Sarah James led discussion about the TNTP that came out this month, and modeled how she would talk about the data. We are going to work with the outcomes committee to see what data and story details do they need as Board members to tell this story to other outside community members.

Sarah demonstrated how she would talk about she would frame the changes that the school went through with leaderships changes, pandemic changes, and more. We are now focused on literacy and making sure students are on grade level to make sure they are fully prepared for college. In addition, through persistence project we are working to support our alumni who are currently in college to make sure they are succeeding there. We are thinking about what the right moves are to best support our students. 

It was also discussed how comparing how we are doing in the general landscape of education in general.

Question was posed: What data do you need as a Board member to make sure that you are sharing the correct story about Boston Prep?

Suggestions of necessary data: Concrete language on how we are comparing to BPS and charter peers & what are the instructional and data collection bets we are taking to improve our data and outperform our peers

- What is good in relationship to where we are supposed to be? What are the standards we are trying to achieve in the next five years? Where are we supposed to be year after year.

- What are the bets that Boston Prep is taking? How are we doing data collection and evaluation? And what are the instructionally things we are doing that would lead kids to be more on grade level? What is special about Boston Prep and how we are approaching education? What are the specific education practices.

- The numbers of how we are preparing to BPS and our charter peers

Rob led a discussion to analyze this school year's data from iReady data from the fall compared to the winter data.  When looking at the reading data it can appear confusing, and by analyzing the data in comparison to TNTP data. The data target increases each year and the gaps become larger. One of the goals we put forward was that in five years we would have 75% of students reading grade level, currently we are around 20% of students reading on grade level. 

Opened it up for clarifying questions and what they need to better understand the practices to improve literacy.

Questions: 

- Why are our high school students performing below grade level more so than Middle school? Generally speaking some factors are that there is more content for students to access in high school, vs in Middle School there are clearer systems for reading intervention. We are working on improving mindset work in high school as well to address this. There are many different stories to tell about this as well. 

- How do we know that the data is impacted directly by the story and hypothesis is accurate for the issue we are seeing? There is no way to fully prove that the hypothesis we have come up with is the only factor.  We use coaching and teacher observations to understand what the quality of the instruction is and if that is a factor. There are many factors that go into it, for example our younger kids have had more consistent practices as the foundation of their educational experiences. It is important we codify our practices and stick to it before changing course.

- How do we pick what to prioritize so we can go fully in on those things? As a school based team we are working to think about the educational priorities for next year

- What extent are we relying on reading intervention and reading intervention specialist? Vs how much are we going to rely on the literacy curriculum? We have a team analyzing what core curriculum and we have a diverse group of teachers, reading specialists, director of special services, etc. analyzing this to make sure that all hands are on deck for the decision making. 

- How will the curriculum impact the classroom management? We will need tight structures in place for classroom management to make sure it can be implemented to the highest level