The Boston Opportunity Agenda: Fifth Annual Report Card

N

37

Kindergarten; Elementary Secondary Education; Postsecondary Education; Public Schools; Charter Schools; Program Effectiveness; Educational Quality; Graduation; Educational Attainment; Adult Learning; Summer Programs; High Schools; Youth Programs; High School Graduates; College Graduates; Student Characteristics; Catholic Schools; Readiness; School Effectiveness; Skill Development; Access to Education; Change Strategies; Reading Fluency; Elementary School Students; Emergent Literacy; Reading Tests

This fifth annual "Boston Opportunity Agenda Report Card" provides the most up-to-date information available on Boston's education pipeline, from kindergarten through college graduation, including measures for school readiness, 3rd grade reading proficiency, 10th-grade academic proficiency, high school completion, dropout rates, college enrollment and completion rates for youth and adults. The measures for the public systems--the Boston Public Schools and Boston's Charter public schools--use the state assessments. The data is gathered from the Boston Public Schools, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Archdiocese of Boston. Given the different sizes of the student populations in these systems, this year the number of actual students represented by the percentages for each measure have been included in each chart. This report card also marks the final update on the initial goals for the Boston Public Schools in high school completion and dropout reduction. While short of their initial five-year goal of 80% for high school completion, the current 66.7% is higher than the national average for urban school systems and represents a jump of five percentage points from the baseline set in 2008. Meanwhile the annual dropout rate narrowly missed the five-year goal of less than 3%, coming in at 3.8%. Having started at 7.3%, this is a tremendous achievement. It reflects the hard work of many partners and it represents a promising start for hundreds of young people annually. [The Boston Indicators Project and the Boston Public Schools Office of Data and Accountability assisted in analyzing and reporting on the metrics in this report.]

ERIC

2016

ED581771