ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
February 10, 2005
Task force unveils new measures of school quality
Jeremy Schwab
When a city-appointed task force asked members of the public last
year whether they supported reducing the size of student assignment
zones, parents in Roxbury and other neighborhoods of color emphatically
rejected the idea.
Instead, they said the school department should work to improve
the quality of all schools. The school committee and Superintendent
Thomas Payzant ultimately decided to keep the three-zone model
and appoint a quality work group to study how to better measure
the quality of each school.
The task force studied the recommendations of parents during the
school assignment forums and narrowed them down to a list of eight
areas of quality, each with measurable criteria that could be
used to evaluate schools. Last week, the group presented its findings
to the school committee and the public.
“The purpose was to try to come up with a series of indicators
so parents can make informed decisions about where to send their
children,” said school committee Chairwoman Elizabeth Reilinger
during the committee’s weekly meeting, where the report
was presented. “[The report] will go back out to the community,
because we could be clear what we think it means but be in a room
with 1,000 people who have a very different idea of what it means.”
The report calls for schools to be evaluated based on teacher
quality, school leadership, curriculum, student support, school
climate, family and community engagement, school supplies and
physical plant. Each area of evaluation includes sub-categories,
directives on what to measure, sources for that data, what benchmarks
schools must reach and how the data should be reported.
The task force also presented a list of its recommendations for
improving the school system. The group recommended that the department
survey students and parents on school climate and family engagement,
revitalize the school site councils, extend the school day, recruit
culturally competent teachers and maintain at least one advanced
work class per school.
The group of activists who formed to push for a school quality
task force – the Work-4-Quality Schools group – held
a press conference before last week’s school committee meeting
to demand that the school department allow the parent councils
and school site councils at each school to conduct a review of
their institution based on the indicators.
“The department takes a perspective that they know how to
bring about quality education,” said Work-4-Quality co-founder
City Council Education Committee Vice Chairman Chuck Turner. “Our
belief is those who know best what to do, school by school, are
teachers, parents and administrators. So we want them to define
the nature of the problems. Give them the indicators, and they
can add some indicators.”
But the school department already must ensure that each school
meets federal and state education standards, and Payzant expressed
reluctance to add a whole new layer of evaluation.
“The schools are under tremendous pressure with all kinds
of oversight and panel reviews,” said Payzant during a phone
interview last week. “Do I see 139 additional audit teams?
No, that’s not do-able. The reports on each school published
in January of each year already contain a lot of information for
parents. We could make some modifications to those reports and
add additional information based on indicators that are not currently
there.”
Thus, while the recently unveiled quality measures will apparently
be used to provide more information to parents about the performance
of individual schools so they can make better-informed choices
about where to send their children, it remains to be seen how
the data will be used to improve the quality of schools, a key
demand of parents during the student assignment forums.
“[The indicators] would take the conversation from the general
one — saying schools are not good enough — to looking
at specific components district-wide and those unique to schools,”
said Payzant. “It would mean looking at the ultimate impact
on student achievement, because the ultimate goal is getting to
proficiency and closing the achievement gap.”
Another key demand of parents and education activists has been
more parental involvement in decision-making. Last month, activists
called for the school department to hire parent outreach coordinators
in every school in order to facilitate parental engagement and
inform parents of the goings-on at their children’s schools.
The Work-4-Quality Schools’ demand for the parent and school
site councils to review each school is also part of this push
to increase parental engagement. The Black Ministerial Alliance
and the Boston Parent Organizing Network called last week for
the creation of a task force on quality that would work with the
community to develop an improvement plan for all schools and a
cost assessment for this plan.
Payzant admitted that the department needs to do a better job
of reaching out to parents.
“Would I like to have more parent and family engagement
in the schools?” he asked. “Absolutely. I think one
of the things we have got to do a better job of is reaching out
to parents to say we want you engaged. There are too many schools
that struggle to get parents engaged on the school site councils.
We’ve got to find those where they are not that much involved
and ratchet it up.”
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