This report from Boston Indicators and The Fenway Institute finds that young Massachusetts residents are much more likely to self-identify as LGBT than in previous generations, but they still feel many of the social pressures and discrimination of the past. The report also finds Massachusetts’ LGBT community is diverse, disproportionately young, and second in the nation when measured as a percentage of the state’s population.

Leveraging autonomy to strengthen teacher collaboration and community engagement, two Massachusetts innovation schools created powerful, child-centered learning environments. The Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville and the Paul Revere Innovation School in Revere—the 2017 Pozen Prize finalists—underwent rapid school improvement by supporting students’ social, emotional, and intellectual needs. Working in collaboration with The Boston Foundation, the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy produced this case study to describe how the two schools used school-based decision-making to accelerate student learning.

This report, conducted by the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute for Success Boston, finds that Boston students have access to unprecedented levels of support for getting into and persisting in college, but that the effectiveness of those supports would be increased by improved coordination and sharing among schools, community organizations and higher education institutions.

The report looks at the changes in college completion rate for Boston Public Schools graduates in the decade since a 2008 report found less than a quarter of BPS Class of 2000 graduates (and only 39% of BPS college enrollees) completed a program within six years. It finds that the six-year college completion rate of graduates who enroll in college during the first year after high school has reached 52%, the highest recorded to date. For students entering the fall immediately after graduation, it’s 55.2% - closing in on a national average of 61.7%.

This report, The Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap in Massachusetts: A Race to Lead Brief, offers findings from the subset of national survey respondents who work in Massachusetts. The report explores: 1) what the data indicates about the differences between people of color and white respondents in Massachusetts and 2) how the Massachusetts findings compare to the national survey results.

At this forum, the Boston Foundation released a report authored by Boston Indicators and the Fenway Institute that features new research about our state's LGBT community. Following a presentation of the report's findings, there was a series of discussions on the inequities facing today's diverse LGBT community and ways to address them and other challenges going forward.

Quality instructional coaching is a critical tool for supporting teacher growth and, as a result, student learning. There are two common challenges to this: Consistent instructional coaching is not readily available for the majority of teachers and, when it is, teachers are not typically empowered to drive the focus of their coaching work. Jennifer Glynn, a Grade 4 Lead Teacher at Match Community Day Charter School in Boston and James Likis, a Data Inquiry Facilitator with the Boston Public Schools, have a possible alternative. DIY Coaching addresses these challenges by thinking differently about instructional coaching: It brings together communities of teachers and activate them as coaches of themselves and their peers through the use of classroom video. Here's their presentation from the 2018 Boston EdTalks

Student stories are a rich natural resource running through the veins of our schools that often goes untapped. In this 2018 Boston EdTalk, Christine Gentry, Director of Teacher Development and Licensure, at City on a Hill Charter Public Schools in Boston shows how teachers can unearth this resource by bringing oral storytelling into their classrooms—explicitly teaching students how to choose and craft stories from their lives and then allowing them to publicly perform those stories.

We teach our students how to live in the world, not how to change it. Pair that with the constant access to the unfiltered, harsh realities of our world, and we have a strange recipe for fear and apathy. In this presentation from the 2018 Boston EdTalks, Alvaro Peters, Speech and Composition Teacher at KIPP Academy Lynn in Lynn Massachusetts, shows how he was able to spin what had been a class on equity gone awry into an important teachable moment. By giving his students the “Knowledge of Systems,” he strives to keep them from falling victim to those systems.

On May 10, 2018, hundreds of educators gathered at the WGBH studios in Boston for the 7th Annual Boston EdTalks. Ten talks - by educators - about the ways in which teachers and other educators can drive innovation, in the classroom, the school and the community. 2017 National Teacher of the Year, Sydney Chaffee, served as the Master of Ceremonies.