3 Boston High Schools Are Getting It Right. Here’s What We Can Learn.

Today’s high school students are navigating competing priorities, rapidly evolving social and digital landscapes, and myriad post-secondary pathway options. However, today’s high schools are much the same as decades ago, using old models and methods to meet increasingly complex and dynamic student needs.

Public high schools must evolve to provide relevant, high-quality educational experiences that truly prepare students for postsecondary and career.

This moment calls us to answer a critical question:

How can high schools adapt and improve to better prepare students and empower them to make informed decisions about their futures?

In Boston, there are promising examples of schools already addressing this question. Through a recent study of three award-winning high schools, we have identified critical lessons for advancing high school improvement. These schools offer powerful examples of how re-envisioning teaching and learning can reshape academic and non-academic outcomes. Their stories underscore the importance of developing a clear vision for success, aligning strategies to that vision, and creating systems to ensure students' voices are heard and their needs are supported.

Our work affirmed that transformative change in high schools begins with clarity of vision, starting with a fundamental reexamination of what high school is, how it works, and for whom it serves. The three schools we studied crafted visions for success that acknowledged this reality and developed collaboratively with school communities, reflecting their stakeholders’ unique aspirations and contexts. 

Boston Green Academy

Boston Green Academy (BGA) empowers students through rigorous, relevant education centered on sustainability. Its vision is built on four pillars: high expectations with tailored support, a curriculum connected to students’ personal and career interests, a collaborative learning environment, and a culture of continuous improvement. BGA offers the district’s first Environmental Science and Technology (EST) Career Pathway, connecting classroom learning to real-world work experiences on renewable energy, conservation, and sustainable agriculture. EST pathway students enter college at rates 15 percentage points higher than their classmates. BGA’s clarity of purpose provides a foundation for all school decisions and is guiding their efforts to expand the pathway to serve more students

Fenway High School

A few miles away at Fenway High School, a similar shift toward a community-informed vision for high school took hold. At Fenway, the need to address unfinished learning and attendance issues brought on by the pandemic, the desire to meet student and family demand for increased access to college and career pathways, and a strong commitment to equity spurred the school’s vision for improvement. Fenway set out to cultivate a socially responsible learning environment where every student thrives beyond graduation. Fenway’s leaders translated this vision into student outcomes centered on leadership, intellectual development, and self-esteem. The shared vision and desired outcomes led the school to expand its college and career pathway options, and early college opportunities are now woven into the fabric of the school. 

East Boston High School

East Boston High School (EBHS) has gone from a 56% graduation rate to a 94% graduation rate over the last 10 years, with school leaders citing a relentless focus on collaboration and student success as its ‘secret weapon.’ EBHS prioritizes continuous improvement and coherent professional development experiences. Teachers work in professional learning communities through which they can earn graduate credit and conduct action research and curriculum reviews together. Teachers are committed to sharing knowledge, analyzing data, and refining their craft. Instructional Rounds are a school-wide approach to professional learning,  enabling teachers to observe and learn from each other's best practices.

5 Key Practice Areas

These schools also showed that implementing transformation requires coherent, aligned change across key practice areas already identified as critical to school improvement. Reinforced through EdVestors’ prior 20 years of research and other school improvement literature, schools drove connected change in five key practice areas that underpin successful school transformation:

1. Strong Leadership and Shared Ownership: Leadership teams champion the school’s vision and create ways to empower educators and students to take ownership of it. At BGA, they hired a Director of Teaching and Learning and tasked them with overseeing the school’s approach to instruction, fueled by a post-pandemic need to evaluate systems and structures. 

2. Meaningful Teacher Collaboration: Teachers have time, space, and targeted support to collaborate on implementing and adjusting practices aligned to the new vision in their classrooms. BGA and EBHS both implemented instructional rounds to support educator collaboration and norming.

3. Academic Rigor and Student Support: High expectations must be paired with innovative, aligned curricular approaches and explicit support systems to ensure all students succeed against broader measures. At Fenway, leaders enacted this through new competency-based graduate portraits that explicitly connect to new expectations.

4. Effective Use of Data: Schools articulate new measures alongside traditional academic ones to respond to student needs and drive improvement. Fenway implemented new, cumulative mastery demonstrations for juniors and worked with the University of Massachusetts - Boston teams to analyze early college math data.

5. Family and Community Engagement: Beyond engaging stakeholders in vision design, schools recruited new partners into the educational process, adding additional capacity, experiences, and support. EBHS created a parent and family support center — open every school day — to better engage families directly in students’ learning.

As education leaders seek to drive positive change in their unique contexts, the lessons from these schools provide a roadmap for creating more relevant, engaging, and effective high school experiences that prepare all students for future success.

By embracing a shared vision for success and creating systems to support it, we can transform high schools into places where every student can thrive.