Mobile Curriculum
WBUR News
November 21, 2002
As public schools struggle with how to increase their funding, a charter school in Boston has a new approach to fundraising. The Media and Technology Charter High School, or MATCH School, has built a Sprint Wireless store into its new facility on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The store is staffed by students and managed by a teacher with a masters in business administration. This mix of commercialism in public school raises questions for some.
Jennifer Meyers, a recent business school graduate, is the director of what the MATCH School calls its Entrepreneurship Academy. She says the school is teaching skills students will need to someday run a business. "They're learning everything from marketing, operations, finance, accounting, investing, even how important it is to be organized and keep good records and be confident," says Meyers.
The Match School is in its third year of operation. It's goal is to prepare 160 disadvantaged Boston students to succeed in college. More than 90 percent are minorities and are some of the poorest students in Boston. The school's academics are rigorous and nearly 30 percent of the students are held back each year for summer school.
This year, the Match School opened a new $9 million facility. And with private funds the school bought a Sprint franchise and built the wireless store into the school. Students can enter the store through a door connected to the school. Customers enter through a door on Commonwealth Avenue.
Match executive Director Alan Safran says right now the store is struggling to break even, but it has the potential to earn the school $300,000 a year. Safran says that beats selling candy bars to raise money. "We've really put entrepreneurship on steroids. If we can prove it to be successful, it's worth looking at for any school, and a large school would maybe have more success than we would because they would have larger labor force, their kids, to tap," he says.
The money earned by the school goes to paying back loans on the building and for one on one tutoring, an extensive social work support system, and college counseling. Ten juniors take a course on entrepreneurship and work in the store for $6 an hour, plus commission on the phone plans they sell. The money they earn goes into a savings account that only can be used for college expenses. Some students are allowed to miss classes to work during school hours.
Education experts say this is the first time a school has built a store on its property and staffed it with students. The fundraising model raises serious questions for Alex Molnar, a professor at Arizona State University and a national expert on commercialism in schools. Molnar says students are being distracted from their academic program to earn money for the school and for a corporation.
"I think the administration of this school should be asked to resign. I can't image a more grotesque exploitation of children than to say 'The way in which we'll be able to provide you with a high quality education is to turn you into drones for some corporation,'" says Molnar.
Others disagree. Pedro Noguera, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, applauds the idea because he says kids develop math and literacy skills working at the store.
"I think the skills involved in interaction with public and helping consumers, and understanding the product they're selling are all valuable skills that will benefit children in other parts of their lives, so I think that's a good thing," says Noguera.
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