BPS budget: the Opportunity Index
How an attempt to make school funding more fair led to results that are… complicated
By Alain Jehlen
The neighborhood where you live affects how well you do in school. It’s not just you or the opportunities your parents can give you—your neighbors matter, too.
That’s the controversial idea behind the new Opportunity Index that BPS administrators are using to redistribute close to $9 million in the proposed 2018–2019 school budget.
Superintendent Tommy Chang says the OI is a cutting-edge advance toward closing the achievement gap for BPS students.
Several school committee members have expressed skepticism. At budget hearings, there’s been no opposition to the general idea, but parents and students from schools that would lose money have explained the painful effects of the cuts — especially the harm to students who already have too few opportunities.
The biggest issue is a change in funding for some of the district’s partner organizations, which provide extra services to students at some schools. Most partners are unaffected, but some important ones will disappear from schools that have depended on them.
Some of the City Connects staffers who link students with badly needed social services won’t be there in the fall. Some schools may drop their Boston Debate League teams, and students are telling the School Committee how their debate team has changed their lives. (In both cases, after desperate, angry protests at budget hearings, some cuts — but not
all — were restored in the administration’s final budget proposal, due for a final School Committee vote Wednesday night, March 28.)
So what is the Opportunity Index?
It’s an attempt to go beyond weighted student funding to provide equity in the budget. Weighted student funding gives schools more money for students who have disabilities, who don’t speak English, or who come from low-income families.
But there are other factors that make it easier or harder for students to do well in school. For example, having well-educated adults in the neighborhood seems to promote school success — not just the education of a student’s parents but their neighbors, too. That’s according to social scientists from the Boston Area Research Initiative, or BARI, which was hired by BPS to design the Opportunity Index.
“Neighborhoods matter,” BARI researcher Dan O’Brien of Northeastern University told the School Committee.
“Where you wake up in the morning and where you put your head down at night is going to matter to outcomes in general, including academic achievement,” he continued.
O’Brien and Nancy Hill of Harvard University explained it all to the School Committee last November 1 and November 15 and got quite a bit of pushback from School Committee members.
Committee member Alexandra Oliver-Davila was concerned about the message that’s sent when school officials talk about lower opportunity neighborhoods. “I have a real physical reaction to that,” she said. “We’re constantly telling our families and youth that they bring all these deficits.”
Oliver-Davila seemed somewhat mollified two weeks later when Assistant Superintendent Colin Rose stressed that the the Opportunity Index is not about the merit of people in the neighborhoods, and that it’s about “addressing need, not labeling need.” BPS will not issue a “heat map” showing areas of the city that provide high opportunity or low opportunity to children, he promised.
Nonetheless, Committee member Michael O’Neill warned BPS Assistant Superintendent Colin Rose and his team to consult with many more parents and students, and not rush into any major use of the index.
(The presentations are on YouTube here (starting about 33 minutes in) and here (starting about 3:11).
Besides the education level of the neighborhood, BARI found other neighborhood factors that seem to affect student performance: crime rates and gun use, income level, physical deterioration of buildings and public spaces, and “custodianship.”
That last category sparked some discussion at the November 1 School Committee meeting (starts at 1:24 here). The measure of “custodianship” that BARI used was the likelihood that someone would call 311 if there’s a pothole or a broken street light.
O’Brien said 311 calls show how much effort the neighbors put into taking care of the neighborhood. He said that would carry over to neighbors caring for the neighborhood children, so that when “you get home early, your parents aren’t home — you have a place to go….Those types of people [create] a nurturing, comforting environment.”
School Committee member Michael Loconto had a different interpretation of the numbers. He suggested that people might not call 311 over a pothole because “you’ve got to go to work, you’ve got to put food on the table, put a roof over their heads, and get them clothes before you can do the all-star stuff.” And Assistant Superintendent Colin Rose said the likelihood that you would call 311 might have to do with “the expectation that things will be fixed when I call.”
Whatever the reason, O’Brien said 311 calls do help to predict an elementary school student’s performance on test scores, although not for older students.
In calculating a school’s Opportunity Index, BARI did not look at the level of education, income, custodianship, etc. in the neighborhood where the school is located. Instead, they looked at the census tracts where a school’s students live. O’Brien said there are 177 census tracts in Boston, so each one is fairly small, averaging less than 4,000 people.
When BARI sorted out all the factors, they found that the strongest neighborhood predictors of success on standardized tests were the education level of the adults in the neighborhood, crime rates and gun use, and the social class of the neighbors. Custodianship and physical deterioration of the neighborhood seemed to affect elementary students but not older children.
Another part of the Opportunity Index: students’ success or lack of success at their previous schools
The Opportunity Index also tries to account for a different (and much less controversial) obstacle to high test scores: Individual students’ academic success or lack of success before they got to their current school.
If a high school has a large proportion of students who did well in elementary school, it’s no surprise (and not much of an accomplishment) if they also get good test scores in high school. If a high school has many students who did poorly in elementary school and middle school, those students need extra resources to catch up — which means that their school needs a bigger budget.
Earlier test performance doesn’t enter into the OI for elementary schools because students aren’t consistently tested before they reach elementary school.In middle and high school, previous school success is the strongest predictor, but the education and income levels of the neighborhoods the students live in still matter.
More details here.
The result of all this calculating is a number between .01 and .99. Schools with high Opportunity Indexes are the ones that need the most help. Here’s the list of schools with their Opportunity Indexes, with Boston Latin showing the lowest index — that is, its students face the fewest obstacles to doing well.
The BPS administration refused to release the actual formulas used for calculating the OI without a formal public records request. (But when we filed one, they did respond. Click here to see what they sent us.)
Rose said future uses of the Opportunity Index could include changes in the weighted student funding formula that determines most of the schools’ budgets, but not for the 2018–2019 budget. The district could also decide to focus on schools with a high OI for summer school programs and programs that help prepare students for the exam school test.
But for the next school year’s budget, the biggest use of the OI is for allocating $5.8 million worth of partnership dollars — including funds that in the past has been spent on programs such as Debate League and City Connects. The proposed budget gives that money only to schools with an OI of .57 or higher, and the higher the OI, the more partnership dollars the school will get. Another $3 million is also being allocated using the OI, but to a wider range of schools.
More on all that in part 2 of this article, which we will post tomorrow, March 28.
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A Billion in the Bank, Cuts in our Schools: BPS Funding Explained
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