We hold students and families at the center of all of our work.

We believe all students have the right to an education that will empower them to pursue their hopes and ambitions and inspire them to reach their fullest potential. We honor the self-determination of our students and families, appreciate and have compassion for them, and champion ideas, methods, and strategies that are initiated and developed by Dudley community members. We work with students and families to create engaging and supportive school communities. We are unwavering in our commitment to partner with the Dudley community to improve outcomes for our students and families. We develop and support educators who share this commitment.

We pursue educational equity in service of racial justice.

We embrace our work with authentic hope and with a deep belief in education as a critical force in transformational societal change. We recognize that we operate in a context of historical and contemporary racial injustice. Our largely Black community has faced a chronic lack of education funding and resources for generations. We seek to dismantle systems of racism and white supremacy in education and holistically, and understand that in the absence of intentional action to produce racially equitable outcomes and interrupt white supremacy within BPE itself, our organization, despite its best intentions, will perpetuate and replicate anti-Black racism. We are committed to liberation and equity for all marginalized groups. We strive to deeply understand the unique challenges and barriers faced by individual students, and to provide additional supports to help students and families to overcome those barriers. We implement our vision of education in service of racial justice, which includes high cognitive demand for students, and productive learning communities to support them.

We build collaborative learning communities.

We know our greatest ideas and our most successful outcomes will be the result of thoughtful, ongoing collaboration with our colleagues and with our Dudley community. We recognize that our greatest assets are our incredible staff, both at BPE and at our schools, and we are deeply committed to their well being. We model a learning stance as an organization, and we strive to improve while we hold ourselves accountable for our impact. We understand that collaborative learning communities are the result of deep trust, and we cultivate this trust by fostering healthy, positive relationships across differences. We recognize that developing these relationships requires a learning stance which includes self-reflection, curiosity, and cultural humility, and we challenge each other to develop our collective understanding of power, privilege and oppression so we can attend to how these dynamics and our individual social locations influence our perspectives, our relationships, the ways we build knowledge and understanding, and our work. 

Our Norms

• Think about the impact of our decisions on communities of color.  
• Ask, rather than assume, what students and families think and need, and include their voices, even when they are not in the room. 
• Use collaboration as an opportunity to build positive relationships and trust. 
• Be humble, courageous & honest.

Anti-racism Commitment

At BPE, we are committed to becoming an increasingly anti-racist organization. We lead with race because we operate in a country founded on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, and the oppression of countless others. We acknowledge the role this history plays in perpetuating inequity and dominant white culture, and strive to be an organization whose policies, procedures, practices, and programs move toward racial equity.

We’ve partnered with Boston Public Schools since 1984 to develop and support initiatives that ensure that each student has access to high quality instruction. 

We were founded to foster improvement in the city’s public schools by acting as its research and development arm.  

Highlights:

• 1996: We developed the BPS Essentials of Whole School Improvement, which focused on improving classroom instruction through coaching. In 2002, what became known as the Collaborative Coaching and Learning Model was adopted district-wide.
• 2002: BPS commissioned us to develop a teacher preparation program that would deliver a diverse set of highly qualified teachers for hard to fill subjects including math, science and special education. We launched Boston Teacher Residency.
• 2005 – 2009: We created the Formative Assessment in Reading (FAST-R) model and student progress data tools that were adopted in Boston and beyond.
• 2009: Our definition of a teacher residency was adopted by the U.S. Department of Education for its Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant program and was named a model for quality clinical preparation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.

We’re committed to partnership.  

We work closely with our local partners, including Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Project Hope and Roxbury Presbyterian Church. We also work with nonprofit partners and corporate partners who are critical to the success of our students as they seek to find their place in today’s career landscape.

Why Dudley? Why Boston?

In Dudley, 54% of households earn less than $25,000 per year and only 16% of residents have attained a two or four year college degree. We urgently need to ensure that Dudley’s students, and all of Boston’s students have access to educational opportunities that are equal to their potential. And Boston’s workforce development needs, which are increasingly in STEM-related fields, demand preparation beyond that provided by traditional schooling.

As many of the schools in Dudley are rated as underperforming, 72% of families choose to send their children to schools outside of the neighborhood. We created a preK-12 pathway so that families looking for a great schooling option right in their neighborhood would have a guaranteed place at excellent school.

Through Boston Teacher Residency, we train teachers at our Teaching Academies, in Dudley; upon graduation we send them out to schools all over Boston, where they have impacted 20,000 Boston students to date.