What you will find in this report is an assessment of Boston students’ academic outcomes across the pipeline: Some scores are increasing, disparities are narrowing, but much improvement is still needed. Partnerships can help to address these fundamentals. Along with classroom learning, partnerships fill critical gaps in developmental and mental health supports, early childhood access, tutoring, mentoring, college advising, and career exposure. The tension here is that while we work to meet students’ daily needs and strengthen traditional academic skills, we must also adapt. Boston’s students are entering a world that looks radically different from the one that shaped traditional education. Artificial intelligence is reshaping professions. The skills that lead to economic mobility have shifted as employers increasingly demand critical thinking and digital fluency alongside traditional academics. These shifts are moving faster than school districts alone can restructure curricula, budgets and training. Boston’s education infrastructure depends on sustained partnerships more than ever before. In addition to supporting foundational learning, partners can quickly provide specialized expertise, and innovations that schools need to stay responsive in a world in motion.

Boston has a mayor and BPS has a superintendent who are deeply invested in and committed to long‑term education improvement, working in alignment with statewide efforts and countless other education leaders across the cradle‑to‑career continuum. This report is timely as it marks a return to routinely reviewing the outcomes for the majority of children and youth in Boston, enabling a consistent mechanism for collective accountability. (Previous reports from 2012 through 2022 were called the “Boston Opportunity Agenda Annual Report Card”). Since 2023 Opportunity Boston has transitioned leadership and deepened its role as the cradle-to-career collective impact leader, taking on leadership of Success Boston, a postsecondary completion initiative, and increasing partnerships with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Early Childhood and the Boston Children’s Council. The re-introduction of the cradle-to-career outcomes report establishes a renewed baseline, covering the period since the last report card. Its purpose is to highlight where we are succeeding, where we still have work to do, and to anchor our collective commitment. The numbers in these pages belong not just to educators; they belong to all of us. Moving forward, success in Boston’s education pipeline depends on how well we as a city of employers, universities, health systems, community organizations, foundations, and families take shared responsibility for student outcomes.

The re-introduction of the cradle-to-career outcomes report establishes a renewed baseline, covering the period since the last report card. Its purpose is to highlight where we are succeeding, where we still have work to do, and to anchor our collective commitment.

Data Approach and Definitions

The report includes data for Boston Public Schools (BPS) and Commonwealth Charter Public Schools in Boston across nearly all outcomes, with the exception of kindergarten readiness, MyCAP (career and academic planning), and the college, career, and life readiness metrics, which reflect BPS data only. Capturing outcomes for over 80 percent of school-aged students, the data demonstrate the citywide relevance of these findings.^2,3

Most data are publicly available, except for BPS data on kindergarten readiness, MyCAP, and college, career, and life readiness. These data are aggregated to show broad trends and do not fully reflect the complexity of individual student experiences. We continue to partner with data owners and collaborate with data and research experts to responsibly interpret findings and deepen learning across the cradle-to-career pipeline. At the same time, the data presented are descriptive and do not control for additional factors or capture all intersections and overlapping identities among student groups. Analyses that examine the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender are currently limited to BPS data only. Importantly, disaggregating data by race and ethnicity is not done to reinforce deficit-based framing, but to illuminate how the current system impacts student groups differently. Across the education pipeline, persistent equity gaps highlight the ongoing need for targeted cross-sector strategies to ensure opportunity for all students.