Home Page

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

 

Back to Lead Story Archives

Home Page