study- and you said a couple of students- would be sakaar gonna, be on the Working Group. Yes,.

I

We have two students, great.

A

Any other questions.

D

A

Comments, mr. macclay, thank you, sir, for your report. We'll move on now to general public comment. Miss Sullivan.

K

Public comment period is an opportunity for parents and other concerned parties to make brief presentations to school committee, pertinent school issues, questions on specific school matters and not answered at this time, but referred to the superintendent or later response questions on specific policy matters an audience at this time, but maybe the subject: I've waited discussion by the committee. Each speaker will have three minutes to speak and I remind you when you have one minute remaining and then 30 seconds. Those require interpretation, services.

K

Speakers may not resign their time to others. Written testimony is appreciated and encouraged before you begin. Tv cameras were only record speakers. We have three speakers this evening, beginning with Jose Martinez.

L

My name is my name is Jose Martinez I am a 2016 graduate of Brighton High. Currently, I am attending Bunker Hill Community, College and I. Have an interest in literature. I am here to request that LMAO tools, step programs be brought back to Brighton High, to quote Henry Brooks Addams a teacher effects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops. What makes LMAO truly great teacher she passionately gives everything for her students.

L

Her priority is to see her students become more and more educated and for them to be strong thinkers in doors for our country and our world's future. Lmao is a teacher who always shows how much she cares. When I was her student I experienced how much she cared about me and my fellow classmates. She taught us so much: construction, robotics, acceleration momentum, velocity how machines operate, etc, etc.

L

She also mentored us on ethics on how to behave to one another, how to work as AI, diverse, joyful team towards a common goal of all of my teachers in Brighton High. She was the only one who brought in university students who, on a long-term basis, were there to teach guide and mentors these contacts.

L

Contacts were a great resource and when I was thinking about college and how to get there, misil's, who gave me the opportunity to be a part of her brain burning, Tigers FIRST, Robotics team lots of students had the opportunity to dissipate in competitions that positively impacted all our lives. She convinced me that education was in my best interest. She always guided me to improve my skills and to give my old tour successful learning.

L

I thought I did not have what it took, what it took to be good at mathematics, but me so to realize that I could do it. She made me believe in myself. Mistletoe is one of the reasons that I've become the person here today. A person in love with education in love with reading and writing about socio-economic issues. I have gone through much adversity, including homelessness. When I confided in her that I was having difficulties, miss O'toole's encouraged me was a great help to me.

L

I cannot believe that you've taken away all her programs from the students at brain high. Why are you treating us this way? Why are we the ones deemed unworthy of STEM education? Thank you. Thank.

A

You, mr. Martinez, thank you for joining us this evening.

M

Good evening to all once again good to see you all, my name is Rodolfo Aguilera and I am the parent organizer, with Massachusetts parents united. We are a statewide organization that unites parents to build safer, neighborhoods, affordable housing and equitable access to high quality education. I am the father of three and I live in Hyde, Park and I am here to represent our parents chapter in Boston that has nearly 2,000 members.

M

Mpu is a data-driven organization, and to that end we have with the support of our research team, which includes some of the former administration staff from bps to take a look at some of our neighborhoods schools with an independent lens. We all know that the achievement gap is a problematic in many of our schools in Boston I'm, not greater example of the gap in achievement for our children in crisis. We have in the city regarding science, education, it's the out.

M

It's the elephant in the room, and it's not being discussed tonight, we'd like to make sure that we are on the record in saying that we want to see this body start to address the issue aggressively.

M

According to our Massachusetts parent generated report card for Dorchester, these are several schools that registered at zero percent proficiency on the fifth grade: science assessment across the number of different subgroups cutting through all the spins and creative slicing of the data. The numbers are clear and, frankly, the fact that our children have no proficiency by grade five is one of the great concern to all of us.

M

There is no way that our children will have access to the high tech jobs of the future that our mayor, Martin Walsh, is working hard to bring to Boston without a solid foundation of the STEM education, beginning from the very beginning of their educational careers. By the time they get to fifth grade it's almost already too late, parents want to see the Boston Public Schools to address the situation with the foot with a focused plan on STEM education.

M

We look forward to working with all of you and find solutions to the science crisis in Boston, but urge all of you to commit into finding solutions as soon as possible. Our children at their future cannot wait. I do want to thank you, superintendent, chairperson, Vice Chairperson and all the members of the committee, as well as the student representative tonight and I hope you have a good evening. Thank you.

N

Good evening, we're about to enter year, five of the home-based enrollment plan in Boston.

N

Plan asking for the equity analysis. We heard that BPS was going to look for an independent analysis of the home based plan I've found out, even though I regularly check a lot of websites. I didn't see that the equity analysis request for proposal was posted, but I found out from somebody in the neighborhood who regularly gets emails from the city. I came in on September 26th because you had to physically come here to pick up the the it was called an invitation to bid not a request for proposals.

N

I did send it to civil rights, researchers across the country at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Minnesota, NYU, Columbia, Teachers, College, etc. The bids were due. Ten days later, the bid looked like it was written for a home based team that requested five years of experience, providing statistical analysis and evaluation services within bps or a similar urban district. Five years experience working in bps, public school or a similar district and the timetable specified in the invitation to bid is already passed.

N

It asks the bidders to have a draft by yesterday an updated report ready for public sharing by November 15th and be available to co-present to the office of engagement, December 6, with a final report in March.

N

It asked for the lowest and responsive bidder. I worked for state government for over 25 years, sometime as a lawyer, sometimes on procurement appeals and in the state. There's we look for best value, which doesn't always mean the lowest bidder. It means the bidder with the expertise and the capability to do the job. Well, we want somebody who can do this job very well.

N

We want a timetable that makes sense if it takes longer than specified in the bid, so be it, but it is critical that we have that analysis, we'll VPS post or make the proposals available to this committee you're. The ones who adopted the plans will bps make the proposals available to the public.

N

We want more than just data crunching and big data. What we need is really rolling up the sleeves with a real equity lens, hopefully a lens on race and income I'm a little concerned that we're asking for, albeit this, is how the plan is designed and maybe miss designed about access to schools. I think we need access to seats anyway. I hope that we move forward and I look forward to hearing more from the bps on this issue. Thank you. Thank.

A

You mr. Issa mr.

K

Anyhow, that concludes our speakers for public comment. Thank.

A

You miss Sullivan. How first only action I in this evening is grants for approval, totaling, 30, 2491 dollars, I believe they were great. Are there any questions or comments from the committee on these grants? Call me I thought.

O

The definition smart goals were excellent in this set of grants.

O

A

You any other questions or comments. Hearing none I'll entertain a motion to approve that consent. Calendar was presented, Miss Robinson. Yes, thank you. A serve a second Thank You Dean Robinson any discussion or objection. Any objection to approving the grants and the full consent calendar by unanimous consent. Hearing on the grants will approve we'll move on to our first report the opportunity index at this time, I'd like to invite dr. Colin Rose, the assistant superintendent, opportunity achievement.

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A

Step forward, dr. Rose is gonna, be joined by dr. Diane O'brien, the assistant professor, at Northeastern, University and co-director of the Boston area research initiative.

N

A

Well, as dr. Nancy kill, professor of education at Harvard, University, Graduate, School of Education, and a membership of the leadership team at the Boston area, research welcome to you all and while you're getting your presentation, ready, I first like to invite superintendent Chang to give any opening remarks. Thank.

C

You chairman on the own tonight, we will present to the school committee. What I believe is a very progressive equity driven policy potential policy, which is the implementation of a new innovative tool called the opportunity index. The opportunity index aims to provide bps a tool to make decisions on matters such as resource allocations, program, valuation, other perspective and retrospective assessments.

C

Opportunity index is a framework that integrates student home neighborhoods, along with individual and family level of data as a means of measuring opportunity gaps throughout the district. It's a dynamic tool that can be updated regularly to ensure that the most predictive factors and the most recent and formation are being used when we make important decisions as a school committee as a school district, the opportunity index work is a collaboration of various offices. As you can see, behind dr. Colin Rose, we have Becky Schuester from office equity, Monica Roberts, from engagement with Eleanor Lauren's from finance.

C

We have Nicole Wagner from data accountability. Obviously you know dr. Colin Rose proper to achievement gap office. We've also worked very closely with the Boston area research initiative barri. This is a very important step forward for equity as a school district.

C

What we are bringing forth to you today is just a framework we're looking to get feedback from all of you around what a policy could look like. Well, policy could sound like and in an upcoming meeting we will be bringing the actual policy statement to you. We're also now going to be get gathering more feedback from school leaders, from students from teachers and look forward to bringing all that forth in an upcoming meeting last thing, I'll say, is that we are it's often it's difficult to measure. What is the? What is the opportunity gap like?

C

How did you actually truly measure it and very and different school districts across the country may do this in very, very different ways, but the work that has been done here is probably the most innovative and the most progressive work that I have seen nationally and really excited that we're being this sort of deliberate and thoughtful about how we actually try to measure what is the opportunity gap, so we can actually put the right investments in the right places. So with that I'm going to turn it over to dr.

C

Rose, who will be leading the presentation, but thank you so much and thank you for your leadership on this. Thank you and.

P

Thank you school committee, members of the audience, I'm Colin Rose from the opportunity in Chima gap office I'm here with Dan O'brien, professor at Northeastern, and dr. Nancy Hill, a professor at Harvard University, both representing barri or the Boston area research initiative. We are here to present an exciting proposal to members of school committee. I want a tool that we believe is innovative and an innovative way to operationalize resource allocation and bps in a more equitable way.

P

What we coin the opportunity index before I hand, the presentation over to Dan and Nancy, who help model and validate this index. I, would like to read the policy statement or the proposed policy statement and go into why we believe this is an important tool and what it consists of kind of at a higher level.

P

This is kind of our first attempt at a policy statement, we'd like to see your reaction to it and get your impressions. The Boston Public Schools will formally adopt the opportunity index as a district-wide tool for making decisions that drive equity coherence and innovation aligned with the school committee's opportunity, achievement gap policy. The opportunity index uses data from students home neighborhoods, along with individual and family level, data as a mean for measuring opportunity gaps throughout the district.

P

In turn, the Boston Public Schools will close these opportunity gaps by using the index to make decisions such as resource allocation program, evaluation and other perspective, and retrospective assessments. The index will be updated annually to ensure the most predictive factors and recent information available are incorporated.

P

So why do we need this index? We know that students come from their homes to our schools, with an individual, invisible backpack of varied opportunity and experiences, and, while wsf and other tools that we use align to national best practices introducing more variables to get a more nuanced view of what need is within our schools will bring us to the next level of equity. Outside of our current measures, the better we are able to match resources with need, the closer we get to closing opportunity gaps.

P

So how do we get at that invisible now knapsack that students are bringing with them to school a varied opportunity in a more nuanced and more accurate way? The opportunity index is a composite index that introduces neighborhood and individual level variables that are out of schools control, thus allowing the district to direct, varied resources. The schools based on their concentration of students coming from lower or higher opportunity, neighborhoods and backgrounds.

P

Schools may not have caused these differences in opportunity, but they are well positioned and have the responsibility to mitigate these differences and as a district, you want to allocate resources through the most intentional and equitable means, and we believe this index brings us much closer to that.

P

This brings us to our core values of equity, coherence and innovation. The index itself is explicitly stated in the opportunity and an achievement gap policy and its implementation plan under five section. 5.3 demonstrate equity quality impact and funding and resources. It is very much in line with advancing one of the six district priorities set by dr. Chang allocate funds more equitably.

P

It complements the equity conversations we're having around our curriculum and our pedagogy. The essentials of instructional equity are culturally and linguistically sustaining practice work both centrally at the central office, the cabinet level and at every single school in our district, and it complements other tools such as the bps racial equity tool being rolled out this year. Quite often, people say resource allocation is a value statement. This is another step in saying. Equity is our value, so without further ado and with great excitement. I will turn the presentation over to dr. Dan O'brien and dr.

P

Nancy hill to present the ins and out of this index.

Q

Thank You Colin good evening committee. Thank you for having us here this evening. So as Colin said, Nancy and I are going to kind of walk through the process of constructing and validating the index and and the implications there of I'm. So just sort of starting with the idea that that Colin's already stated this was to create a place-based opportunity index that captures inequities that arise from factors outside of the control of schools. So I think the original inspiration was the idea that neighborhoods matter all right and and beyond.

Q

Just the fact that demographic and socio-economic background matter as well, but also where you wake up in the morning and where you put your head down at night, is going to matter to your outcomes in general, including academic achievement, but also that we can't lose sight of the fact that those individual factors matter too, and so that's why this has become as Colin described it a composite and comprehensive index to try to address both of those aspects and to the superintendent's point.

Q

The the really original part of this and the part that really attracted us to the project as partners was that it takes neighborhood effect seriously in a policy way that no no policy or program that we know of nationally really does, and so it was exciting to be able to construct that and validate with the team here at bps. For that purpose, so just sort of to map it out in a sense right, Boston, like many other urban areas like it, is essentially residentially, segregated de-facto on racial and socio-economic lines.

Q

Right, and so you have disparities between those groups in the first place, but then again the contexts that those individuals live in, reinforce those disparities even further, and so the idea that then the opportunity index could assess and account for both levels of disparity and incorporated into policy and programming and funding to think about ways to address between school variations in right. Schools are going to need the resources to address the challenges that children are carrying in their backpacks, as it were so starting with the bottom line.

Q

First, just to kind of give you the takeaways and then we'll walk through the details, so at the very top neighborhoods matter, neighbourhoods differed by as much as 20 points on MCAT scores.

Q

Now, that's from the top to the bottom, but and that is controlling for individual level, factors that is saying to students with exactly the same individual background living in the the most, not necessarily advantage disadvantage, but the neighborhoods, with the context that are most conducive and least conducive to academic achievement differed by as much as 20 points in their expected MCAT score, which is 25 percent.

