Research & Insights / Dante Alighieri Montessori School: A 2025 School on the Move Semifinalist

Dante Alighieri Montessori School: A 2025 School on the Move Semifinalist

The six semifinalists for the 2025 School on the Move Prize are excellent examples of the conditions of sustainable school improvement EdVestors’ research has identified. You can read all their stories here. Please join us at the Prize Ceremony on November 13th!

Dante Alighieri Montessori School is strongly grounded in its identity as Boston’s only public Montessori school. At its founding, the school set out with a bold mission: to make a child-centered, peace- and equity-driven approach to education accessible to all. Located in East Boston, the school counts cultural wealth as an asset, affirming that its students and families, who represent a broad spectrum of countries, languages, and lived experiences, bring tremendous value to the school community.

Through 2019, the school had seen disparities in achievement between white students and their multilingual peers. Since that time, the school has adopted a number of high-quality instructional materials aligned to the school’s Montessori context and modified to match Deeper Learning practices, such as engaging students in grade-level work that is relevant and interactive, and embodies opportunities for mastery, identity, and creativity. This practice–establishing a culture of high expectations, and having it drive instructional practice—is a key condition for sustaining school improvement. By 2024, the school had closed the gap between White and Latinx students in MCAS ELA achievement scores and significantly reduced the gap in MCAS Math achievement scores.

The school’s staffing structures have also evolved to continue to prioritize students’ needs. The Alighieri created interdisciplinary teams of guides, learning specialists, and support staff to thoughtfully scaffold Tier 1 instruction in classrooms. The Learning Specialists support both Students with Disabilities (SWD) and Multilingual Learners (MLLs), replacing separate ESL and resource room teachers, and ensuring that Tier 1 instruction in classrooms is accessible and meaningful for all students. This has facilitated smaller instructional groups in classrooms–an asset to promote the Montessori “work cycle” model, where students work independently, and do more of the “heavy lifting” of instructional work.

In an effort to plan for the restructuring of these inclusive classroom instructional practices, the team at the Alighieri also implemented regular data cycles to identify students not yet meeting benchmarks and ensure an equitable distribution of instructional resources. Every eight weeks, the school analyzes data from a range of district- and school-based assessments like: MAP Fluency and Growth, CORE Phonics Surveys, PALS Assessments, BIMAS Assessments, and Unit Assessments from their curricula.