Research & Insights / TechBoston Academy: A 2025 School on the Move Semifinalist

TechBoston Academy: 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!

TechBoston Academy (TBA) is one of Boston Public Schools’ largest open-enrollment secondary schools, serving students representing Boston Public Schools’ (BPS) district-wide enrollment — including multi-lingual learners and students with disabilities. The school houses substantially separate Special Education programs and one Sheltered English Immersion cluster.

TBA has implemented several targeted and replicable school improvement strategies to increase instructional rigor, improve alignment across the school, and ensure access to an equitable and meaningful education for all students. First, TBA focused on strategies for teachers at the school–including teacher peer walkthroughs led by instructional coaches, common planning time, and professional development focused on implementing high-quality instructional materials with strategies to support all learners. The school embedded instructional coaches in classrooms and employed co-teaching models in select grades to support instructional coherence across the school.

To address significant student learning gaps, most notably in ELA and Math, TBA has introduced intervention blocks that group students by skill level to offer targeted supports. The school has also partnered with external partners to provide either academic tutoring and/or social-emotional content to support the whole young person. Like the intervention blocks, these supports are also targeted to students’ needs. The school has also increased the percentage of teachers who have completed instructional literacy training to enhance struggling readers.

Finally, TBA has intentionally focused on decreasing chronic absenteeism among students using a few different strategies. These include a daily advisory block and a Community Breakfast. In 2022, TBA established an attendance task force to monitor attendance among students with ongoing absences, including communication with families and home visits. TBA has seen a consistent annual decrease in chronic absenteeism–students not attending school for 10% or more of school days–over the past four years.