Q

As you know, of the total eighty point scale, and this is driven particularly by crime rates, socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, that is to say, concentrated access to or lack thereof of, resources and academic attainment of adults in the community, and we'll talk a little more about that.

Q

Obviously English language learners, static, special education status disadvantage previously measured through free and reduced price. Lunch now, measured as a poverty index, I'm still matter a lot too right and and even more so really the neighborhoods. But the two both are important and then last risk indicators which we'll go into more on things like previous suspensions. Previous failures, so on so forth are also a great way to predict future outcomes and they they would support an opportunity index that is even more predictive, but one of the things that we've realized in our discussions is well.

Q

That could be really great for prediction. We still want that underlying opportunity index to understand the. Why? Right? Where are these students coming from what are their backgrounds, that they have failed a course they have had suspensions previously and that is predictive of their future. The future success so walking through the first stage of the project, was to basically define neighborhood. How do you define context and describe it in an effective way? That's comprehensive and we've aimed we created eight different constructs and we can get into the methodology of that at another time.

Q

I want to keep this brief, but we're happy to provide more detail on how these were constructed, but academic attainment of adults in the neighborhood, public safety or crime levels, public health, physical disorder or the classic broken windows, socioeconomic status of the neighborhood newcomer or phrase that we use to refer to the proportion of the neighborhood that was immigrant status, residential stability, turnover and custodianship, which is a new variable that has been developed by barri working with the 3-1-1 system at the mayor's office.

Q

Looking at how proactive people are taking care of the neighborhood and for various reasons, all eight of these in theory could be related to student academic. Achievement, of course, for different reasons. Right, academic attainment of adults reflects the amount of resources students have in the neighborhood of people to go talk to write to practice to learn how to navigate the world, whereas crime in the neighborhood may reflect kind of a distraction or even a somewhat traumatic set of experiences.

Q

One might have that distracts them from their studies, and so all of these, for various theoretical reasons could be important and now to evaluate them.

Q

I'm going to very quickly just kind of give you a sense of the methodology we use, because I want to make sure the interpreter is understood correctly, but I don't want to spend too much time pulling you into the weeds on this, but it essentially, we used a tool called multi-level models that would disentangle neighborhood and individual characteristics, and this is very important because there's a kind of a classic question in social science right do poor neighborhoods, have lesser outcomes, because poor people live there or because of the overall concentration of lack of resources right.

Q

Is it the people or is it the neighborhood or is it both?

Q

And this is a methodology- that's been developed to handle that if anyone wants to get deeper into the weeds on how that works I'm more than happy to do that if I just wanted to, let you know so that the way we do this, it's simultaneously testing differences between neighborhoods and the differences between individuals assuming they live in the same, and this is important because essentially it's very important when you have racial and socio-economic residential segregation, because these things are inherently correlated and every number that Nancy or I present from here on out accounts for all the other factors we're talking about.

Q

So there's no question of another variable correlating or explaining something all of these are being considered together simultaneously.

Q

So back to our indicators, we had eight and three of them turned out to be irrelevant in the models: Public Health, newcomer and residential stability, and we can unpack why more if you would like, but the five that remained of importance at some level were academic attainment of the adult population, public safety, physical disorder, socioeconomic status and custodianship, and the three most important of those are the academic attainment.

Q

The public safety and the socioeconomic status, as you can see here, so this graph essentially shows how the how important these are for each of the three different age groups: elementary school students, middle school students and high school students, and as you can see, academic attainment was far and away the most powerful predictor of student outcomes, followed by public safety and then SES and the custodianship and physical disorder were important for elementary school students only which speaks to probably the the greater impact of neighborhood at that younger age.

Q

So then, basically to summarize, the neighborhood opportunity index or the neighborhood component of the opportunity index demonstrated that simply put neighborhoods matter right. Even when you consider well what's important for individuals but at the same time that there were clearly individual factors outside of the control of schools. That 20-point difference that I described to you was not the whole variation and there's a lot more to be said. And so we moved on to think about individual level factors as well and at that point, I'm going to turn it over to Nancy to take over.

R

So again trying to account for what individual students bring in their backpack with them to school, and what schools need to do in support schools need in order to to best educate the students that come to them. We want to also look at the individual factors and we want to look at variables. There are a lot of variables in which we could look at, but we wanted to look at variables and constructs that BPS has at they're ready disposable. What could they put in a model? What are they readily collecting in the future?

R

They might want to collect different kinds of variables, but these are the variables that we looked at. They fell in three different categories. First, we looked at individual demographic characteristics which we used free and reduced-price lunch or poverty index.

R

We also looked at special services, special education and AOL services and also prior school experiences, so their attendance in school, whether they've, been suspended before course, failures and in M kasparian failures and as we're looking at this in moving in as an opportunity index. We're not looking at these in the schools that they're currently in we're. Looking at this as as characteristics that they're bringing with them in it into the school, so these are experiences that they've had in the school prior to the one that that the opportunity index can be calculated.

R

So when you look at this again is in a very similar level, you can look at the length of the bars and see the the strength of the impact. If we start all the way to the right, you'll see that special education has the strongest predictor as much as 10 to 13 impasse. Points moving to the left, you'll see that that having a failed or I'm sorry I'm having trouble reading the.

L

R

Status being currently in an an e ll student is associated with with lower performance, with that relationship being strongest among high school students, secondarily among the middle school, and still significant but weaker among elementary school poverty matters and free reduced-price lunch. It matters and it matters it slightly more at the elementary school level compared to the middle and high school level and then, very interestingly, being a former e ell student actually is positively related to achievement outcomes into M test, particularly at the elementary school level and I.

R

Imagine that this isn't just about having you know, learning the language skills, but there's a lot of support that comes to students, particularly at the elementary school level, that, when they're in the EO ell programs is so we're seeing that if you're they're, a former ll student they've, had some some support as they've made adjustments to the school. In addition to becoming proficient in English language in predicting performance, you know, academic aptitude is formed continuously throughout development. This is something that happens over.

R

It's not a one-time shot, it's something that develops as kids go through school, and so we were interested in whether we could use performance in a prior school or previous school to determine the needs of students moving forward, so we're using risk indicators indicators that bps is used already know it's not possible to do this with elementary school students, because they're coming into the school and so we're looking at high school outcomes, we're looking at how they performed in in middle school and looking at middle school outcomes were looking at and how they performed in elementary school.

R

What we're calling lead, indicators or risk indicators, and what we're seeing is that on this graph, if you start again start all the way to the right that having a failed or not done well on your mcat scoring math has the strongest predictor for a 10th grade, MCAT score. So, if you're looking at high school, having failed the impasse in math in eighth grade, it's a strong predictor for not doing well in high school as the most as the strongest predictor failing AOL is also significant.

R

Predictor of 10th grade elo and high school proportion of failing a core curricular class in math or English is also predictive, but a little less so the most significant one you see on this graph is 4 percent. Failure of MCAT scores in math, you'll, see attendance and suspensions also as significant predictors of of outcomes.

R

So, in conclusion, the place matters the neighborhood indica opportunity index accounts, as Dan said, for up to 20 points in M casts and various factors matter, including socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, and keep in mind that the neighborhood factor, not socioeconomic status of the individual family, so living in a neighborhood with other people of a particular socioeconomic status safety, adult educational attainment.

R

Again this isn't their kids own parents, educational attainment, but the educational attainment of other adults in their neighborhood that they're gonna bump into on the street for elementary school physical disorder and custodianship matter, and so I like to think about it. When you have elementary school kids who look who live in their neighborhoods and they look around and they see disorder, and that has an impact on them. But but the idea that parents or other adults in the neighborhood would call 3-1-1 and have things taken.

R

Care of will provide a sense of security, I think for elementary school students. Moreso than that older students, individual character at characteristics matter even more and add even more to what we can explain in in characteristics that students are bringing to school and in relation to their test scores for older students.

R

We can predict future performance with the risk indicators, but the individual level characteristics provide even even more precision and the opportunity index can be effectively used to account for a substantial amount of variation in the outside outside of the control of the school, and so it significantly adds to to students test scores.

P

Briefly, to conclude, I wanted to go over a few kind of high-level examples of how we might apply it just in general areas- and this is quite intentional- to front-load this so that the conversation can kind of stay around like the the actual index and the merits of the index, and we don't go down rabbit holes speculating what this might look like in WS, F or around other other specific programming funding.

P

Applications tonight really I want to concentrate on what is what the index is and what's in the index. Having said that, a few examples might be. You know how we apply partnerships across this district thinking about programming, obviously funding what there were the implications of using this and funding and then thinking about equity analysis of current programming. The way that we do business kind of an ex post facto way, but also thinking forward using the index to have an equity check at the onset of any programming policy that we produce in this district.

P

A more specific example so sitting down with the expanded learning time team around their goals and on a G implementation plan a few weeks ago, and they were talking about the opportunity index in relation to summer learning.

P

They've done a good job, I think over the last few years of changing the narrative around at least k-8 summer school as a place for enrichment, both academically and socially and less of the sit-in grant and get summer school for students that have failed and so they're thinking about concentrations of need at schools and and would think that the opportunity next would give them a more nuanced view of where need is at school sites so that they could then match a higher level of summer programming as schools, with higher concentration of students coming from lower opportunity, neighborhoods to kind of stave off that that summer slump and provide enrichments that otherwise the students wouldn't have avail to them.

P

So that's one kind of specific way that we could think about operationalizing I think this is a tool that could be used vastly across our district. This is a very innovative tool. In our opinion, we don't see anything as robust as this when we look across the nation there's other districts that are trying to approach some of these issues. I know Oakland does a decent job at this, but this is a very robust index that I think would put us as a leader in K education, around equity and resource allocation.

P

I also sat down with a group of civil rights lawyers and others. We took a look at the index and started thinking more flexibly about it outside the Boston context. I think this could be an example of something we might want to lobby towards the state around like resource allocation, specifically for cities and metropolitan areas like Boston, where you see a mismatch between what the the municipality looks like versus who were actually serving in bps.

P

If you could imagine an opportunity, index, statewide and thinking about, then how would you fund a state or a national education? So with that I've Alyssa thank yous and you know, I would like to take full credit of the index because it is going to be houses out of the opportunity to achievement gap office but I believe highly an attribution, not only because I think it tells a story around how things are built and the collaborative nature of things, but it also delineate s-- expertise when and when we don't attribute things to the proper people.

P

I think we lose that, especially when we try to dig into the foundation of why and how we build things so with that I'm sure I'm going to miss people, but this has not existed exhaustive list so, first and foremost I'd like to start with the superintendent, it wouldn't be possible without his support and leadership and vision and commitment towards equity, for us to even bring something like this in front of you, I'd like to especially thank John, sobral and Aaron Cooley was in the audience.

P

She has left us and gone to Brookline to run their data office, but they were kind of at the genesis of this project. They built the first iteration of the opportunity index a couple years ago and excitedly when I took my post came into my office is one of the first thing. I was really excited about taking taking the post and in Boston Public Schools, drawing opportunity, achievement gaps, also key contributors to that first iteration were nicole Wagner and Akata from Oda.

P

Throughout the years, executive cabinet has been a good partner who have both nurtured and challenged the product, making it better. We have a guiding coalition, who had become very involved in the validation process over the summer and from that group I'd like to especially thank Eleanor and and Erika from finance, who really drove the final stretch of this to get us to this point today, and also the work and thought partnership of that accountability. Team I'd also like to thank some strategic partners in the work dr.

P

James Jennings, Chris Horan, the Boston Police Department, the Boston Public Health, Commission, opportunity, nation and obviously barri Dan and Nancy, who have patiently worked through multiple models, constructs the twists and turns of working with Boston Public Schools, and they did so with great expertise and and grace so I really thank them for their efforts and their continued partnership.

P

And, finally, some funders, the Lynch foundation, the Boston foundation and actually numerous offices in Boston, Public Schools, who dug into their own coffers and their foundational budgets, because they believe that this should be a priority in the district and they wanted to make it happen. So with that I. Thank you for listening to us and open up for comment feedback in questions. Excellent.

A

Thank You dr. Rose, and thank you dr. hill and dr. O'brien for joining us today fascinating work. This is I'm sure gonna open up a lot of questions from members today, so I do just want to reiterate dr. Rose in particular what you said and we heard from the superintendent the beginning. This is potentially groundbreaking work for Boston. So it's the type of thing we need to understand and really dig in and.

E

A

The index before we start the question how it's calculated, how its implemented that I think it's kind of a multi-step process and thank you, dr. Rose, for encouraging us not to chase down a rabbit hole and our questions, because we can do that because we're excited by this type of stuff right. If we have the opportunity, achievement, gap, policy and task force. This is a natural lead-in, so I know members gonna be very interested in finding out. But if I heard you correctly dr.

A

Rose, you want us to focus in on the concept of an opportunity index. Yeah.

P

The concept and the makeup of the actual.

A

Makeup of it, okay, great! So that's what we'll we'll try to encourage? Let's start with Miss Oliver Davila.

S

Thank you. Thank you to all the partners and the schools northeastern and Harvard I think you said for working on this I know it's a lot of work. I just have a few reactions. I am I would need to understand it better. So I will wait for more time, but I'm wondering how how you have the neighborhood and then meet the individual needs.

S

I still have it that really hasn't been captured for me, but long term figuring out how you do that at the same time and when I look at some of the neighborhoods, for example Mission Hill, which is very resource heavy, and yet there are a lot of families that don't actually have resources.

