Last Night @ School Committee - October 14th, 2026
At last night’s Boston School Committee meeting, we saw a preview of a proposed bell-to-bell ban on cell phones, further discussion surrounding word on the OIG report, and a lengthy discussion of new accountability and achievement results. Hopefully you’ve listened to the podcast, because in this post we will be digging deeper into the accountability results, providing more context and identifying what the district missed.
During her mandatory report, Superintendent Skipper began her remarks by announcing a draft policy for a phone ban that will be submitted to the Committee in early 2027. This has been a hot topic not just in Boston, but around the nation. While a state bill to ban phones seems dead on Beacon Hill, districts like Brockton have had bans enacted for almost two years now, with some success. That said, studies on phone bans have been somewhat mixed. A recently released study of 17,000 Indian college students found some modest academic gains amongst the lowest performers, equivalent to a “0.073 SD increase in GPA.” As the paper points out, “the difference between an average and a very good teacher over one academic year is roughly 0.20 SD.” An NBER paper from earlier this year was a bit less positive, pointing to no real long-term impact on academics or attendance. That said, implementation matters (if pouches are used) and changes to student behavior and classroom environment may be more important than academics. Phone bans are also a policy with minimal costs or practical downsides, and thus any improvement may make the policy worth it.
Accountability
Every year, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) releases accountability data, which ranks and categorizes all schools and districts according to a set of achievement metrics. Broadly, districts and individual schools are classified as either “requiring assistance or intervention” or not needing intervention. Schools are ranked with an “accountability percentile” from 1 (the lowest) to 99, which indicates overall performance relative to other schools. Generally, a school in the bottom 10th percentile is classified as being in need of assistance.
As district officials noted, accountability rankings barely moved from 2025 to 2026 in Boston. Of the 86 schools with a score in both years, 39 improved, 40 declined, and 7 stayed flat. But we can also be more specific about which schools saw the biggest shifts. Many in the bottom deciles improved substantially: the Ellis, Margarita Muniz, Russell, and Lee K-8 to name a few. The largest single-year gains came from the Hernandez, Mozart, Bates, and Haley schools.
On the other hand, some schools saw declines; the largest in the last year included the Winthrop, Hurley, and Gardner schools. And while the district highlighted schools that have seen consistent growth since 2023, it is also worth highlighting which schools have seen the largest declines over that period and are in the need of the most help. Since 2023, five schools have declined by more than 10 points: Gardner (-26), Mendell (-21), Hurley (-20), Tynan (-17), Kilmer (-12), Quincy Elementary (-10). The Gardner fell enough that it is now officially "requiring assistance” according to DESE.
