By Cary Shuman
It is Thanksgiving week and the administrators, teachers, students, and parents at Bradley Elementary School have a lot for which to be thankful.
The 300-student school (pre-K-6), led by Principal Claire Carney, received the prestigious $100,000 School on The Move Prize at an Academy Awards-style ceremony at Fenway Park. The Prize, now in its 20th year, recognizes the schools, leaders, and teachers who create and continuously improve learning environments where all students can thrive.
Boston Region 1 School Supt. Dr. Tommy Welch, who oversees the East Boston school district, visited Bradley to personally commend and congratulate Principal Carney and Instructional Coach McKenzie Powers on the esteemed award.
It was Dr. Welch, an East Boston resident, who hired Ms. Carney a decade ago as principal. What Ms. Carney and Ms. Powers have accomplished is of statewide and national noteworthiness: the school has improved its academic ranking 50 points to where it is in the top 16th percentile of all schools in Massachusetts.
“Claire is the big story of the school and its amazing journey of consistency and excellence,” credited Welch. “She knows how to manage the teachers, the kids, and parents. She has been so instrumental in the over-50 point gain during her tenure at Bradley.”
“And McKenzie is the perfect example of the pipeline, going from East Boston kid to substitute teacher to paraprofessional to her role now as instructional coach,” said Welch about the 13-year educator.
Carney reflected on the school’s remarkable ascension to citywide treasure and national model for big-city schools.
“The Bradley School had a really good reputation (33rd percentile in the state), but we really weren’t serving all of our students well,” said Carney. “Now we’re in the 84th percentile. We try to create a welcoming and inclusive school community. We’re also thinking about how our teaching teams function and the support that they receive. We work really closely with our teacher-leaders of the school to make sure that the quality of the time that they get together is really strong.”
Carney said she puts importance on the instructional materials and accelerations that the school is utilizing for all students, “so that not only our students with a high level of need getting accelerations but that all of our students, even our highest learners are getting their accelerations.”
Carney lauded Powers as a partner in the school’s meteoric rise in the rankings.
“McKenzie has been a huge support as a teacher who really stood out as being somebody who was able to reach our highest-need kids and meet their needs and modeling that approach for her colleagues and then thinking about how you coach teachers so all teacher can be teachers of our students with disabilities and our English learners,” said Carney. “And that’s something she has done really well.”
Carney said the school has focused, “especially in a post-Covid world, on what professional development looks like for our teachers and how do they give us feedback on what their learning looks like. And we then use that to build our plan.”
Carney cited the collaboration that is happening among all teachers across all grade levels at the school as being vital to the consistency of the educational experience for students.
“How are we then inspecting what we can expect from the staff? We are spending a lot of time in classrooms getting to know every family and every student and really making sure that we’re there to see the fruits of the labor that the teacher are putting into this,” said Carney.
Welch called the 12-1 teacher-student ratio at Bradley “a great ratio.”
Powers agreed, stating, “I really love the model that Claire has implemented over the past few years where we’ve shifted to being a fully inclusive school and we’ve actually seen our scores match and exceed the scores when we had an advanced-work class.”
Powers said the school has also benefited from learning specialists focusing on “one-to-two grade levels” as opposed to kindergarten through sixth grade.
“How that helps is they’re able to become super familiar with the curriculum and the students, and the schedules align so they’re able to plan and collaborate with the classroom teachers,” explained Powers.
Carney said an emphasis on STEM has also been effective at the school.
“We have three full-time science teachers,” noted Carney. “We really want to prepare our kids for jobs that we don’t even know exist yet. We’ve seen a 30 percent increase in the students in just two years meeting and exceeding proficiency in science.”
Carney said she has enjoyed her tenure as a teacher and school principal in East Boston.
“I really love working in East Boston and working with the community,” said Carney, who is originally from western Massachusetts. “I fell in love with teaching and being a teacher-leader at the Umana. I met my husband there because he was a teacher there as well. And I got this job and we decided to buy a house [in the neighborhood].”
Welch has offered across-the-district suggestions that have been well received at Bradley.
“He’s [Welch] a connector of people and connects us to what’s happening in the best ways in all of our schools,” lauded Carney.
Welch said the tremendous success at Bradley is not the result of “a magical formula.”
“Everyone’s working together – it’s just how we roll our curriculums,” said Welch. “We have a great team at Bradley.”
And families can give thanks for having Ms. Carney and Ms. Powers – an Eastie product and former scholar-athlete – captaining and co-captaining the ship at Bradley Elementary School.