S

If you look at the juxtaposition of families and in that neighborhood, you might be looking at that neighborhood and thinking wow that neighborhood, you know it doesn't need anything and they're still so I just that was just a comment in terms of how you figure that out. But my larger comment is around my concern about the messaging of this and the fact that we are constantly telling our families and youth that they bring.

S

All of these deficits, and so I, just whatever this rolls out to be I, think we have to be really careful when we talk about having an opportunity score for young people. When we talk about neighborhoods that have lower you know, we said in the presentation: lower opportunity. Neighborhoods I think that I I have a real physical reaction to that, and I want to make sure that our families are looked at. You know, there's a lot of things that happen in our neighborhoods, that you know you talked about the ll students as an example.

S

You know they have strong bonds with their families. There's a lot of connections and in the neighborhood, and so I do not want to have something. That's going to add another layer looking at our families as deficits, so I think just going back and figuring I'm, not against the concept of looking at resources and how we allocate it. But I'm more concerned about the actual message and and again working with our families and I.

S

Would love to in this process hear from actual students their reaction and families in terms of how we are working in partnership with students and families? So thank you.

R

I completely agree with I'll start with the last part of your comments. First, the last thing we want to do is put a label on a family or a student or a neighborhood, and we've been really keen in this process to make sure that we're not talking about students who have opportunity and Dec indices attached to their backs or even really in their backpacks, as we try to get it out of the person.

R

These opportunity indices will be calculated at the school level rather than at the individual level will be based on the individual theta, but individual kids would not have an opportunity index attached to them and we want to be very careful about the kind of deficit framing that you're talking about, but it really does aggregate up at the at the school level and when you think about the kind of neighborhood that you were talking about in Mission Hill, where you have, when you look at the resources, it might score.

R

You know very well in the neighborhood portion of the index, but there's a lot of variability at the individual level and that's part of the reason why we wanted to distinguish between the individual characteristics from the neighborhood characteristics in creating this index. Because there is that variability within individuals in the neighborhood that are separate from the kind of resources in the neighborhood.

S

Thank you for saying that I just want to say, because in the presentation the actual language was lower opportunity, neighborhood, so I just I just want to say that you know again. It is about the way that we're saying and making sure that we really understand what we're saying so family don't feel like, because, if I had that reaction, I can't imagine other people yeah.

P

Yeah I don't think we would send out a heat map of the neighborhoods and then I think neighborhoods.

P

They're really census tracts, so we're cutting up Boston, adult-like 177 census tracts. So when we talk about mission hillier, we talk about Dorchester, we're not talking about that level. We're talking about a very my new piece of that, so we can get at more of the nuances of that and, as Nancy said, the scores won't travel with the students.

P

It's a really around like concentrations at schools, and so I am I, am I, understand the double edged sword nature of this, but I think we also can't be so scared of that that we bury our heads in the fact that there are differences of experiences and and that we should be more nuanced on how we fund and make sure that schools are ready to mitigate things such as trauma at our schools, for the students that walk into it. You know it's the same thing.

P

You know with some of the programs out of my office that that directly deal race. You know I, wish race, didn't predict outcomes, but right now and it's not because I don't think our black boys and girls or Hispanic boys and girls aren't brilliant.

P

But there are conditions out in society and in our schools that need to change and and while we're waiting for that to change, we also have to do some detox with them because they're being affected by the environment, and so we need to make sure that, yes, we do fund schools correctly when, when kids come from neighborhoods with a lot of violence and there might be trauma, we want to make sure that schools are well positioned to deal with that at the school level. And so yes framing will be very important.

P

But but I also think. We also shouldn't ignore that and and as nuanced as we can and as careful as we can, we should move forward.

A

Thank you Miss all, but don't all sit.

E

Q

Did you want me to to address the methodology question or should we.

A

H

You so much this work is amazing and I'm glad that you did give kudos to so many people, because this is, as you said, very comprehensive in nature, and there are a lot of eyes and hands and minds behind this work. My question and you know I guess it could be a bit of a reaction to both the presentation and my colleagues questions so because I think the work, because the word opportunity is the central focus here. I think both messaging, but also educating everyone involved is going to be critical.

H

And my my question is around the academic attainment. I, don't know if it's a rabbit hole. So if it's a rabbit hole, you can tell me to move move on the academic attainment of the adults, I'm I'm, always very much interested and the the parent piece, the neighborhood commitment piece, the adults surrounding the children who are bringing the invisible backpacks. So could you speak a bit more of the opportunities for the adults in this area of academic attainment? What our potential solutions?

H

What are, if you, if you were speaking to a group of adults in a neighborhood? How can we close opportunity gaps, I guess, I'm, going straight to kind of solutions that the end of this process? Can you just kind of speak to that a bit more when.

R

You look at you kind of have to unpack. Why is it that as we measured it, the percentage of adults in a neighborhood or census block as it were, that have a college degree matter? So why does that matter? And there are lots of theories around social capital and networking? And you know not why your?

R

Why doesn't that your parents have a college degree, but why does it matter that your neighbor does and then you have to kind of imagine what that looks like to live in that neighborhood if you're in a neighborhood, where lots of people have graduated from college, then there's this ethos in the neighborhood that people go to college, and so there becomes this pathway there's a way in which you know your neighbor across the street, who went to college and majored in something different. Now you can ask questions about that.

R

You have potential mentors and role models and you. Why else you kind of imagine what and what does it look like to have neighbors, where high proportion have a college degree it it's it's social capital and it's networking and it's modeling, and it's it's all of those kinds of things. And so then, when you look at what would a school do with an opportunity index that suggested that many of their kids come from neighborhoods? Who, who don't have a lot of adults who have a college degree that you start looking at?

R

How would how would you build programs or fun programs that would offset those kind of networking and social capital opportunities that come from living in a neighborhood with a high proportion of of college graduates? I think one way of looking at this. It's thinking about adult education in these neighborhoods. That's one way of thinking about it and that and that's one potential solution and then but the other solution is it kind of graduates up at a school level? Is how do you offset what we know matters from this?

R

You kind of think about it in two language and and we think about an opportunity index that gets calculated at a school level. How would school leaders think about the kinds of programming they might want to implement if they knew this about their student body and I? Think one of the things that's really innovative about this, given the kind of school district at Boston is that we as a choice district, which is increasingly the case across the country. We no longer know about students, communities based on their catchment area.

R

So you can't say this school sits in a neighborhood. We know what that neighborhood looks like that's no longer the case in the United States, and so this kind of opportunity index allows us to look at and assess and help school leaders understand the communities in which the many communities and the dynamic nature of these communities in which their school population is drawn on a year on your basis, I think it's trying to figure out what are the theories around? Why adult education attainment matters? That's a long way to dancer. No.

E

But it's something I.

R

Care deeply about and yeah.

Q

And if I could actually add to that, so one of the things as Nancy has said so well right. A lot of what we've talked about is: what are the mechanisms right and one of the programs that address those mechanisms, and we've talked a bit with dr. Rose and others about communicating to schools, not only their opportunity index single number and then oh, these components might go into it, but also communicating how their school, basically the the profile of neighborhoods, that they draw their student population from for each of those components.

Q

So then a headmaster, a principal, is empowered to say well, what's going on. Here is the following things, and is it academic attainment of their neighbors? Is it a high crime neighborhood? Is it socioeconomic status, the neighborhood and consider their own internal programming based on those new to do so and dr. Rose keeps using this word I. Think it's a good one too. So in a nuanced way right, we don't want to go from one blunt instrument to another.

Q

We kind of wanted to support you guys to have the tools to do everything in a very targeted manner. I think, which.

P

Also, doesn't divorce the school of their responsibilities of knowing who their students are and what they need? This is a way to try to get the resources where they're needed, but what we actually do with it might vary. You know and I think that's where the framing comes in. So what do we? What do we do with with with additional resources for for schools with more concentrations of lead?

P

Do we go and we do we get more banned programs like we talked about those things are not free, right and and but to me, are required a requirement in certain contexts in order to again what I said, empower and detox certain students right, and so you know I think again. If we're, if we're not intentional about the way that we fund, we already try to get at it with a blunt instrument, but if we could be more nuanced, you know in our approach to distributing resources.

P

It's still on the school to know who your students are, how we're affirming them and and how are we going to build them up and I? Don't think this tool will tell you exactly how to do that, but I think it will be a will, be able to be more nuanced than the way that we distribute resources to be able to do that. So.

H

Dr. Hill, there is something to be said and I appreciate, long-winded answers from experts. I really do so keep them coming. There's something to be said about adult education, I turn to the chair and smiled because I work out of college for adults and.

A

You get student life.

H

A

H

Cambridge College we're in Charleston in.

A

Which college that has now moved to Charlestown and.

H

We're his neighbor now and he's very excited, but if you were speaking to the four colleges represented up here and let's just say these are for future college presidents, let's just say.

R

It said, let it be said, let.

H

It be said, let it be said. um What would you say regarding? Are you still trying to figure out who I'm talking about okay?

H

What what could be said regarding that piece of information that adult education matters for student success and you are speaking to those leaders in regards to recruitment to educating their their neighbors that are around them, because we're in a city that is so education friendly? What's the what's the messaging, the strategy, the encouragement in order to help bps students, college presidents should or must.

R

Ow I mean this is a part very quite apart from the opportunity index, because I think when you're looking at the opportunity index, it's really you know boiling up to what schools do based on on on the neighbors, but when you're asking me, what should local universities do.

R

I mean we really need to think about adult lis, as you say, adult education in your area of expertise, that it's that educating, an educated, public and making education accessible is not just about individuals, occupation or financial success. It becomes a community resource having an educated public is not about the individual, it's it's a community commodity and and that's what I would say is making higher education accessible to anyone.

R

It's not only going to help those individuals and help our our economy and and have a better prepared workforce, but it's going to trickle down all the way down to our elementary schools and all the way through high school, so I think, apart from the you were kind of moved away from the opportunity index, but we're really talking about education and higher education as as a community and collective good I. Just.

H

Wonder if we've really moved away from it, if the adult education matters to students in the neighborhood I've long believed that when I see adult students who are working hard in the classroom and I know they have students in bps, the testimonials at least are that their children are much more motivate. You know they're much more motivated because they see mom and dad getting their work done as well and I don't have the research that's and.

R

It's not just mom and dad it's their neighbor.

H

Community, yes,.

Q

Then I think I would say right if we're working on that hypothesis right that social capital is what's connecting all right, adult education to youth achievement, then what you know you or the other future college presidents out there might do- is encourage theirs their adult students to go home and own it all right make it a part of their daily experience in the neighborhood to help local kids think about and aspire to these things, because I think that's the mechanism right. That's the way you connect, because essentially what you're asking is?

Q

How do we use that all education to change the local contact.

H

Thank you, Thank.

A

You Dean, why I'm 17, coma I? Think you wouldn't know you want to wait. Okay, thank you! I'm mr. Locke, on top Thank.

T

You mr. chair and thank you, doctors appreciate your our presentation tonight, so my comments are on on conceptual level and a question that goes along with it as well, because I think we all generally agree that you know the concept that you brought to us is something that we hear time and time again. We talk up here all the time about. You know the the external factors that students bring across the transom under our buildings, and you know so it's the district.

T

That's often faced with the constrained ability to try to address those issues, and so a lot of it is left to other agencies or nonprofits or families or communities outside the school building.

T

And so you know I want to highlight and go back to the idea that presentation that so much of what you found through this research is going to be especially compelling when you push it back out to a state, a national level, and we think about how we fund kids around the school rather than just literally in in terms of how we find in the school.

T

But in listening to the presentation again, I think it's fantastic I think it. You know it speaks to everything that we do talked about here. The the threshold question I have. Is you know? What is it you know, and and how is it necessarily that we are weird to think about plugging this thinking into the way that we manage is school system that that might be too broad or too few simple question but I feel like.

T

We need to hear a little bit more about that, particularly because I know we have a policy statement, that's still under development, and we also have a vote if I, if I read our materials correctly, it'll come off at some point with respect to.

E

The up anyway,.

T

So I want to know exactly what it is. Everything.

C

So this evening we hope to just kind of get feedback on like a high-level policy in the framework. What we will bring to a future presentation is: maybe you wanna have a granular level like how this is a mechanically work and algae plug, die and potentially to how you do partnerships, how you do a more nuanced way of looking at student waiting for a weighty to employment, so that will be our future meeting. So today is really more of a high level and they Bard continues to collaborate with us on figuring out.

C

How do you actually do all these mathematical calculations? Alright,.

T

That's very helpful, so just one other new ones, question I wanted to go back on the custodianship issue, so I heard three one. One is one example back: can you give some other examples, and, and when you give the examples, I think it would also be helpful to Josh opposed those against physical disorder. You know the broke. It feels like those two are married and in many respects and so trying to understand a little bit. How about how those are different, I think will be helpful in think about how all those begin yeah.

Q

So so, the way that it is explicitly measured here is through basically novel measures that we've developed based exclusively on 3 1 1. So essentially, what what the measurement is it is. It is a quantification. Basically, what is the likelihood if there's a streetlight outage if there's a broken sidewalk, if there's a pothole?

Q

What is the likelihood that that will get called in by a resident and that's based on extensive methodology, where I, somehow convinced 10 UMass Boston students five years ago to actually audit all of the streetlight outages in the city with me and then and then validated against how you could predict from within the system the likelihood that a call was going to come?

Q

And so then that gives you a MEK that I think of as sort of a manifestation of a capacity of a neighborhood to take action on on something a relatively low-level problem, but to take action on it. Nonetheless, and you could see that same capacity manifest in people sweeping up leaves and garbage on the ground around their homes, people shoveling out the fire hydrant on the street.

Q

You know those other sort of custodial actions of caring for the physical space, and so when we started this process, one of the things that we committed to very early- and this was driven by the BPS team as much as by us- was to cast as wide a net of measuring neighborhood context as possible and consider everything we possibly could things like.

