Grounded in Their Competency Model, Boston Day and Evening Academy Evolves and Sustains

The transformative power of competency-based education remains visible at Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA) nearly 30 years into building its model. BDEA creates an environment where learning is connected, student-centered, and fundamentally about learning and growth. Ny’Aija Cook, a recent graduate and participant in the BDEA Teaching Assistant program shares, “When we say ‘are you at this kind of competency level right now,’ it doesn’t mean you can’t change or grow. It doesn’t even mean that that competency level is bad right now, so it gives students a different perspective.” 

BDEA was an early leader in the launch of the current CBE field, with roots in the Coalition of Essential Schools model. BDEA began with its evening program in 1995 as a Horace Mann charter school – a school within the Boston Public Schools district with a charter and related autonomies. The day program began over 20 years ago and now there are two additional programs – the BDEA 2.0 program and a Blended Learning program – though the evening program is no longer in existence. 

As the Director of Instruction, Blaine Yesselman phrased it, BDEA is like an old house with a good foundation and beautiful elements, but sometimes repairs or renovations are also needed. This post recaps the core elements of the BDEA system and then explores the ways in which the school has evolved in response to the needs of their students and how it sustains its commitment to the mission while navigating changes. 

Foundational CBE Elements of BDEA

Many design elements of BDEA’s student-centered, competency-based program described in the learn more links at the end of this post remain at the heart of BDEA. First, the BDEA community roots itself in its values, which shape all that they do. Equity, belonging, and connection shape the culture, structures, and pedagogy at BDEA. 

The culture of BDEA centers strong, healthy relationships with young people. They see this as essential because their mission is to provide an alternative learning environment for students who often did not feel connected or supported in their prior schools. Several structures enable relationship-building and a culture of belonging. All prospective students attend a 3-day orientation, required for admission, in order to help them understand the BDEA system and support them in creating a plan for social and academic engagement. Once enrolled, Advisory anchors the BDEA commitment to knowing who students are as full human beings and having a place to meet academic and social needs as they arise. A range of additional support services – including on-site counselling, which nearly half of  students utilize, free hygiene products and on-site shower and laundry facilities – tangibly reinforce that the school aims to support the full range of student needs. 

Competency-based structures underpin the academic system. BDEA’s competency framework builds from the state standards to identify concrete and measurable competency statements that, in turn, are unpacked into discrete benchmarks aligned to the BDEA curriculum, referred to as the BDEA roadmap. Instead of confining students to a grade level, the roadmap represents the set of required competencies and benchmarks, bundled into modularized, trimester courses. 

The roadmap doesn’t necessarily mean a linear path. When a student arrives, their existing credits are mapped onto the roadmap. Students can also do diagnostic assessments to demonstrate competencies and earn a credit, or if they need more time, they don’t have to redo an entire course, they can continue learning into the subsequent trimester. A digital infrastructure for tracking competencies provides transparency to staff and students. 

Pedagogically, BDEA focuses on meeting students where they are through a relevant, social-justice oriented approach to course topics. During an annual project month, students focus on a selection of competencies they need to meet through a range of projects that change from year to year. The students we connected with recently did projects that include partnering with Harvard Medical School to explore health professions while gaining academic and technical skills and understanding generational wealth and personal finance. One student reflected on their experience, sharing, 

“The generational wealth project made me realize that I never had money conversations with my parents…I learned a lot from my mom from when she was a child and when she moved to America. It made me realize, ‘wow, there’s a lot of stories behind what we do and what I do for her.’ …Now, in class, I’m asking deeper questions about what we’re learning, instead of just staying at the surface.”

To bring a student’s learning together, the BDEA learning experience culminates in a senior Capstone project anchored in a post-graduate planning (PGP) process that builds on a series of PGP electives.

Evolving to Meet Student Success Needs

BDEA continues to evolve its programing, building from the core competency-system. College and career planning and differentiated programming like BDEA 2.0 utilizing a more hands-on, project-based curriculum are two areas that stand out. 

Informed and Ready for Career and College

Post graduate planning at BDEA offers choice and agency all in service of ensuring that as many students who can have a solid plan for after graduation. From the early years as an evening program, BDEA realized that in addition to helping older students achieve their goal of earning their high school diploma, often while working and parenting, students needed support in leveraging their learning to access better employment opportunities after graduation. 

The BDEA Career Exploration Program, based in a bright and buzzing room on the top floor of the school further evolved over the years. In addition to BDEA orientation and Capstone, a series of learning opportunities, which function like electives, provides ongoing opportunity for students to explore interests and potential careers. On “PGP Thursdays” or Career Exploration All School Event Days, different partners come to campus with students selecting opportunities that align with their interests and goals. 

Margaret Samp, longtime Director of Post-Secondary Success (recently retired), underscored that students have different needs and paces and her aim is that her team supports the full range of students: 

“Competency-based should not be time-based, it’s not about warming the seat…We have students who come in and zip through here in a year, if they’re really on it, because they’ve come with credits, they’ve been someplace else for two or three years. And some need to get back on their feet and start loving school again. They come in and they have teachers that are doing great project-based classes and it’s a new experience.”

