MATCH wants to improve significantly as a school in many areas. We believe our students have huge untapped upside. These areas include
1. Transfer Rate
MATCH sets out not simply to get students to earn a high school diploma, but to require all students to earn an "Advanced Placement" high school diploma (passing at least 2 AP and 2 university classes is needed for MATCH graduation).
Because the typical student arrives to MATCH in the bottom 20% on statewide exams, and arrives "against his will" (signed up by a parent), the requirements are steep. School runs until at least 5pm (sometimes until 7.30pm); the grading and coursework is by far the most challenging of the 36 open-admissions high schools in Boston.
Currently, about 50% of our students achieve the goal of an AP Diploma. We'd like to get that to 60% in the next 3 years (The DOE reports this data a bit differently, and actually already lists MATCH as 60% graduation rate for 2007).
Another 45% transfer back to the traditional schools after some time at MATCH (where they tend to do well, earning "traditional" diplomas and higher MCAS than other Boston students). For example, of 91 students who started at MATCH in 2004, 38 have transferred to traditional schools, either locally or outside of Boston (families moved). At least 36 of those 38 are still in school. Our dropout rate (students who start at MATCH in Grade 9, but never get a diploma) hovers around 0%, compared to about 40% in Boston.
On a parallel note, in 2007 the MA Department of Education released data on 4-year high school graduation rates. They calculate data differently, and show the MATCH graduation rate higher than our method of calculation: 60% from DOE, versus our number above of 50%. We realize this gets confusing. Again, almost all students who ever attend MATCH graduate from some school....but many don't graduate from MATCH. A common scenario is students get mega-tutoring from us, make huge gains in academic skills as measured by MCAS, then transfer back to traditional schools, with a much lighter academic workload and lower standards for passing to the next grade. Our dropout rate, which the state defines as a student who does not complete high school anywhere, is almost 0% for any student who ever attends MATCH.
Click here for more information about transfer rate.
2. Sports and Extracurricular Activities
Because so much teacher and tutor energy goes into remediating students, we do not offer as many arts, club, and sports activities as we'd like. For example, boys and girls basketball are our only varsity sports. One way we are tackling this is to open a middle school, which we'll do in 2008. That way, by 2011, students will arrive to our high school with solid academics, and we can offer a much wider array of extracurricular activities.
3. Critical Thinking
All of our teachers would like to see students make two great leaps forward. The first (where we do well) is to get kids who arrive with very low basic reading and math skills to fully master the fundamentals. We need to improve on the "second" leap: kids who can apply reading, math, and writing skills to a variety of more complex questions.
4. Better Collaboration/Dissemination with Boston Schools
MATCH has hundreds of visitors each year, from urban schools around the nation. However, few of them are Boston educators. We launched an outreach effort, sending 25 of our teaching fellows (at our expense) to tutor several times per week in traditional high-poverty BPS schools, supporting their teachers and students (Read more about this). But while our efforts there are appreciated, we have not succeeded in leveraging that into any sort of collaboration. We need to find better ways to share our successes and failures with local teachers and principals.
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