Q

Number of facebook friends was considered before we realize like we could never have possibly measure that right or get access to it, but so we we made as long of a list and then organized as best we could, and this stood out as something that while distinctive, because it's not something it's easy to measure you'd, have to sit on the street corner and literally count people. You know shoveling out fire hydrants.

Q

Apart from this measure, we want to include it anyway to see if it was informative and to really consider it and across numerous models of elementary school student outcomes. It was predictive, and so our interpretation of this is simply that as Nancy put it a neighborhood that has an abundance of people who are willing to take action on something that is everybody's issue. But no one's responsibility like a street light outage like a pothole I, generally think about it as people taking care of the urban Commons.

Q

If you will right, if you have an abundance of that resource, then it seems as though that same resources is applying itself to care for young children at some level or another and be it. You know you get home early, your parents aren't home, you have a place to go to, and those types of people are the same types of people who take action in public spaces or or that there are.

Q

You know social capital forms of access to thinking about how to navigate academics at a young age or whether it's just a nurturing comforting environment, because people are taking action. One of those mechanisms or all of them is, is operating here and that's what we're seeing, at least through the data, to answer your question about whether that and physical disorder are quite the same thing. It would seem that right.

Q

The two should be one-to-one, but you have to think about the fact that in any given neighborhood you have a certain percentage of people who are creating disorder and a certain percentage of people who are counteracting disorder and more or less the other. Ninety percent of us are in the middle doing neither of those things in any consistent fashion right, and so you can easily have and I'm happy to show maps at a later time.

Q

You there are many neighborhoods in the city, or at least a good, a good proportion of neighborhoods in the city that have high custodianship and high disorder, as well as locust, odeon, ship and load disorder and then in between. So the two are not actually that highly correlated because of that disjunction between things that generate disorder and individuals who are willing to take action against disorder. Is there.

T

A public/private divide- and it sounded like that from your comments between physical disorder and custodianship, you know to to the point of broken windows- speaks to the boarded-up building that you know just hasn't been cared for by the landlord versus your custodianship theory. That speaks to people that all about the broken streetlights. So is that a fair assumption to.

Q

A certain extent yeah, the custodianship is completely in the public domain yeah, the the physical disorder we measure, as both we measure it as deterioration to private spaces, so things like housing deterioration, failed utilities, pest infestations and such, but also include public denigration graffiti people leaving trash on the street those sorts of things, so so the broken windows and the broken windows theory has always been kind of a merger between the private and public.

Q

In fact, the theory itself can be a little vague at times about which one matters, but the custodianship one is explicitly- and we did this and, very importantly, with the data- and we looked at 3-1-1 data, there's a big difference between someone who calls 3 1 1, because their TV is broken and they need to throw it out and someone needs to come pick it up. Then someone who wakes up in the morning and sees a streetlight. Well, you don't see a streetlight outage in the morning.

Q

It sees a pothole and says this needs to be fixed and takes the personal time to call it in rather than saying huh someone will get to it. So.

T

I, don't want to go too much you time. Is there a research paper that speaks to this? What you're speaking to you tonight in further detail, though we can review that will shortcut light. My questions sure.

Q

Sure I had this about five or six of them. I can send them to you happy to and guys.

T

And stuff that you folks have put together specifically for this purpose, or is it the material that underlies the research that you've undertaken yeah.

Q

You mean on the custodianship stuff, specifically it.

T

Stood for the opportunity index for.

Q

The opportunity index we have constructed, we have a final report- that kind of walks through everything and yeah. So for that fully fully documented and fully explained from top to bottom, and if you're more interested in you know particularly custodianship and broken windows, I'm happy to if I have a number of papers on those topics. Okay, the.

T

Only other thing I'll mention is I'll, keep coming back to this and I think you know the materials that you'll you'll, provide us I think will shed some light on this, but you know just thinking about this idea of agency. It's I think it's something that we think about a lot here with respect to you know how it is.

T

We engage our parents and how it is that we, you know just bringing all the folks that are in our constituency into the fold, and so you know I'd be interested to to know when we're speaking about the particular aspects here or the opportunity index index that really do rely on the agency.

T

How much it brings into the fold. You know both the access to the means to have agency as well. As you know, maybe that grit is one of those popular terms where you know people just you know want to want to be agents. You know that I think you know Pete, it's often I don't want to hypothesize, but without having really any firm grounds for it. But you know I mean people often want to be agents, but it's seen as a luxury, because you got to put you know you got to go to work.

T

You got to put food on the table for your kids, you get a bite, you know, put a roof over their heads and get them closed before you can be. You know, do the all-star stuff and you know, being a good neighbor, is part of that and I think that's something that you know. We have a civic culture in this in this city in this region around that, but you don't often get to that point.

T

If you don't have you know the phone number three one one, it's pretty easy to remember, but not everybody knows what it does or the app on your phone or anything else like that, and so it I'd be really interested to hear through the future work that you do here. You know what kind of things we can do on the what would seem like the periphery there to improve those types of access points for people that want to improve their there's a custodianship score or reduce their physical disorder score and.

R

I think if I could add on to what what Dan has said, I think part of the reason why the custodian chip matters is in part that there are potholes and that they get fixed and that creates a sense of security for particularly the elementary school kids. There's also, this sense of expectation there's this sense of efficacy and expectation that you walk out the door, and you know you see the pothole or there's the trash on the street or whatever it is, and you're like I'm, gonna call and.

T

I've got 20 things.

R

I've got to do this morning, I'm gonna, call and I'm gonna expect and I think modeling that efficacy and modeling. That expectation that one you should care about your community again. It doesn't have to be that parent and that's you know the beauty of this kind of opportunity index being outside of the individual family.

R

Is that it's just having a neighbor I mean there there's a broken window and there are 20 neighbors the fact that one of them look called not all of them need to call, but one of them needs to call and then something and the kids see that that they can expect that their that things should be fixed in their neighborhood, and so it comes with this sense of pride and identity and and fit and belonging.

R

None of these things that we can actually measure on a year-to-year basis and an opportunity index, and so we're really looking at these measures that that by theory and correlation are related to the things that we know matter and.

P

One little deeper is also the expectation that things will be fixed when I call right.

E

P

Also, again, structures and and historical realities around like why people choose the exercise agency or not so I think we could. We can talk a lot about why, but it's the fact that it is predictive. You know, I think, speaks to the fact that we need to figure out a way and and push resources in a way that no longer it becomes predictive and and so I think you know, researchers make very good points, but I think there's.

P

There are other ways to frame what we're talking about, but the fact is, it doesn't matter right and so it's up to us to really dig in and figure out why it matters and that will most likely take resources.

P

A

You very much thank you, Silla Khartoum, Miss Robinson. Thank.

J

You very much for the report I'm having some difficulty trying to figure out what I want to ask you about, but here's my issue is that always felt with our work on the opportunity and achievement gap task force.

J

It was a combination of the work that we do at the school district level, but also was a strong partnership with the city and what I really see this is now getting to that part about the city, because the city is responsible for all of these things that we've got listed here and our children end up being the indicators of what we do or do not give them as a result of all these pieces. So the question for me is you know: where does the city get engaged first before we go nationally or anywhere else?

J

But how are we immediately pulling in the city our partner, to begin to look at these things and begin to figure out what are the things that it's, the city's responsibility and all of our elected officials responsibility to fix?

J

First, because we have parents and folks who come from many different cultures and experiences, and many people are afraid to pick up that phone and call don't know how to do it, don't expect it, and so we're expecting a lot from a very diverse population who has put its trust into the schools and the city to do some of this work. So where does that begin? The same time that we are educating the adults towards agency towards understanding? They have a right and responsibility towards this, so that our children do begin to see it.

C

Let me just start off and I, say: I think you're, absolutely right.

E

C

There are implications to this beyond this school system and what we hope to do is actually. This is a starting point for a much larger conversation, there's a framework that can help us make decisions, but will help us also use. We can bring this framework to other tables that we wrap and say to those tables think about how we think: how do we allocate resources within BC YF?

C

How do we court, we think about resources when it comes to helping Human Services I mean we could use this now as a tool to also work with our colleagues in our inner city and our state, and also nationally. We get a lot of resources from our national level as well, so I've, just affirming what you just said and.

E

C

huh And I know this, and the city has been very supportive of this kind of deep analysis. When we started doing doing this work, we all the then Boston Redevelopment Agency right. They were the woods they were helping us think through some of so they were contributing to part of this thinking. Now it's the BPD egg correct so so they've been at the table. Absolutely yeah.

A

D

In this moment,.

U

A

Vo-Tech thank.

U

You very much for this work, I mean, as I said. This is really important. I mean, as a sociologist I've been battling. This for most of my life I know you're right, you know, I mean it's absolutely true and and I'm hoping that we can really. You know, move forward and and try to really hunker down and try to figure out the best way that we can measure this and evaluate it so that we're a very solid ground I do have a couple of questions.

U

The first one is really a reaction to Alex is free because I have the same reaction as I as I kept looking at this at the presentation. What kept going through my mind, these warning lights because of the arguments that are made about geography being destiny, so I'm very concerned about the messaging and them, and that way in which we're going to be talking about this I would relieved by by your statement that the child is not gonna, be wearing an opportunity index on there.

U

You know what I mean so that but I think the house to be made clear. It's not clear in this presentation, so it was kind of scary. You know, even though I know you're right and then we need to be threading here. We need to be thinking, and there gonna be. A lot of people are gonna, be throwing stones and that you need to be able to explain this in a way God that that people will get it and and not use it against the children, which is what happens in a situation like this.

U

My I kept thinking also about how we're gonna, implement and evaluate this I would not given the importance of this I would not want it to be something that's treated as the last great idea, but rather something that we really build the capacity to to implement it. You know to implement and measure in a very good way, so I along you know in that one of the questions that came to me was first of all when you say that these measures, or these indicators account for about 20 points on the MCATs I.

U

You know, I said great. You know, I was actually surprised that it wasn't more. You know that that out that that but I kept saying where the school effects, what what are the school effects and how? How did you control the school effects? And so that's my number one question, because they know order for me to believe that it's 20 points only from these two. You know these two areas I have to make sure that that we took into account what is happening within schools and between schools as you as you're making this measure.

U

So that's my methodological I think you say well, whatever I don't know, the label is used here, but you know what is it that that you're doing and how are you doing if you didn't do it? Why? Because I want to Reardon's paper and I saw that he didn't glue. They did include the the school measures, so I was wondering why you had not. So basically, if you could explain that a little bit better it'd be very good.

U

Do you want to start there and then have two others I'm.

P

Gonna call up Nicole Wagner.

V

Okay, so so I agree with you doctor here, two other research. Literature in this area has definitely controlled for school effects and I was thinking about it a little bit. You know, I think that there are there's the sending school so there's you know, because we're really trying to identify factors or indicators about students outside of the control of the school that they that they go into right. So we're looking at six through eighth grade information about students before they go into high school, so there's the the school effect of that sending school.

V

But then, when we do these regressions or when these folks do these regressions and they look at future outcomes, obviously between six and eighth grade and these future outcomes in tenth grade M casts or graduation there's the impact of the school itself that they go to, and so you know my feeling is given the fact that we're actually trying to build out an opportunity index where we actually devote sort of a proportion of you know basically a 100 percent, a 100-point index scale to a number of different indicators that we think impacts students.

V

Well, we all know that there are indicators that we have not named here that do impact students, including schools. We have to be thinking about. What are we also? What are the indicators that we actually want to include? So if we start to control for school, then it means to me that that means we're sort of obligated to to use the school as something that we're going to consider funding on so, let's say, I'm, just considered, funding, yeah or or us consider is a resource allocation.

V

I hope that this is making sense, and please please tell me if it's not but I'm, imagining that I'm a student who, in sixth or eighth grade you know I, am you know, I come from a neighborhood that has you know some residential instability. There might be some other demographic factors and myself, but then I also failed a couple of courses in eighth grade and I had some suspensions and then I go on to another school. That is actually a high school. That really has experienced.

V

Turning around students like me and so by the time I get to tenth grade I. Actually don't do too poorly on the M cast. Well, that's a great story for that school, but that high school, who does pretty well just fight the factors that I bring into that school I, wouldn't want them to be handicapped from having the resources that they need in order to support a student like me.

V

So what my feeling is that when we start to control for that receiving school, because we do know that the impact student outcomes we're sort of obligating ourselves to then.

V

Then, what's the word factor in their effectiveness, the effectiveness that they have had with students, despite the fact that many of the students that go to their school may come with? You know a lot of risk indicators and, and maybe despite the fact that they haven't necessarily gotten the resources to really to combat those issues, but somehow they figure it out. Does that make sense? This is my thinking, but.

U

But I mean with what I would push back. Is that you know in a conceptual framework. What you're saying is that schools don't matter to out see what is therefore, the only thing that matters is a school. What kids come from and I'm thinking about the graph that you made, which you know it just has academic outcomes on one end and you know anything so I'm following the arrows and you're saying these are the two factors that in fact occur and I'm.

U

Sorry, that's not all there is, so you know what I mean and so like in. Unless you speak of it and then you can say in this study or in this index, I am only gonna. Consider a and B, not C, but don't put it out as if don't matter. Okay,.

R

And I don't think we're trying to say that schools, don't matter I, think that we'd be crazy to not expect that that schools would be the biggest they better be the biggest impact on on on MCAT scores right.

R

But when you think of it, go back to our earlier model, where we had the home effects in the and the neighborhood effects, and that we had the opportunity indexes being the thing that that really serves as I said, cause like equalizer before you get to the school and I think there are lots of ways in which you could look at school characteristics because there's a live variability on schools, but that's really a different kind of index targeting a different set of issues.

