The Boston Opportunity Agenda and its partners conduct independent research to inform our work along the cradle-to-career educational pipeline. Through our annual report cards, forums, evaluations and community dialogues, we aim to educate ourselves and the greater Boston community on our challenges, progress and collective impact.
The Boston Opportunity Agenda hopes to learn more about opportunities for building parent leadership in nonprofit organizations and public agencies across Greater Boston. If you represent an organization, please complete this survey and share it with your networks.
Your responses will help the Birth to Eight Collaborative think more creatively about how to strengthen parent leadership in the region.
The survey takes about 8-10 minutes. It is intended for nonprofit organizations and public agencies (not to individual parents), and results will be shared on the BOA website.
The new report captures results of a survey of more than 600 early education professionals, and highlights demographics, education, turnover and experience of the current workforce - as well as policy opportunities to attract and retain these vital workers.
The 2023 State of Early Education and Care in Boston report from the Boston Opportunity Agenda and the Birth to Eight Collaborative indicates that the child care crisis is far from ending. It examines the current state of early education and care both for pre-K and infant and toddler programs, considers the continued impact of COVID-19 and pandemic recovery investment on child care in Boston, and analyzes changes in supply and potential demand at the neighborhood level.
The tenth annual report card takes a closer look at the impact of two years of pandemic on the achievement of students on key indicators from kindergarten through college and adult education. It finds mixed results for Boston's public and public charter school students, with some areas seeing much larger changes triggered by the pandemic than others.
Eight months after our original examination, a followup look at Boston's child-care system finds that the city has lost more than 1,400 child care seats during the pandemic, affecting not only the availability of care but substantially reducing the number of children receiving critical Early Intervention services,
The ninth annual Boston Opportunity Agenda Report Card looks at how the pandemic has affected many of the indicators used to track how Boston students are doing in education from early childhood through adulthood, as well as tracking the landscape of the Opportunity Agenda's efforts to strengthen the education pipeline.
This report for Success Boston, The Boston Foundation and the Boston Opportunity Agenda explores the many reasons why students at two institutions, Bunker Hill Community College and UMass-Boston, "stopped out" of their learning without a degree, and the reasons they did (or did not) return. The report also discusses ways in which other two- and four-year institutions might take the lessons into practice.
This update to the 2019 State of Early Education report looks at the significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on childcare affordability and availability in Boston. it finds the pandemic has put renewed pressure on the sector, putting current care and a future economic recovery at risk.
The first in what will be an annual series of reports finds a wide gap between supply and potential demand for affordable, quality early education and care in Boston, especially for children under the age of 3.
The eighth annual look at how Boston students are faring on key indicators from early childhood to adult education features a new indicator, which examines just how ready high school graduates are for postsecondary education or careers.
This report by researchers from the Rennie Center explores the needs, options and opportunities for "opportunity youth," those 16-to-24 year-olds who are neither in school nor employed. Exploring the current career pathways for opportunity youth and speaking with the young people themselves, the authors suggest possible paths forward to engage these young people and set them on a course for career and life success.
A new report from researchers at Johns Hopkins University finds that a series of predictive indicators of college success developed by The Boston Opportunity Agenda and its partners are strong predictors of college and career success.
We know that in Boston a post-secondary credential is crucial to full participation in our knowledge economy and entry into the middle class. Over the past eight years, we have made progress on almost every metric of the education pipeline, but we still see large achievement gaps throughout the entire K-12 system. Additionally, only 51 percent of our students are achieving a post-secondary credential.
The Boston Private Industry Council and the Boston Opportunity Agenda co-sponsored the release of New Directions: Creating Career Pathways for and with Opportunity Youth, in November 2018. The report summarizes the activities of the Opportunity Youth Collaborative, and lessons learned over its six-year effort to engage 16-24 year-olds who are neither working, nor in school in career pathways. The report also provides forward facing recommendations for policy and practice change in the workforce, postsecondary education, K-12 and youth development systems.
In order to define readiness, we must first get clear on what we are getting our kids ready for. In sketching out expectations for the future based on insight into the industry, education, and civic landscapes, the group recognized that the future, particularly today, is characterized by its dynamism and that any singular vision narrows how we expect our graduates will live. So instead, the group coalesced around a set of forces that are shaping trajectories for career, college and life. These forces inform the skills and beliefs we believe students will need to succeed in this fast-shifting environment.
