Molly Cole on Opening Brooke East Boston Charter School and Becoming One of the Top Schools in the State

Molly Cole, founding principal of Brooke East Boston Charter School, was honored this school year with the Ryan Award for exceptional school leadership, a national…

No, Those Tests Won’t Hurt You, But They Should Be Fewer and Fairer

Recently, I wrote about the value of the information parents receive when their kids take common—or standardized—assessments. But I know that leaves some parents wondering whether…

Now It’s Clear That Massachusetts Should Have Simply Kept PARCC

Hindsight is always 20/20, but Boston Superintendent Tommy Chang doesn’t need any since he and many others were right about PARCC all along. Chang was…

Get It Straight: Massachusetts Isn’t Scrapping PARCC

As predicted, Massachusetts’ recent decision to create its own hybrid exam to measure student progress has proven to be a way for all sides to…

PARCC Over Politics? My Hope for Massachusetts

It makes sense that Massachusetts sits at the top of the K-12 education rankings consistently. While so many states struggle with mediocre standards, poor student performance…

The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will vote on whether to move forward with using the PARCC assessment instead of the state's standardized test, MCAS. A panel of several education experts recently agreed that PARCC would better serve student needs. “What these assessments are doing is giving you a real honest assessment of how students are doing to be ready for that real high-stakes [adult] world,” she said.…

With greater emphasis on developing more rigorous coursework and building critical-thinking skills, Boston is celebrating 10th grade ELA gains; perhaps most exciting about the results is the narrowing of the achievement gap, as proficiency scores show African American and Latino students achieving their highest gains in years.   The ELA proficiency rates for all 10th-grade BPS students climbed by 6 points from last year to 82 percent,…