R

So, when I think about the kinds of conversations we've had around the opportunity index in thinking about funding for partnerships and for resources to help students who are living in neighborhoods where they might be coming, let's say you know some mental health issues because of exposure to crime or violence, and and so it sets the school back from doing what it's doing. Regardless of the quality of.

R

What's going on in the school, and if we were going to create an index as it were, that accounted for school characteristics, we would be looking at a whole host of different things. It would be a completely different project. We will be looking at teacher turnover. We will be looking at quality of curriculum. We will be looking at extracurricular activities. We will be looking at dis portion all discipline across across you know, we'd be looking at all of those things and that's a completely different kind of project or index than trying to say.

R

Let's assume schools are gonna, do what schools do, which is educate, kids, but their ability to do that is impacted by what happens to them between when they wake up in the morning and they make their way to the door. I agree. We.

U

R

The index is trying to do is account for that variability in what happens to students when they walk in the door, whether they're coming in with some level trauma or they're coming with a sense of efficacy, or you know all of these things that that were we're. Looking. What.

U

I'm, saying is that your conceptual framework does not reflect an understanding that those other factors are also there. Then you can say I'm only gonna. Look at things right. You know people do that all the time, but but when I saw I said wait a minute. You know schools, don't matter. Let me give you the example of these Boston. We were just talking about it. Yeah, it's a it's a community, that's more immigrant I mean I. Can I can go through all your yet the schools are doing good.

U

The kids are doing well in those schools. So it's school do matter after you might not want to at this point. You know focus on that as as part of your index, but you know to not, you know not even exclude it. It was shocking. That's that's what I'm saying so. That's you going through presentations, I think it you know acknowledging yeah. We have all these different other things that we're not looking at, and it's that's fair, that's fair to do! No, no problem.

U

I am and I say that, particularly because how are we going to evaluate the effectiveness of what you're putting forward? How are we, unless we take into account the school factors? That's.

V

U

You see when we this were so exercised out there and then you know no, but I think we are committed to. If we vote for this, we're gonna also ask you to evaluate it and and I. You know: I talked to Eleanor Lawrence about this.

U

You know, I didn't know that I was gonna appear in the school committee yeah this year, but we were talking about this last year, as you know, in order to really think through harder how to make decisions about funding for different schools, some of them in East, Boston and others talking about English language learners. So in order for us to under to the value of this, we have to do the whole thing.

N

Absolutely to evaluate.

R

You would need to measure those things but not, but if we think about what we're trying to accomplish with it, those are the things that we want to include in it. But.

U

I think what I'm saying is, from our perspective, I mean from my perspective in this in this role.

U

You know it would be just one other idea unless there's a way for us to understand how effective your idea is, and that's what I'm saying it needs to be more complete, more conceptually tight, you know, I can I believe you I believe totally what you're doing, but at the other end I don't want. You know, I want to make sure that that we have a handle and that we're not looking at this now and in two years we're looking at something else.

U

Do you see what I mean so that that's my my concern about where we implement and how we evaluate and I know, that's a rabbit's hole that he didn't want to go into, but it's very hard not to talk about I, don't know how that people feel about the issue of evaluation of that of this, and and so you have to build a model that allows you to control for those other variables. No.

Q

I completely agree and I think you know just to your point about conceptual comprehensiveness. I think you know if we were writing an academic paper, we would definitely be laying out the various factors that impact student achievement and then cordoning off what it is. We're answering the question about I think for the for the purpose of this and that naive, as it may have been, we we thought about just kind of focusing directly into that and not spending that front end on theory for as long, but your point is completely taken that it should.

Q

We should always be thinking about all those different factors and how they play into the overall question. As for evaluation, I think you know, as you asked the question. I was thinking about it right, I. Think, evaluation from where we stand right now is I, don't want to say straightforward, because that just gets me in trouble, but I think it's it's very, very doable right. I think it really gets to the point that dr. Roe is made if the policy leads to these effects disappearing.

Q

That's what we want to see and and I think we would want to look at that at the district level. The way we already have- and maybe we do set aside, say those schools that received more funding or less funding through programming. Because of this, and we look at specific changes within those schools relative to change in school composition.

Q

I think that's a perfectly valid and strong approach to attacking this and and one that, as you said, takes account of school context and I think we we have every every abilities from where we stand right now to approach that in the most comprehensive way. Okay,.

U

I believe you good thank.

A

You dr. URI, I, take mr. macclay.

I

Right so I'm, just looking at it from different light. As a student saying that many times we hear these things, I speak around the student rather than coming from the students and saying that, if we're looking at the factors and how the impact students may be having a way to gauge like student perspective, saying well, how do these external and internal factors impact me from home between home school extracurricular saying that?

I

Well, these are also the resources I need, rather than having these second and third hand accounts of what actually impacts students been here for them like we can speak to students through mayor's Youth Council, which it's made up of students from different areas like they have a model based upon geographic regions of the city, saying this is what happen in my environment. Students give input like how can I change, what do I see in my environment?

I

How that impacts me so just seeing like a strong emphasis around student engagement in this process, it's like my main thing, mostly.

C

It's very important you're, absolutely right.

A

Thank You mr. macclay Dean Coleman thank.

O

You this is very exciting, very difficult work in a lot of political, social pitfalls that are facing us. We very difficult to get this right, Peter RT, that you know.

O

My doesn't really and two questions. The first is one of the things I find excited about this we've talked earlier about. How are we gonna begin to identify those challenges to to the district that are really public health strategies that are external from the school, and this index helps us to articulate that alright, that problem what's external to the school? And how do we measure that in our own data, so we can see how well we're doing at other reasons we did in gray.

O

So that's a beginning, they organized a organizing, there's public health strategies, but in that one of my questions is: why drive to a single score index, if it's really gonna help us change our behavior, for example, you say: academic attainment is one issue. Public Safety is another issue.

O

So if I have an O I score in my school, that allows me to see these three different scale subscales for lack of a better word at this point, then I get to say: okay in my school I may have a high Oh high score, but what's driving it is. My kids are coming from a catchment areas where there's a low level academic attainment, so I need to partner with Cambridge right. That's that's what I!

O

That's the partner I need to address my problems versus if that's all it was driving as Public Safety, then I need to really work with.

O

G

Police directors.

O

No one'll write the wisher Evans Commission's, give.

B

O

Job and so in terms of having subscales rather than just a single score, something I do want to understand why we're not going that way so that that's one man and I think it's. The value of the oh I is being able to direct in by the school what interventions we're going to go forward and the second one and and and I think some of the conversations help me with is I and maybe just be a wording issue I still struggle with. If we're looking at out-of-school factors, how does in school behavior like I?

O

How many kids have failed previously count as an out-of-school factor and I heard the explanation that it's because they were in and they came from a k5 in which they had these problems. Now there are my school and what's this previous history, but that still seems within the responsibility of the district to me that that should be conversations as we move kids on to schools that we should be knowing about our kids Advent behavior from previous school. So that's something that we can address the eternally, so it seems different than public health strategies.

O

I'm still struggling with that idea, though you know prickly, you know, I know that one of the big challenges that it was high school, for example, and a lot of our content that high schools have to do with, is they're getting all the repeaters. The ninth grade repeaters and that's a burden to the school that we have to think about. But do we need the oh I to tell us that, or is that data we have internally so that I'm still struggling with that conceptually and so as we go forward?

O

That would be helpful to me, but again, I think this is you know whatever we call an opportunity acuity? This is where we need to be. It's gonna be difficult for that. I think some of the reasons you you laid out that it's gonna sound awful to a lot of people and we had to find a way to make that work so that we can drive improve performance. But thank you for this very difficult work.

C

A

Was some question.

A

Do you want just reiterate the two particular questions.

O

You've identified Public, Safety and custodianship as the three driver variants in your model. Why not add those B sub sports because the school they would respond differently depending what happens? That's number one number. Two.

O

Sorry number two do we? Is it really accurate to use the previous performance as a measure of out-of-school behavior, because that's a district, we're still responsible that previous performance I think.

P

Attends to the first question, I think we imagined a a tool that would allow schools to disaggregate in that way where you could look at those three constructs.

P

What we wanted to be intentional about was not attaching scores the students but aggregating at the school level, but we would imagine being able to be that flexible and you can imagine I think different context is what you're saying we would want to almost shut off shut off or should I turn on certain variables that we want to pay attention to, especially when we're talking about partnerships and actually mitigating certain issues.

P

Second question was.

O

The previous previous performances, really an out-of-school factor or out-of-district factors. You know me that's what didn't school within district. It's.

C

Absolutely a factor, but we also know that we have students are moving in and out of our system from different sectors from different communities, and we want to make sure we are not miss incentivizing this. We want to make sure that we're talking about the opportunity index. It is about the factors that that young people are bringing into a particular school that they're sitting at understanding that absolutely the school that they're currently attending is absolutely a major factor, but we don't even want to miss incentivize additional dollars.

C

If there was funding based on low student performance, that wouldn't be the right incentive for schools and.

P

I think yeah I'm you're you're, talking more on the framing of us, saying that it's it's purely variables that are outside of schools, control, I, think the the real frame is is introducing those variables I, don't think it's your tier Point exclusively if we're talking about suspension is not exclusive, but we're introducing variables that currently we didn't have that we're outside of that school's control other than SES status. We just didn't have it.

A

It's been a fascinating conversation as I anticipated. It was going to be the depth and breadth of the experience levels of school community members here, including having several deep in the academic world in the academic research world, I anticipated, was going to be a great conversation and I. Thank the members for their comments. You know my viewpoint on it is, is a little different and I and I have to give a little context to my comments. I was sitting at thinking about when I was getting.

A

My masters at Babson, I was taking some early morning, classes and some evening classes and the only main classes were predominantly with students who were full time. Students had come straight from undergrad, it was fantastic. Theoretically, the solution to a problem was well we'll just increase sales 10% and the nighttime students tended to all be working on 128 at that point back when they were companies like weighing and other companies that many people haven't heard of anymore and.

U

A

And and I found the the folks who are working full-time trying to get so practical so immediately they had trouble with the theory. So if you said to them increase sales 10%, they would stop and say that means gonna sell two more widgets per location per hour. How we're gonna make that happen, and so I've always had the equal mix of thinking theoretically, but also thinking practically and I, find I found in my head as I.

A

Looked at this going back and forth between the two and what I mean by that is, we were a policymaking board and we have four responsibilities. One is to set policy for the district. Two is to hire a superintendent that to implement that policy. Three is to approve a budget that allows the superintendent to reach that Paulson. Fourth is to evaluate the superintendent. Those are the main objectives of this board. That's what we are set up to do, and it is the policy this board to close the opportunity, achievement gap.

A

It's the number-one policy of us. We try to use that thinking in everything that we do, and so the theory of coming up with a better way of really looking at the opportunity gap of our students. And how can we apply the more that we do is incredibly appealing to me. I mean it really. I would love to find something and I was so fascinated here.

A

The different reactions and members here, as well as all the great work of some clear experts who have done a lot of work on this and yet I'm struggling with some of it as well and I. Think Dean Coleman hit one of the points exactly I had thought of. Each of these individual factors is so important. I'm going back to I. Think dr.

A

Hill, you were the one who were talking about the academic achievement from neighborhoods, and if we get that information to the school leaders of you have students that are coming from a neighborhood that may be struggling in this and it would impact their decision-making. So Dean Coleman said work with Cambridge College I. Also, thought of you'd want to make sure to set up mentoring programs for those students. As an example, you, the school leaders, would make decisions upon having that information that they don't have right now.

A

So I love the ideas of that I'm struggling with using that to make funding decisions, because that is one of the key levers that we have it's one of the four responsibilities that we have when we take so seriously and and talk to you rowdy you we're talking about last year and I love that you reference it again today right we take that so seriously, and the weighted student funding formula is one of the vehicles we use right now, and that is all on the individual student. We have always said it Falls a student.

A

So do they have English learn language learning needs. Do they have disabilities and various disabilities weight differently? Are they from poverty? Are they behind those all impact things, but we also think long and hard about unintended consequences of the decisions and, when I think about using a funding mechanism that, in effect may one of the things you talk about individual characteristics of how they did on English and how they did on M casts at various levels.

A

You want to make sure to always make sure to incent school leaders to improve, and that may actually have an unintended consequence. So this is what I'm going back and forth between the theory and the practical and that's why I think it's so important for dr. Chang to work a little bit on talking this through with school leaders, talk it through with students with parents with community folks and teachers and getting the reaction. You know talk to you about today and and MS Oliver Davila really hit that the messaging on this could be critical.

A

People could have a visceral reaction to this, and one thing I wanted to get into in particular, though, was the neighborhood cuz. We've talked a lot about neighborhoods and I. Think it was you dr. Rose though it may have been. You dr. O'brien, who had said it goes by census, track right that that's us census data, that's done every 10 years or what no.

Q

Actually, with the American Community Survey, it's now done there's annual updates of 5-year estimates for the census data, but of the data that we used here. It's a mixture of American, Community, Survey data and custom measures that Barry has developed that we we build off of city of Boston administrative data that we update annually so.

A

The city I mean I'm a resident cities Boston. We all, uh we fill out an annual census for the city, but I, don't recall it saying educational achievement and that type of thing.

Q

No, we don't use that where that data sits and how it's used is a whole different story that we could get into a longer conversation about some other time. At the moment, it's not really used for much of anything, and we don't use it here. It's we you, the administrative data that we use is we use 9-1-1 records, 3-1-1 records and in in other work, various other things that are generated by on the dept of innovation technology and on behalf of other agencies, and that measures things like Public Safety, the custodianship measure, physical disorder.

Q

Those are all measured, those ways and then the academic attainment and the socioeconomic status are measured. The American Community Survey data from the federal census, which.

