Purpose & Beliefs   

BayCES believes that every child has the right to a quality education, and we coach people to become the powerful leaders who make good on that promise.

We provide comprehensive services to build culture, conditions, and competencies for excellence and equity in districts, schools, classrooms, nonprofits, and communities.

We currently work in over a dozen cities and districts. We seek new engagements with clients who are committed to an equity agenda.

We offer a deep, authentic, and supportive partnership, meeting clients where they are with their current needs through a range of coaching and consulting services focused on educational equity, including:

• District transformation and redesign: administrator professional development (transformative leadership, team development), coach program development, structural redesign and implementation, school network professional development. 
• School transformation and redesign: Principal and leadership team coaching (school design, culture, instructional leadership, professional learning communities), embedded instructional professional development (formative assessment, data-based instructional planning, literacy and math coaching, culturally responsive instruction), school redesign (SLC, advisory, master schedule).
• Organizational development and executive/team coaching services for nonprofit agencies committed to equity, access, and service.

Please see our program pages for more information about our services.

Beliefs

1. We can do this. Educational equity is achievable. Opportunity and achievement gaps based on race, class, language, or other social difference are being eliminated in excellent schools and systems.

2. People can lead this. The problems in education today are complex, daunting, and systemic. There is no one program or approach that will solve them. But in every case, people will solve these problems. People working together more effectively, purposefully, openly, and strategically than before.

3. Solutions must be people-focused. Education reform is often conceived and delivered as a technical enterprise: data and accountability, performance management, resource re-allocations, etc. Program solutions are important in complex education systems, but if we neglect the social and emotional sides of people (culture, race, history, relationships), we will continue to see slow or no progress.

4. Equity requires dialogue. Urban education systems are oppressive and the people in it are hurting. Students and families are angry, scared, lost, alienated, acting out. Educators are stressed, frustrated, professionally anxious, and turning over at high rates. Progress requires strong alliances across identity and role. Sustainable change requires time and space for talking, listening, thinking and learning together.

5. Good data used well makes for good decisions. "Data" means information about each student that teachers can actually use to make critical decisions now that will improve their teaching and student learning. It also means similar actionable information about families, teachers, schools, districts, systems, etc. Change should be informed by best practices and research, local data, and qualitative understanding of the people involved.