A personalized tracking system (within the school’s tailored Salesforce database, Connects) allows the PGP team to track touch points, goals, and action steps for each student. The team continues to expand college visits and employer partnerships that offer internships or other out of the building opportunities. 

Meeting Student Needs

BDEA 2.0 started in 2018 after the BDEA team identified that a disproportionate number of younger Black and Latino male students were not progressing through courses or attending as much as other BDEA students. Co-designed with input from students, project-based learning and required internships form the foundation of this model that serves young people in a smaller, hands-on environment. The focus on relationship-building carries over from the original program design with greater emphasis on mentoring. (Stay tuned for more about BDEA 2.0 in a future post). 

Sustainability of Practice and Systems

Sustaining a school requires ongoing learning at all levels. At the instructional level, teachers need the pedagogical skills to implement the competency-based system. At the systems level, external accountability metrics do not always capture the mission and values of a school doing things differently by design.

Ensuring High Quality Instructional Practices

In the past two years, BDEA has been focused on how their identity as a competency-based school comes through in their instructional practice as well as in the culture. The impact of the pandemic on student engagement required resetting and recovery of the instructional model, and meeting students where they are in their foundational literacy and numeracy skills. As a result, the staff is now providing more intensive and structured support for students with interrupted schooling. At the same time, the cyclical nature of staff turnover also adds a challenge to the collaborative processes that build and sustain staff capacity and shared practices. In this area, BDEA is working on ensuring all staff understand the curriculum and how to match relevant texts and materials at expected levels of rigor to learn and demonstrate the competencies. Teams currently meet almost every week in a designated “time for your content area colleagues to collaborate on instruction to give each other feedback to like work together on problem solving and dilemmas and things like that.”

A second area of focus is on (re)integrating BDEA’s Habits of Mind and Habits of Success into the day to day, including the academic learning experience. Social and emotional support are integrated seamlessly into the learning environment, and intentionally building student habits helps them drive both their academic growth and personal development, which are inextricably linked. For example, student support services are available and teachers can be modeling and supporting self-regulation and perseverance skills within the classroom. Embedding work around student agency and discourse in the classroom supports both academics and cross-cutting habits.  

Meaningful Accountability Metrics

Schools implementing CBE practices often name the challenge of navigating the external mandates of the accountability system. For example, the requirement metrics for attendance and graduation are important but don’t fully capture the culture and learning of a school’s mission. Alison Hramiec, Head of School, explains, “On one hand it’s beautiful, right? We should be hitting those marks. On the other hand, how do we keep the alternative of our alternative? A key part of the change process is really an adaptive finessing of: How do we work as a community, create buy-in, and hold true to values around social justice?”

In the school’s most recent state-required Charter Accountability Plan, BDEA disaggregates the student population into three engagement categories based on a robust set of student-level data such as course completion, attendance, and lexile level. Through a process which takes place annually at the start of each academic year, students are designated as: minimally connected, partially connected, and connected. While it is important to maintain high expectations, different attendance and academic growth goals for each group allow more accurate and nuanced discussions about instructional practice, support, and identifying different student needs. A student who is attending regularly but not making progress needs something different from a student who is only attending sporadically and also not making progress.

Hramiec sums up how BDEA aims to balance support with high expectations, saying, “When we raise our expectations for students, they meet those expectations, and when they’re struggling, we have support in place for them, but we have to set that bar, because without a bar, what are we doing?”

Centering Students

The relationships between students and staff project a sense of genuine community, with interactions characterized by mutual respect and authentic connection. One student summed it up, saying: 

“We’re here. We’re treated like humans. We’re not seen as a student or as lesser than. [At other schools] I feel like it’s more of a power situation, like, ‘Oh, I’m an adult, so now I’m going to treat you as a student and a little child.’ And I think that here it’s a more level situation. There’s an adult to youth relationship, and I think that’s very important…They give you the work, and they make sure you can do it. It’s at your own pace, but that’s up to you. If you don’t do it, then now you’re not passing. It’s something that’s very human.”

Students speak about the sense of belonging they feel at BDEA, describing a school culture that sees them as individuals capable of meaningful learning and personal development. 

Learn More

• Reading the Pulse of Students at Boston Day and Evening Academy
• Creating a School Culture Where Students and Teachers Both Flourish (Part 2 of 3)
• For Students Who Struggle, Boston High School Offers ‘Space to Grow Emotionally’ – The 74  

Laurie Gagnon is the CompetencyWorks Director at Aurora. Over 15 years ago, Laurie first visited BDEA over 15 years ago. Having transitioned from the classroom and into transformative change work one of her first days on the job was an opportunity to shadow Amy Bayer (leader of the ACE program) as she was coaching Alison Hrameic, now BDEA Head of School, who was then an instructional leader. It was a pleasure to get to spend time at BDEA last winter and last fall with the Aurora team.