A

Is the every 10 year census so.

Q

Which one no, the American Community Survey, is annually updating 5-year estimates, so the most recent I believe is 2011 to 2015, but.

A

What I'm getting at is this is a city. That's changing rapidly many neighborhoods in the city change very, very rapidly yeah. You know I, think of a neighborhood where I happen to live now. I'd love them to make a plan, but I live in Charlestown now, and the economic inequality that you see, doors away is is breathtaking and I'm, not sure if that's actually captured down to you said a census track data, but also how how rapidly it is changing in this city in.

Q

Theory, it should be right, 5-year estimates that are updating every year. It should catch right because you're you're, essentially tracking everything that's happening year to year and I mean on a completely separate note. I have a couple of students working on projects on gentrification in the city right now, and we're able using these rolling 5-year estimates we're able to capture you know the map looks like it should for gentrification right. You can see clear rises in socioeconomic status for areas like South Boston, the East, Boston waterfront, specifically right.

Q

Those are all visible in the data, so these I mean you're you're, absolutely right to refer to. We were using ten year estimates I'd be very concerned, but with this newer kind of form of releasing data, I feel much more confident that we'll be able to capture those things and.

A

I also want to get to the issue that uh curiosity was talking about, and I and I wrote down the woods who said schools do matter and I.

A

Think of there's no better example than a school that this morning one $100,000 prize will be in a school on the move and yet blocks away is a school very similar age in buildings, very similar student population, literally the same neighborhood and yet has had very, very, very significant challenges and one was a level-3 school that has risen and won $100,000 prize today for doing so well and one same neighborhood, same physical type structure, very similar student population struggled significantly and so to me as dr. DiIorio, they say schools do matter and I wonder.

A

You know I still struggle with this. If we're talking about the neighborhoods that the students are coming from, how will we accounting for that.

R

Yeah and I think, if you take your example, schools do matter. I think there's no question, but if you take the example that you gave of the two schools that have have you know similar student bodies, but one is doing well and one's not I. Don't think that means that the opportunity index is somehow invalid. I think one of those schools is better able to garner resources than or do something inside their building that the other one couldn't but I.

R

Don't necessarily think that means that the students that are walking up to their door coming from particular neighborhoods that have advantages or challenges I, don't think it would change what I would how I want to support those school leaders yeah.

A

Annie and I apologize. If my comments came across incorrectly, I did not mean that it would invalidate the opportunity index, but what I would struggle with is making key funding decisions based on that when, in my MA and and I would love, maybe as an example, if you could look at those student populations and look to see, would in fact the opportunity be index index be different for something that we wouldn't know. You know that's and, and then, because we're gonna be digging in. Why why?

A

Why would we have success at this school and not at this one? What and- and we have some suspicions on it and.

Q

I think I was gonna, get to that point right, just cuz two schools because of the way Boston assigns and enrolled students in schools. Two schools, literally three blocks away from each other, could have completely different student populations in terms of their neighborhood background. So I mean we're happy to look at that comparison and see if that accounts for it. But even if it doesn't I mean to your point earlier about perverse incentives right.

Q

If we, if you think about the funding structure according to the needs that students carry with them right and and you sort of you're deciding whether you want to think about that or think about the the school's current performance than what you actually would end up doing is, in a sense, penalizing schools that have done an excellent job because you're saying well, it doesn't matter that your students come background where we should be supporting you with with more programming, more funding, because you've done so well. So we're gonna step back from that.

Q

I think if those two schools end up having exactly the same scores on the various components of the opportunity index and just happens to be that one of them has been excelling because of programming because of curriculum, I. Think really the thing there is to learn from that school and how it can be transferred to other schools. But I. Don't think you want to back that out to recalculate and of post-hoc your your funding structure. I think you still want to give that school support commensurate with the student population.

Q

That's coming in the door at the beginning, I.

A

I, thank you. This was this was intended to be a theoretical conversation at the at the beginning of a process, I think to try to summarize what I've heard from fellow members is. I would say there was interest on this, and this concerns questioning and there's some concerns that have been raised as well. I think it's an equal mix of all three we're all intrigued by the concept and applaud the tremendous hard work that has gone into it already.

A

I think it's gonna be very interesting, as the superintendent said you know, in talking with students and with teachers and with parents and school leaders to kind of get some feedback from them as well on on how this gets, how this gets implemented and then working a bit more on you know, could this be a policy I think speaking individually, I have some concerns about making a pot major policy move affecting the vast majority of our funding, as this gets worked out and explored a little bit more I'd love to hear fellow members as well on this, as as we dig in on this a little bit more I think it's.

A

It's excellent work to date, dr. Rose did doing a fantastic job, please keep it up and everyone else was working on it as well. I think this is gonna, be a continuing conversation of this committee. uh Curiosity, I, I.

U

Was gonna, say and maybe I mean now I know that last year and working with Eleanor Lawrence on this, it made total sense to really look at some of these factors and try to try to not monetize them. But you know to say you know we need to help this school. For these reasons versus it's up, you know, and so I I wouldn't want to just wipe it off the table because they I think it had.

U

It has significance, you know, wouldn't you say I wonder, are you thinking about this and in relationship to funding or let.

C

A

C

It before you do.

S

A

Know means was okay.

S

A

Wiping this off the table.

E

A

The superintendent laid out to us at the beginning he wanted to get our feedback about this.

E

A

He wants to then move forward and talk to some interested constituent groups and.

E

A

Back to us again and I was trying to summarize follow us that I think would with indicated an equal level of interest and questions and concerns. I, don't think any one of us said stop this I didn't I didn't hear that from any member. Okay,.

U

A

Was you know professional feedback from a variety of.

E

A

Beautiful okay.

C

Yeah yeah I want to first just thank the school committee for your feedback. I, don't think I could have anticipated the kind of breadth of perspectives that happened today. So I want to thank the folks number two I think we're very, very clear that, as we think about this policy and the implications of this policy, because this is uncharted territories, we're gonna have to put some really strong guardrails around this. We have to really study this understand this.

C

We have to understand where it makes sense to apply such an index to, and we want to be very, very careful. I find it just ironic that in bps we have a ways to employment.

C

It looks it considers all these different factors, and that has become too blunt for us as a school system and that we keep continue pushing ourselves to be even more nuanced and more innovative and more progressive and I just I just caution all of us in not letting don't let perfection get in the way of progress, and now we're not going to get this perfect. But if we put the appropriate guardrails around it and continue to study this and study this, we have where to put those guardrails of it.

C

We have to make progress, get we got somehow put a toe into the water, because this is such important work and it is completely aligned to what the School Committee has asked us to do, which.

D

C

Figure out a better way of being more equable in the way we find and we're coming back to you with some of the best thinking, I have seen I.

A

Do want to break protocol a little bit and see if members have would love to give folks a opportunity if you want to make any further comments on this. At this point,.

O

That's a rabbit, hole, I, don't want.

E

A

Okay, I think you accomplished, we accomplished what you hope: yep.

C

And we're gonna be coming back with and next set of information for this school committee to consider yep.

A

um Dr. hill and dr. O'brien, thank you so much for joining us and you work on this this. This is incredibly eye-opening for all of us, as you could see by the interest of every committee member on this and as I said, it's a continuation of the focus that we've had on the opportunity achievement gap. Dr. Rose is leading us on. So um thank you for the work that you've done on this and my guess is you're gonna continue to do on it as well.

A

So, thank you very much and thank you for joining us this evening. Thank.

R

A

We'll move on now to our second report. Our next presentation is on bps secondary to its tools, this time, I'd like to invite dr. Noriega Murphy, the assistant superintendent of high school redesign and college and career-readiness gonna, step forward to our presentation.

A

As she gets ready like to give superintendent Chang an opportunity to make some any opening remarks, if you'd like to yes.

C

Thank you very quickly. This presentation is about our office of secondary schools, work on high school redesign, programming for college career and life readiness bless you. This is a fairly new office. If this is a redesign office, reconstituted office under the leadership of Lydia, Noriega and I want to just appreciate dr.

C

Lee, hidden Noreaga Murphy we're coming back and a Septon the offer to come back and kind of work at a systems level and to bring more coherence to our our secondary work within the system and, as you know, she was the assistant had high school us assistant, superintendent, high schools, but really doing the work at English high over the last several years. Now she is overseeing this entire office.

C

She will be providing an overview about her office and the work that she is embarking on doing and in particular, really talking about expanding our portfolio of options, especially when it comes to expanding career, technical education, around linked learning and ultimately, making learning academic learning relevant as we prepare young people in our secondary schools, our college career in life so and she will be joined by Marsha, so we'll turn it over to them. Well,.

W

I could even in I think that dr. chan is taking all my talking points, but thank.

E

W

That introduction I.

C

W

Presenting with me as dr. chance, Anna is a Marsha Innings, who is the director of post-secondary partnership and initiatives, but I want to recognize Michele Salaria, who is the executive director of career technical vocational schools for the district and she's just helping us quickly? Work I wanted.

X

To say good evening, but given the hour, I will say good night to everyone here, as well as my children at home, hopefully they're, sleeping and they're in bed. Right now again, my name is Marsha in this Mitchell and I have the pleasure of working alongside dr. Lee, here, Noreaga Murphy, on this very important work. Our work is focused in the office of secondary schools, on ensuring the successful post-secondary attainment of all of our students, regardless of their situations and I. Think you all would agree with me when I say to do this work.

X

We must remove the disparities and the educational outcomes of students who have been historically underserved and some of our most vulnerable populations as well. Our efforts must result in stronger alignment between secondary schools, as well as post-secondary institutions, so alignment, and not only the systems, but our two sectors as well. We must also work on building better coordination with all of the wealth of partner resources in our city and Alexandra.

X

Aliyev alia is the head of Sociedad and one of our very important partner resources that we rely on, and the third piece is to really make sure that we have a tiered supportive schools focus on the integration of quality, academics and workplace readiness skills. With these pieces in place, our students can definitely acquire the knowledge, skills and experiences needed to be successful when they leave us.

X

We look to these four high school redesign principals that were developed through a large citywide process, headed up by our chief of education, mr. Ron Dorsey, alongside the Boston Public Schools, we looked at them to deliver on the fundamental goal that we are looking at for our high school experience and that is to offer more rigorous, expensive experience focused on the whole student, both inside and outside of the classroom. As a result, we have begun to launch new thematic career pathways, as well as early access to college models in several of our high schools.

X

We hope that students will begin to see the relevance in their education, both inside and outside of our classrooms, and that see the city as an extension of their classrooms. As well over the past year, myself, as well as other district leaders, some of our high school Headmaster's and other colleagues across the city joined in with the opportunity agenda to develop what you see here as our new the adopted citywide college and career and life readiness definition. This effort was led by christen, McSwain again from the Boston opportunity, agenda and I.

X

Think they're going to change, has already presented on this definition. A few weeks back, but I want to emphasize. This research was conducted based on what we know our students struggled with in their early college years. They struggled with the ability to set long-term goals and manage their immediate needs. They struggle with identifying a support person and a mentor in their lives, setting a realistic self appraisal of themselves. The acquisition of knowledge about a particular field, as well as the ability to persist.

X

Despite some of the challenges in their life and using this new definition, we plan to launch strategies to help our students to build more agency, monitor and track their own successes through individual plans and this year we're looking to launch a tool called Naviance, which is a college and career planning platform, and every ninth grader will have an opportunity to begin developing a four year success plan using Naviance, and that way we can help them to begin to identify when they've mastered some of the skills.

X

We know that's necessary for employment, as well as post-secondary entry and begin to badge some of those skills in a digital manner that can be used both for internships, job opportunities, as well as post-secondary admissions. At this point, I'm going to transition over to dr. Noriega. Who will give you a sense on how we're planning to phase out this work.

W

So one of the things that I think we have to clarify because many people ask this question- is how do you redesign high schools? Thank you for explaining phase one which we define as defining the principles for the work, then defining the. What is college and career readiness for life on Phase two in order to do the work is the groundwork is to find out what we have in our high school. So that means the program phase three will be Bill.

E

W

So I just want to make sure that that is clear, because sometimes people ask: when are you going to change schools? When are they going to move beyond this? How you want to close, really sign we bump, and in this case is we are working very closely to look at what we have in order to grow. So we are looking at five areas and one is the early college pathways which include dual enrollment. We are looking at the Career and Technical Education pathways and we did an inventory of what we have in every single school.

W

We have link learning pathways link, learning is not a program. It is an approach that blends academic with project-based learning. Then we have the school design innovation pathways. We are also looking at the landscape of secondary schools and the programs, including alternative education and educational options.

W

Lessons learn yes: when I was at English, I learned something when I was at English high school and that vocational career programs can exist in traditional schools. We do not have to have a vocational school to have other CVT programs.

W

Lessons learn is that we had to bring the partners to the conversations and when I say partners is also parents, community members, industry members and then bring students to this line. What they want to learn what they want experience, not just in the classroom but are just outside the classroom. I have to say that most of our CTE programs, the career technical programs, exist in our open, enrollment schools, and that is a great accomplishment.

W

We also have, for the first time, an exam school that is going to open a CTE program, an engineering program and that to us means we are expanding the opportunity for students in alternative options in open enrollment schools and now in exam schools. So to us that is a great accomplishment.

W

We do want to make sure that every single school in Boston for school will give opportunities for students to have hands-on experience and at Manchester to use this city as a classroom, and in order to do that, we had to make sure that also there's equity and that is aligned to all four essentials.

W

We are looking more into the sustaining learning environment. We want to make sure that the programs are going to be able to be sustainable for a long period of time and that they can grow within their communities.

