Boston Public Schools officials charged with promoting equity and closing achievement gaps appeared at a budget hearing with city councilors last week. They were joined by one parent, eighth grade students from the Patrick Lyndon School (via video call) and the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts (via written testimony).
Both councilors and members of the public expressed fears that the city’s current budget proposal may be insufficient to maintain needed levels of programs and services at some schools and to expand the work of the Office of Equity and Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps in important directions.
“I’m curious if your budget will be big enough for all the things you envision doing,” City Councilor Andrea Campbell said following the presentation by Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of the Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps.
Meanwhile, school department representatives avoided making requests for funding. Instead, the BPS officials focused on outlining progress achieve thus far, along with planned initiatives.
Office of Equity
BPS’s Office of Equity is responsible for responding to allegations of bias and discrimination, providing religious and disability accommodations and taking proactive steps to create an equally welcoming environment for all adults and students in the system.
Assistant Superintendent Becky Shuster told hearing attendees that traditionally, most of the Office of Equity’ s investigations have involved complaints made by school employees. But this has been a year marked by student activism, from #BLACKatBLS to high school students’ thousands-strong walkout to protest budget cuts. Now, Shuster said, the office is taking a more proactive focus on students to increase their awareness of her office, the equity-based resources offered and their rights as students. One initiative includes a mobile app, launched in partnership with the Boston Student Advisory Council, that allows students to report grievances directly to the Office of Equity.
The app is one example of how the Office seeks to become more tech-savvy. Officials also plan to launch a website and recently implemented a digital case management system.
Outreach measures to students, educators and administrators seem to be working, Shuster said.
“Our efforts to get the word out have been effective because our phone has been ringing off the hook,” Shuster said.
Further Equity initiatives include updating policies, creating more detailed response protocols for staff to follow when alerted to incidents and new professional training. Principals and headmasters are undergoing an Equity Protocol Training, which will teach methods for addressing and preventing discrimination and bias. So far, 87 percent have completed it, and BPS aims to bring this to 100 percent by the end of this fiscal year.
Additionally, the office has selected 24 schools where the diversity among teaching staff does not match well with student demographics and is taking proactive measures to ensure the hiring pool and selections are racially diverse. The office also currently is investigating all reported incidents of alleged racial or ethnic bias at Boston Latin School that are outside the scope of the original BPS investigation, Shuster said.
Budgeting for equity
Shuster said the budget proposal is enough to sustain current staffing — herself and two full-time employees— but that the office has relied on interns and a college student to meet this year’s increased workload.
“We had enough of an increase in our budget to be able to retain all of our current employees with no cuts,” she said. “We are utilizing interns fully.”
The office, she said, is operating at peak capacity. By the end of this fiscal year, it aims to complete 80 percent of its current cases, prioritizing those filed by students.
Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps
Academic achievement gaps between groups that are traditionally disempowered — students who are black, Latino, economically disadvantaged, English language learners or with disabilities — and their peers are sizable and have persisted for a long time, said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of the Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps.
These demographics on average show lower scores on grades 3-8 PARCC and grade 10 MCAS scores, lower rates of high school graduation and higher rates of suspensions compared to white and Asian student groups, according to BPS data.
The performance gaps are a call to action, reflecting that sufficient opportunities are not being offered to all students, Rose said.
“Unfortunately, those who are well-adjusted to the dominant culture will do well in a culture designed for that,” while others will not, he said. “Have we given these [other] groups and individuals the opportunities they need to succeed?”
Although a policy for tackling achievement gaps has existed for a decade, “we really truly haven’t implemented that policy in the way we should be [doing],” Rose said. A more extensive policy is expected to be released in June that will give all departments targeted goals.
Targeted programming
Another critical step, Rose said, is to attack cultural and structural barriers that he says prevent traditionally marginalized groups from fully engaging at school. Rose’s solution is a three-pronged approach involving programs targeted at boosting performance of specific student groups, professional training for making more cultural diverse classrooms and schools and a system for measuring progress.
Rose proposed targeted programming specifically for black and Latino boys in grades K-12. He and BPS Superintendent Tommy Chang are also seeking to provide 300 new seats in exam school entrance test tutoring programs to children at traditionally underrepresented schools in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and parts of East Boston.
Another initiative would focus on combating chronic absenteeism in elementary school. Kindergarten classes in particular tend to have high levels of absenteeism, and learning gaps that emerge at a young age often only widen as time goes on if not addressed. According to Chang, boys of color living in poverty are 17 times more likely not to graduate from high school if they are not reading on level by grade 3. One strategy for handling absenteeism that some schools have found effective, Rose said, is to gradually ease children back into learning after a prolonged absence, as opposed to returning them to the classroom immediately. These schools first provide out-of-classroom instruction to help the students catch up.
Staff and environment
Necessary professional development, Rose told the Banner, involves having employees consider their conscious or unconscious biases and assumptions and how the employees can better meet student needs. Adults in BPS cannot ignore that students are diverse, but must acknowledge that cultural differences have an impact and should be treated as a strength, Rose advised.
Other ways to make schools more welcoming include creating an environment that is consciously multicultural, he said. This could mean featuring various cultures and races in the pictures and murals that decorate hallways, giving students collaborative group work and teaching history that goes past just a Eurocentric perspective.
Currently, Rose is developing a rubric to give schools guidelines on such steps they can take, and working with the Annenberg Institute of School Reform at Brown University to identify measurable indicators of what he calls “cultural proficiency.”
The Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps currently is a one-person team: Rose. He expects to be able to bring on two more members next fiscal year, including a director of cultural proficiency.
