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Boston Pilot High Schools Excel in 4-Year Study
News Release
November 2007
Contact: Robert Frank
Director of Communications
(617) 421-0134 ext. 285
rfrank@ccebos.org
“There will be a parade on Arlington Street today for Pilot Schools.” Paul Reville, Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Education, called up memories of the recent parade for the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox, as he addressed a November forum on high achievement over the past four years of Boston’s closely watched Pilot high schools.
The achievements, analyzed from data provided by the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and reported on by the Center for Collaborative Education, appear in a new report that finds, over a four year period, Boston Pilot high school students outperformed students from other non-exam BPS Schools on every standard measure of engagement and performance. This level of achievement held true for every racial, economic, and academic subgroup examined.
Pilot high school students showed better MCAS scores, higher attendance rates, higher promotion rates—and the four-year graduation rate for 2006 was more than 23 percentage points higher than the rate for BPS students, 75.7% as compared with 52.2% for BPS.
The report, “Strong Results, High Demand: A Four-Year Study of Boston’s Pilot High Schools,” prepared by the Center for Collaborative Education, finds Black, Latino, and White BPS students in Pilot high schools outperformed their non-Pilot counterparts in comparisons of attendance, suspensions, MCAS scores, promotion, and graduation rates. It finds similar patterns for students with academic risk factors.
Paul Grogan, President and CEO of The Boston Foundation, where the November 9 forum took place, said, “It’s the across-the-board nature of these results that makes this report so powerful.”
Boston’s Pilot Schools, the model for new autonomous schools taking shape in Los Angeles, Aurora CO, and in several Massachusetts cities, gained their autonomy through an agreement between the school department and the teachers union. Each school exerts control over curriculum, budget, staffing, scheduling, and evaluation, using the input of families, staff, and community members. Being freed from district mandates, the schools are able to focus on the needs of the students and take advantage of the strengths of the staff and community.
According to Reville, “the key to the success of Pilots and to every good school I walk into is ‘ownership’ by the educators in the schools.”
In contrast, Pilot school principal Nicole Bahnam pointed out that, previously, “When I ran Boston High, everything was an outside mandate.” Now, in her Pilot Boston Community Leadership Academy, “Yes we have accountability. But the key accountability process is in-house.” Teachers and communities care and keep the standards high.
From the students’ standpoint,according to Dan French, Executive Director of the
School Superintendent Carol Johnson speaking at the forum on Pilot high schools, at The Boston Foundation. Nov. 2007
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Center for Collaborative Education, what really makes the difference is personalization in Pilot Schools. The personal approach improves a student’s commitment and learning.
Richard Stutman, President of the Boston Teachers Union, announced that the union “will be starting our own Pilot School, hopefully no later than September of ’09.”
Responding, Boston School Superintendent Carol Johnson asserted, “Richard [Stutman] and I are committed to the process in the next few weeks of setting in motion creation of Pilots. We see ourselves moving forward….It may be the fall of ’09 before we open new Pilots. They need a year of planning.”
As for the key outcomes reported in the study, Johnson said, “Let us celebrate success…This is very exciting news today.”
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Two Pilot high school directors have agreed to be available at their schools to discuss Pilot (including Horace Mann Charter) high schools:
Printed copies of “Strong Results, High Demand” are available from the Center for Collaborative Education. Electronic copies of the report and of the executive summary are available online at www.cce.org.
The Center for Collaborative Education, headquartered in Roxbury, is an educational and research organization that works to develop innovative models of urban public schools, including coordinating the Boston Pilot Schools. CCE is a national leader in small school and middle school reform. The Center provides its network schools with onsite coaching, professional development, advocacy and research. For more information about CCE, visit www.cce.org or call 617-421-0134.
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