W

One thing that we are trying to avoid is to create programs where we have one enthusiastic teacher who knows about things, and then we open that program, because that teacher has that great idea and everything and then the teacher leaves the classroom and there goes the programs. So we are trying to be very intentional about what's happening in the schools. We want to make sure this a trajectory. So therefore we are going to start working with the Headmaster's on school leaders in developing three to five year: strategic planning.

W

We know that leaders also transition, and then things sometimes do not continue, and that is very sad to see. I have to say it's very painful to see it that it. So we want to make sure that we start thinking about long term on how we can create these programs, how we can sustain them and also to bring the partners and partners most likely will be willing to invest more in programs that they know are going to be there tomorrow and in ten years.

W

This is our wine, and one of the things that we want to make sure is that we are including all our students and the work that we are doing is to make sure that we explicit with school leaders to say when you open a program, make sure that you are going to put practices in place where every single student that is in the building has access to. We are working very closely with the office of special education and the office of English learners. What are we doing there?

W

We are developing a strategic plan where we are, as a group analyzing the potential programmatic changes where students can be served better. We are revising the trip at the choice forum for students with disabilities and allowance, because we have amazing programs in some schools, but due to the choice, some students don't have access to those programs.

W

We are also trying to find the best transition support programs for students who are non diploma bound. These are the students that sometimes we don't think about when we think college and career, but they are career source. These students, that, due to their cognitive circumstances, will never attain a high school diploma.

W

We are also looking at the overage students and when they turn 22, what do we want to deal with them and we are saying: what do we want to do is create a plan where they can go to Adult Ed programs and not just to get a GED or high school from theirs. Are these programs offering career readiness, skills and I have to be I have to inform that we have five partners that come into the table to find out more about these programs on how they can engage.

W

In these conversations, our work has been also in the landscape of secondary school. We have with them the way that we group them and we group schools according to the following criteria: one: what programs do they offer of covering the over population students they serve? Our students have access to these schools and programs. What college and career-readiness opportunities they offer for all for all our students.

W

In order to do this work, we rebound also the office of high school, and the first thing that we did is we change the name of the office of high school. We want to make sure we are aligned, I mean with our higher education institutions and with the state. So we decided to change the name to the office of secondary schools in order to make forward umbrella, larger to schools and programs. We have created an in-house secondary school cross-functional team instruction. Superintendents for high school are part of this team.

W

Now we are developing metric systems on how we can measure our impact on schools. Some of you know that I'm a data focused person because we need to know if what we are doing is really having an impact on students lives. You know, how can we stop doing that and then improve the programs? Are we have in order to be transparent? Our focus is in the open, enrollment schools, that's where we have most of our level 4 schools and lower level 3 schools.

W

So we want to make sure that students in those settings have opportunity to be successful.

W

We want to base things on research, so therefore, we partner with two institutions- one is Department 2.0. They are looking at how VPS defines what is on track students on off track students. What are the conditions that affect students from disengaging from school and then what time we at what point on their lives? They just don't stop coming to school, and what happens after that? We are looking at interventions and also we are looking at alternative programs.

W

Spring point is looking more at the school cultures. What do they offer in certain schools? We have great prices, but where these students don't want to leave, no matter what it is, they love to school, these people that care about them. So we want to learn about those conditions, so we can replicate them in other schools. They have trainers in using a rubric that makes sure where we can find those best practices of service and servicing students.

W

We also use in data to tear the support systems for schools. We know that one size doesn't fit all, but we want every single school to be able to have the right conditions to offer these pathways city programs. We have worked in two schools this year and is part of the turnaround plan, and that is with Brighton and Excel that they have linked learning and I had to report the teachers enjoy working in project-based learning and cross-functional teams.

W

We want to make sure that CTE programs will be an opportunity for interdisciplinary team analysis and also to open a network of teachers working across this system in order to develop curricula and not look at the standards and to be able to create lesson plans that can be integrated in all the classes on, like other courses.

X

Some of the data that we look at to approximate college readiness of our students are the Advanced Placement arm scores and taking as well as at SAT scores in the first graph. Here we see steady increases of students taking AP exams in the course subject: areas of English math science and social studies, with over 1,300, more exams taken in 2017 than in 2013, and that's huge, while increasing the number of exams that our students are taking.

X

The number of qualifying scores are also increasing and have been increasing over the past the past five year period, but we recognize that they still remained under 50%. So we have some serious work to do on that. A white and our Asian students continue to be over-represented in AP courses compared to their overall population distribution in the 11th and 12th grade. However, the racial distribution is narrowing. Black and Hispanic students now represent 58% of our districts overall ap enrollment, compared to only 50% back in 2007, so I just wanted to recognize that as well.

X

It's growing, but we also recognize the work. That means that happen in that area. The SAT participation rate in the second graph has remained stable at approximately 65 percent of seniors are taking the SATs. This past year, the College College Board launched the new SAT tests with a new scoring scale, which is why we only have data for one year. We see that for 2017 the mean reading and writing score and BPS exceeds the SAT college and career benchmark by 13 points. So the college and career benchmark is 480 as determined by the College Board.

X

The district's students are scoring on average of 493. So we're pretty excited about that. um However, our math score is below the college and career-readiness benchmark by 26 points, some of the initiatives- and you can leave it right here. Some of the initiatives that we're trying to work on or have been working on, to really tackle some of the deficits in these areas and better serve all of our students.

X

Is we have a integrated partnership with Massachusetts inside for education, where they provide advanced placement study sessions on Saturdays, mark AP exams, pre-ap alignment ap summer Institute's for new and current teacher, and also some instructional coaching. We want to build off on the successes of our students, but also help them to address the areas where they're struggling the most.

X

The second initiative is, we have an AP subsidy program in the district, where we cover as a district, the AP exams for all low income students, because the last thing we want is for our students, people to be locked out. They go through an entire year of really working hard on their AP courses and we do not want them to be locked out of having to take the exams. The third one is. We want to not only increase a people also dual enrollment, so for schools that don't have a focus on AP.

X

We want to offer dual enrollment and have been doing so. One of the integrated dual enrollment partnerships have been with Bunker Hill, Community, College and I want to publicly applaud and recognize Bunker Hill for continuing to support five AP, dual enrollment courses that occur at the o, Bryant high school campus, but it's accessible to all of our students, so students from across the district make their way after school to access these dual enrollment courses.

X

That are taught by on Bunker Hill faculty, and even though this year funding has dwindled, Bunker Hill has continued to commit to covering those courses so kudos to dr. Ehlinger and her team on that. For the SATs we offer PSAT testing to all 10th and 11th grade students, so they can get a level of familiarity with the assessment. Every single year we have Don. Dr. Chen has signed on to be part of the College Board's all-in campaign to provide free online SAT preparation through a partnership with Khan Academy and the College Board.

X

So once the student takes their PSAT exams, they've, given an a score, then there's been uploaded into the system and a personalized study guide is then offered to that student in preparation for the larger SAT test, a huge initiative that we tinkered with last year that we're looking to expand this year, particularly because we want to provide more wraparound supports to our ll students who are taking the SATs is having an in-school SAT in the school day initiative.

X

With this year, all 11th grade students will be able to access that test in a film and that testing occurs at the home school where they can implement supports for yellow learners languages that will be provided.

X

Our arabic, chinese, haitian creole, polish Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese, and there will also be an approved, word-for-word glossary that students can use on the test day and that's really critical, because that means a student can access this exam within the caring, supportive environment of their home school, and then teachers will get the critical data that they need to make revisions. And so it's not seen as a external process. The SAT is an internal process and owned by everyone within the school building.

X

These two chart show the four-year cohort graduation rate, as well as the 16 month, college entry rate by race and, while 72 percent of students receive a diploma within four years of high school entry and 71% of EPS graduates enter college within sixty months, we do continue to see persistent gaps by race. Okay. We also see solid movement in some subgroups of students which I want to recognize on the high school graduation slide, which is the first slide.

X

We see the four-year cohort. Graduation rate has been steadily increasing for all students over the five past five year period and remarkable gains have been seeing for Hispanic students since the 2014 graduation cohort within a short two-year period. The rate of Hispanic students increased by 7% points alone. We can't really pinpoint the exact intervention that caused that increase, but that is something in the next chapter of this work we'll be able to look at what is a credit recovery at the home school or offered through the district office.

X

Is that what is what's making the change? Today? Almost three-quarters of all high schoolers are able to graduate within a four year period of enrolling in the ninth grade. The second data chart shows college enrollment broken down by race. Here we see black and Latino, students fall below the district average of 71 percent, while while white and Asian students are well above today, 7 and 10 high school graduates are able to successfully enroll in college within the 16 month period.

X

We also know that more students go on to persist and graduate from college within a reasonable amount of time, and that's usually six years based on the national trends if they enroll that September following their high school graduation. This is why, as a district, one of our goals is to really encourage immediate enrollment into a post-secondary plan.

X

Some of the initiatives that we have been engaged in or we are planning to launch that supports this effort. Is you all aware successful, Austin and I will say, because I have been with successful Austin from the beginning. They are City's flagship plan for college readiness, access and completion and, through this cross sector effort we continue to provide important transitional. Coaching supports to over a thousand students going to our area at colleges and universities.

X

The second initiative is through the State Street Boston winds, partnership, which funds five nonprofit organizations serving the majority of our schools to deliver services in the coordinated sequence manner in the areas of college knowledge, admissions, financial aid advising and career awareness and job readiness. The goal of this initiative is not only to increase the job readiness of our students, but graduate them ready to enter into a job at State, Street itself, so State Street is looking to really bring in about a thousand of our graduates into their organizing into their company future implementation of Naviance.

X

As I've mentioned, a college and career readiness platform that VPS will be adopting this year as a district. There are a few schools that have it and I just saw that as a plain flat out equity issue right and so we're bringing all of the schools to the level where they can access access that important tool. I'm Naviance will give students an opportunity to engage in ongoing career inventories and assessments, assessments on their personality and their learning styles.

X

So they're learning a lot more about who they are as a learner and they'll be able to work with their partners and their teachers and their families to create a plan for themselves. But the important thing is that they're going to be able to lead that journey and we're equipping them with a software and building a scope and sequence that will help them along their way and recognizing the core role that teachers play in all of this work.

X

We have been looking and launching new, such as avid and one-goal programs that help students build better study habits, practices to increase their non cognitive skills. It is important to always remember that our school counselors continue to lead a lot of the work in this space and we need to see them and work with them to be equal partners in these key initiatives and also provide them with the support necessary to do so.

W

So we have five goals, but the five goals comes also with professional development and coaching for school leaders. So when we say that we are going to increase high school, graduation is what do we need to do in order for the school leaders to be able to focus on this work? When we look at access to rigorous and curriculum is what can we do to support them in the instructional component? We are doing school visits. We are providing feedback to teachers, we are doing across functional teams applying PD for school leaders and the team.

W

We want to make sure that we bring our partners to this conversation, so we are creating a partnership framework, but not only from these office. We want to make sure that will be of the capacity, so the school leaders will know how to work with them, how to collaborate, how to not only ask but also provide things. We have been working with investors, including the CTE framework for Boston Public Schools.

W

We really want to make sure that our school school leaders have the ability and also the you know that you know how to deal with creating city es and working with partners. We also have some leaders that know how to do this very well. So we are tapping into their expert ceases to become mentors and coaches of other school leaders.

W

At the end of the day, we want to make sure that all the ways students see themselves as member of the community as not that they we will ask them what what do you think you're going to be in the future? But what are you doing now?

W

That is actually having an impact in the present, because the futures too far away from them, but the present I will I love to see to go to hospitals and see students from Boston, Public School say you are next like no and then just for them to have those professional conversations. I would love to see more students riding the buses, the trains wearing the uniforms.

W

If they're going to be nurses wearing scraps, I should call them when the uniforms will see more students in our public sectors, just practicing things, and that's when we say that the city should be our classroom, our students don't have time to do for the future. They have time. The time is now so this is just the beginning. We have a lot of work ahead of us and I'm sure we are going to be presenting next time about how our work is so aligned with the bill bps. So thank you.

W

A

You both I'll open it up to questions and comments. Mr. macclay.

I

So I just want to speak to like a few points like noticing. Naviance my school is one of schools. They use Naviance.

W

I

I would like to see a stronger push behind it, because it's like something we sign into. We fill out for schools that we look for schools that we want to apply to, and that's pretty much it, no not much of like what all it has to offer from what you explained then also looking at more supports for college and career readiness, like you said, counselors are pretty much handling this work alone and we need to create more support for them like in my school.

I

Our senior class is only like 85 students, but that's a lot for my counselor and one career counselor to give students the attention that they need, as they look at practical options for college looking at options that they have other than four-year institutions and actually saying well. This is how you fill out coming up this, how you fill out fast, but that's how you write grants and scholarships for college.

I

So we need more support around that then also looking at just like some of the opportunity of partners, because our school does have a lot of partners and but we see a lack of opportunity, we tend to send our best students, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really equitable for all students who.

E

Are interested.

I

And could possibly fly from being in those partnerships, because we have a nursing program in our school. That's only available to less than ten juniors when we have seniors who are interested and have had experience working in hospitals in past. But yet the numbers are very limited to actually participate in that, and it tends to be the same ten to fifteen students who continue to go into these opportunities.

E

I

We have opportunities to work with vertex, but we can only send so many students and it tends to be the same. Students who work in the hospitals are students who katene been in these opportunities. So how do we expand that to all of our students, not only at schools that have bo tech programs or but all students who actually show a deep vested interest into these?

I

We see the potential of them to thrive and that's pretty much all I have at the moment.

W

I have to see if I'm breaking protocol. Thank you for saying that, because access to this program should be different when you say nursing program, but we said, hospitals are not just full of nurses and patients, you have secretaries, you have staff assistants, you have an infrastructure technology. So that's what the vision that we have. How do we make all these connections and it doesn't have to be in a CVT program? It can be a pathway. Give me an opportunity to different students to see themselves in different lenses, so I.

