Boston Public Schools collaborated with SDP to produce the SDP Human Capital Diagnostic for its district. The diagnostic is designed to identify patterns of teacher effectiveness and areas for policy change that could leverage teacher effectiveness to improve student achievement. It is also intended to demonstrate how districts can capitalize on existing data to understand its current performance, set future goals, and strategically plan responses.

Boston Public Schools collaborated with SDP to produce the SDP College-Going Diagnostic for its district. The diagnostic is designed to identify potential areas for action to increase students’ levels of academic achievement, preparedness for college, and postsecondary attainment. It is also intended to demonstrate how districts can capitalize on existing data to understand its current performance, set future goals, and strategically plan responses.

Center researchers John Papay, Martin West, Jon Fullerton, and Thomas Kane investigate the effectiveness of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) in their working paper Does Practice-Based Teacher Preparation Increase Student Achievement? Early Evidence from the Boston Teacher Residency.  BTR is an innovative practice-based preparation program in which candidates work alongside a mentor teacher for a year before becoming a teacher of record in Boston Public Schools.

The authors used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth-grade students attending Boston Public Schools and linked this information to administrative data on their demographics and test scores. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth- and eighth-grade. Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools with higher average test-score gains score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools. Exploiting charter school admissions lotteries, the authors replicate previous findings indicating positive impacts of charter school attendance on math achievement, but find negative impacts on these non-cognitive skills. The authors provide suggestive evidence that these paradoxical results are driven by reference bias, or the tendency for survey responses to be influenced by social context. The results therefore highlight the importance of improved measurement of non-cognitive skills in order to capitalize on their promise as a tool to inform education practice and policy.

Whether using the randomized lotteries or statistical controls for measured background characteristics, we generally find large positive effects for Charter Schools, at both the middle school and high school levels. For each year of attendance in middle school, we estimate that Charter Schools raise student achievement .09 to .17 standard deviations in English Language Arts and .18 to .54 standard deviations in math relative to those attending traditional schools in the Boston Public Schools. The estimated impact on math achievement for Charter middle schools is extraordinarily large. Increasing performance by .5 standard deviations is the same as moving from the 50th to the 69th percentile in student performance. This is roughly half the size of the blackwhite achievement gap. In high school, the estimated gains are somewhat smaller than in middle school: .16 to .19 standard deviations in English Language Arts; .16 to .19 in mathematics; .2 to .28 in writing topic development; and .13 to .17 in writing composition with the lottery-based results. The estimated impacts of middle schools and high school Charters are similar in both the “observational” and “lottery-based” results.