W

If I students know interesting nursing, I, don't want them to be treating me when I'm sick, but it is very good I think for structure and things I want to make sure the lights don't go out when they are performing stranger surgery on me. So it don't have the entry point. So I truly appreciate your comment about that and.

I

Also, just looking at more time with students hands-on time with students built into the schedules.

X

I

We can actually work on these things cuz. We only have so much time between school time, extracurricular and taking care of our family and homework absolutely.

X

Can I respond to mr. macclay, so I am personally going to project manage Naviance and it's one of those things. That's very passionate to me because it will include the family and everything that I do I. Take into consideration that this going to college or whatever you decide to do. Post high school is a family decision. It's not a student decision and there's an ecosystem of supports. That also includes your partner resources. Now Boston has a wealth of college access partners.

X

Some are integrated into the school and others are community based, but what we will do is work to expand on that Boston wins coordinated action model where these partners are sitting together, they're looking at data looking at how many students are completing critical milestones needed for post secondary entry and they're identifying the gaps and we're going to go after those students and we're going to do it through an intrusive case management. But we have a wealth of partner resources who are willing and they're ready to help.

X

We as a district and as a school, need to stronger post-secondary leadership teams headed by your school counselors, where they can get. Those resources into the laps of the students, so I would love to continue. Having that conversation with you to get some strategies on how we can go about that better well,.

I

Also, we can schedule where you can come to be sac and collect feedback from some of the house. Captains.

K

As we're doing.

I

This and also another way, it's possibly holding focus groups like through the counselors, having focused before some of our students to give their feedback like what do they need in addition to what you guys are offering to us now. Thank.

X

You for that invitation thank.

A

You mr. macclay, miss Oliver mm. Thank.

S

You so much for your presentation. hmm I did everything he said it's not it better than I could have I think this is all really great. I would love to have a sense of when we're looking at dual enrollment, we're looking at internships and we're looking at college access during the school day.

S

When what does it look like for every student to walk out of bps having credit for an internship for dual enrollment for college access, when when do, we think that that is gonna happen and making sure again to mr. mcLeese point I? Think, there's it's an issue again of equity. There are certain schools that have all the partnerships that have all of the internships that have all the jewel Ruhlman and if we look particularly at Yale, students associate latina did a survey a few years ago, and it was.

S

It was a huge disparity when you looked at Yale students and having any guidance around college access, it was like men and I would venture that it probably hasn't moved that much so so I do get concerned about making sure that all students have access when we're talking about. You know equity as part of our charge in school committee and I agree with mr.

S

mclees points and I think I probably say it till I'm, like blue in the face, but it is the responsibility of our entire city, our colleges and universities, our businesses, our cultural institutions, to come to the table and provide resources in terms of internships and mentors, and you know, there's we have to look at this more than just K to 12.

S

It's like K to 16 K to life, and every student needs to be part of this, and we have a lot of schools that and nonprofits that are getting a nice little break from paying taxes, and so they should be at the table, and we should make that happen and I'm happy to be part of any effort. That has anything to do with that and my last point, which will probably escape me.

S

Oh my last point is so you mentioned success Boston, which is a great endeavor Boston foundation, which is made up of a ton of community.

E

S

That make that actually happen, the coaching for two years and the case management and all of the things we take for granted like getting tea passes for students, helping them figure out where they're going paying for housing, whatever that looks like childcare, etc.

S

I just want to make sure in that, whatever this design is that there is space for all of those organizations that are doing all of this really creative work when we're looking at entrepreneurship, if we look at like hale academy, yale reservation, sorry as an example, other external programs, community-based organizations that are doing this work already, that are doing college access, that.

L

S

You know duomo getting students into ben franklin, you know with dual enrollment so that so that it's not just BPS, but it's you know the triangle. So thank you.

A

Thank you miss all the w18 Wahpeton just.

H

One reaction to the work because it is really critical work and anything that I can personally do to help bridge the gap with the college and career readiness. I just want to acknowledge the fact that it's it's critical really to our student success, to have the leaders of colleges at the table so that they know the earlier presentation the neighborhood constructs.

H

You know those are these: students who grow up and stay around our city and so I just believe there is a responsibility from college leadership to really help us solve some of these challenges that we find ourselves and in closing the gaps necessary for our students and secondary schools.

H

You know you'd have an additional partner who will be a champion for you.

X

Thank You, mrs. Robinson.

A

Dean Robinson Miss Robinson, yes,.

J

Thank you. This is very exciting. I have two questions, one, it's great that we're trying to redesign high schools, but I still worry about the graduation right. So my question is: on the flip side: what about high school readiness? What are we doing to make sure that our eighth graders or whatever they're transitioning, are coming in really ready to embrace this kind of work because there's a lot of exciting things, but if we're still losing 20 to 30% of them along the way? Something else isn't happening and we.

W

Are having those conversations we are having conversations about? What are the conditions of track students and the pattern that they're seen is students in middle school starts really early on, and what can we do in the middle schools or even and I'm interested in to the register right mm-hmm? We definitely need to focus on what is happening in the classrooms, because wonderful things can happen. You are right, CVT, all the things, but if the students cannot read or write it at a great level, so those are the intimate interventions supports.

W

Are we want to provide to schools in order to do that, we are doing diagnostic assessments of mm-hmm what they have in there? What are the patterns that these students have in order in failure failing classes attendance? What are the conditions something happening at some point in their lives, that is, they stopped learning in ways that we want or envision them to learn and how we are going to support them. So that is the part in them. 2.0 getting us all.

W

This information that we are going to be able to use data to inform our practice and also with spring point, to find out what are the conditions are. Some schools have which these students are very successful, regardless of how they entered at school, with gaps or no gaps, but when they enter the school they're able to catch up and that's what we want to learn so those instead of just making up numbers. We want to make sure what is this research telling us about.

J

My second question is about resources, how I mean- and we've had this conversation many times about wanting to have lots of very different programs and experiences for students, which I think is wonderful, but the question is more: how many freestanding high school buildings and regardless of the number of programs, then, can we afford so that they are fully resourced because we have that problem now, we've got wonderful programs, schools without libraries, schools without something else. You know schools in buildings- and I know bill BPS will be part of this.

J

The question is you know: how can we come to a reality issue around for the the size of the high school population? You know: how can how many schools could we really have well resourced and then thinking about the programs that could be shared within.

C

I think that's a great question that we had. We do not have an answer to in.

E

C

Moment and the part of Lydia's job as the Italian presentation is really to kind of assess where all schools have what the resources they have find out, where all the gaps may be. That's a very difficult question to answer and there's facilities, limitations, there's location where we want our high schools to be. We want our high schools, ultimately through our bill, BPS process to be closer to our hubs of businesses, because we want the class school. I mean the city truly to be a classroom for our students, so.

K

C

I wish we had clear answer for that, but at this time we don't I.

J

Guess we did I just don't want us to come through this process, still facing some of the issues that we're facing now in terms of not being able to spread the resources wherever they in all places where they need to be mm-hmm.

E

J

Figure out that balance between innovation, et cetera, but the reality of budget and comprehensive new.

J

A

You mr. la canto famous.

T

Chair and thank you for your presentation this evening certainly have one question: just going back to the very spaces that you spoken to around high school redesign at what point teachers get engaged either in I hear about the individual engagement. But you know I'm thinking about it from a collective standpoint or you.

U

T

An opportunity to give feedback on how we really think through how the design others here so.

C

I had an opportunity today, just sit in with a group of central office leaders. Teacher leaders who were part of a Salesforce, fellowship and Salesforce is working with us to create cohorts of teachers from a particular school that would go through a fellowship program over a course of a year. Did you kind of redesign process? I have a orientation as we continued doing this work yeah.

C

This work is not central office coming to schools to redesign schools. It is actually work. That's done. I can I grass tips and level of what bring partners to the table working alongside teachers and the school leaders to go through the process themselves and a sale force is coming to the table to help us be part of this process, and they want to work with us in two of our schools and we're gonna be able to bring other partners to bear in this redesign process. I think for the link learning work with Ryan Excel.

C

We were on a very constrained timeline. We had a couple months to put a plan together to bring link learning in I, don't think it's the most ideal process. I think we need something, that's the redesign process so.

K

C

More a bit longer to be more authentic and we got bringing young people to the table. There's a lot of people yeah bringing to the table to be able to do the redesign process right. So it is part of the process and I have to be part of process and we're beginning to already have there, like groups of teachers are already organizing to be able to do this work so and then partners who are willing to come to be helpful as well. I.

W

Just have to say that all our recurring CTE programs, school-based programs- they have been from school- that's the school interest, students, interests and teachers interesting. So we haven't created programs saying you have to have this program. It.

I

W

From interest, and also from the hard work of the teachers and the students and administrators writing, the plan, I'm proposing plans so and I think that's the best way to create programs, because we don't want to impose things. We.

L

W

To make sure that this student interest there is partners, interest and also the teachers there are going to be supporting this work, so I had to send a hundred percent of all our programs in Boston Public Schools their CTE pathways, including link learning. They have been a lot of teacher input because it comes from schools to us so.

T

From school to school, it may differ when all of this occurs we're certainly in that phase. However, right now, where were we're looking to take those principles that we developed into in phase one and apply those on a school to school babies, and so we can expect that continue to occur over there and.

W

T

W

Of the work that we are doing, trying to see the quality of the work, how the resources that they need, what is the support system they have do? They need any coaching with support with partners. So.

E

W

What they have already something is that how do we support them? So the program can be sustainable and it has a long-term plan for two or three years at least and.

C

Again, as you said, this earlier link learning is approached it's not about the program, and so we put the framework in place to help support teacher to provide professional development, but the work at both Excel and Bryan right now is at the ground level, like teachers.

E

C

Ones, working side-by-side to redesign the curriculum, create projects absolutely has to be at a ground level.

T

A

You crane, thank you I. Thank you for this presentation. It it. It shows us high level what your office is working on and what you think in term, in terms of the students I, will encourage that in the future. We look a little bit more closely, a to particular subsets of your schools, one of the alternative education schools, which I think is a challenge for us right now when it should be a highlight for us and we're gonna, want you to come back and give us a separate report on where we stand on alternative ed.

A

What the numbers are, what the challenges are, what the direct strategies are to grow that and make them as well bus as possible, and the second is we didn't talk as much as I would hope to and I think we can in a future report about our struggling at the high schools that you feel a challenge and that you're paying particularly attention on, and not necessarily the level fours.

A

But, as we've talked about as a party before some of the level threes that you our intervening, is in as much as possible and my reason for bringing this up is.

A

We had an excellent example this morning at school to move and improve all referred to it several times. But Mildred Ave was a school that was struggling and the district working with the BTU used a provision of the contract to do an intervention model and it worked, but it was school ribbon, and that is the critical piece and actually the globe today did an excellent analysis of why it worked at milled wood app. Why it didn't work at Madison Park, why it didn't work at some other schools that we had tried and I think superintendent.

A

This may be a model. It worked at no good happened. One of the reasons for doing school in the move is to highlight best practices and have a replicable across, and we have some high schools that we feel a challenged right, and this may be a model. We have the ability to do it. It's done conjunctively with the teachers union and my suspicion.

A

My guess is there would be strong receptivity if we do it the right way, and you may want to consider that for one or two of the high schools that are facing some severe headwinds, because we do have as much as we have tremendous demand at our early elementary seats, we lose kids in about fourth and fifth and then again we lose them to high schools, and so you know we want to make our high schools as robust as possible and I.

A

Think please look very closely at Mildred Ave why it worked, how they did how they did the intubation intervention model and think about, and since it has to be teacher driven. That was the key of the success that Mildred that we heard from the head from school leader there think about. Are there some of our high schools that there would be the receptivity to do that and I think that may be a model we want to consider? Yes, thank.

W

A

Male comments. Thank you.

W

A

On now to public comment report, miss Alden.

K

We have no speakers, no.

A

Speakers, okay, any new business I, have to make one comment on new business. Today was a very historic day in Boston, Public Schools a very historic day. One of our schools is 382 years old and, as we all know, Boston Latin School. They have only had 28 28 Headmaster's in the history of Boston Latin School 382 years of those 28 I think the number is 14 have been graduates of the school. The last three, including today, have been women female leaders, but today is the first leader of color a.

E

A

Of color took the helm of Boston Latin School Lakers, going.

A

This is a very historic day and I think we have to welcome back Headmaster's Garrick because she served this district so nobly before we had delighted to have her back. We want to thank Michael Connor passes for his second go-around, so when he did a tremendous job along with mr. Jerry Howell Howland excuse me, they've done a tremendous job and Al Holland all three work together. They did a tremendous job at that school and I personally can't be more excited to have Headmaster's Carrick in place and leading that school.

A

Interestingly, you know it's not too many folks have noted that we have three exam schools. They are all headed now by a personal collet, two of whom the headmaster, Laura Bryant and the headmaster Latin school are headed by alumni of those schools, dr. Friedman wisdom in and now Miss Gehrig, so headmaster. I want to congratulate na I want to congratulate you on recruiting back along with many others, Headmaster's Garrick to the district from DC.

A

It was a little bit of an arm twisting on your part and others part, but tremendous potential leadership for that school going forward, and this is a watershed moment for this district, so I want to congratulate you and masters Gehrig and mister. Thank you.

H

Thank you for highlighting.

A

So and I'm sure Headmaster's Garrick will join us at a future meeting. So we can all congratulate her in person. Of course, right any other new business carry none. That concludes our business for this evening, and the next School Committee meeting will take place on Wednesday November 15th at 6 p.m. if there's nothing further I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

J

Thank you second looks.

A

Like unanimous consent.