Darkness is falling outside. The frequent rumble of the Green Line trolley mixes with the sounds of rush-hour traffic on Commonwealth Avenue as a city heads home from work. For many students, tutors, and teachers inside MATCH Charter Public High School near BU, however, the day is not over.
When the bell signaling the end of eighth period rings at 5 p.m., the main stairway turns into a waterfall of students as they cascade into the main lobby. Some mingle, then leave, but others gather their bags and books and head into the all-purpose assembly room. At once a meeting space, a dining hall, and a performance space, it now becomes a study hall, as students, tutors, and teachers gather for extra study that, for some, will last until 8 p.m.
It's a rigorous academic routine, and one that has brought recent accolades.
In the Dec. 10 issue of US News & World Report, MATCH was ranked 99th out of the 18,790 public high schools nationwide evaluated in the magazine's first high school rankings.
For its rankings, US News considered overall student achievement, academic performance of disadvantaged students, and students' college readiness.
"We see it as an interesting benchmark and a challenge to do better," MATCH's executive director, Alan Safran, says of the ranking. "Because the truth is, we don't consider ourselves a great school; we consider ourselves a good school. We have a lot of upside."
Boston Latin School, the city's venerable exam school and the first public school in the country, was ranked 19th and was the only other Boston school in the magazine's top 100.
While Boston Latin has a selective admissions process that looks at students' grade-point average and their score on the Independent School Entrance Exam, enrollment at MATCH is open to all Boston students entering the ninth grade. Admission is determined by a random lottery, and students are clamoring to get in. Last year, there were 641 applications for 70 slots in the ninth-grade class.
High expectations pervade everything at MATCH. Founded in 2000, it is a tuition-free public charter school whose mission is to help students achieve success in college and beyond. Ninety-three percent of MATCH's 220 students are black and Hispanic, and 73 percent are from low-income families.
Safran estimates that only about 20 percent of the ninth-graders entering MATCH received a proficient or better rating on the eighth-grade MCAS. MATCH sets about improving those scores even before new students set foot on campus, requiring all incoming ninth-graders to attend a five-week summer academy at MIT. Junior Joshua Johnson, 17, of Mattapan explains summer academy quite simply: "All we did was work."
Once they begin classes at MATCH, students face an eight-hour school day, a dress code, a strict code of conduct, and academic standards that designate a D as a failing grade. They also are required to attend at least two hours of daily tutoring with a member of the MATCH Corps, a group of 45 tutors who live in a dormitory at the school. And their parents get contacted at least once a week by a teacher, tutor, or the principal.
Propping up these high academic expectations is an underlying familial atmosphere. "There's a really small community feel," says math teacher Anthony Luckett, 29. "There's comfort that I take in being able to address my students on a very real level."
During the four-minute window between sixth and seventh periods, principal Jorge Miranda, 28, encamps at the base of the main stairwell. As students churn in transit, Miranda shakes hands and playfully admonishes them for taking too long to get to class. "Without the human element and the relationships, the kids would go crazy," he says later. "It would be too much of a pressure cooker."
The MATCH formula seems to work: On the 2007 10th-grade math MCAS, 100 percent of MATCH students who took the test earned a score of proficient or advanced, which put the school in a first-place tie in math with two other schools among 341 Massachusetts public high schools.
In order to graduate, MATCH students must take - and pass - at least two advanced-placement courses and two college courses taken through a partnership with Boston University.
In a tangible affirmation of their preparation, 99 percent of students in the first four graduating classes were accepted at four-year colleges or universities.
"You've got to hold high expectations and provide the support for kids to get there," Safran says. "That's what our model is."
Critics of MATCH point to the relatively high number of students who transfer back to city high schools: Administrators are projecting that about 50 percent of the original class of 2008 will graduate in June, up from 35 percent for the class of 2007.
MATCH "is helping a few kids, but it's also hurting a whole bunch of kids that it pushes out," says Marilyn Segal, director of Citizens for Public Schools. "What happens to a kid who starts at MATCH and gets pushed out and sent back to the public school system?"
The Center for Social Organization of Schools, an educational research and development center at Johns Hopkins University, studies the effects of social organization of schools on academic achievement and eventual career success. It initially included MATCH on a list of schools with an inordinately high dropout rate, but later removed it because the center's researchers concluded that MATCH's high transfer rate does not translate into high dropout or low graduation rates.
In fact, MATCH's rigors might help students who opt out. Center for Social Organization researcher Robert Balfanz hypothesized that students who enroll at MATCH and subsequently transfer go on to do well at their new school.
"When the high intensity is not a perfect match for them for the long term, some exposure to it leaves them better prepared to succeed elsewhere," he wrote in an e-mail.
Jamila Patrick, 20, of Dorchester attended MATCH as a ninth- and 10th-grader before transferring to Charlestown High School for personal reasons. "I feel like going to MATCH really did prepare me for Charlestown or for any other school because they taught me, I guess you could say, more than I was supposed to know," Patrick says.
This fall, MATCH plans to expand its reach to younger students by opening a 240-student middle school.
"I think the fact that we're starting a middle school is the realization that, with three more years, we can give students a much better experience in high school," Miranda says.
"Every moment that we have is precious, and we don't have any time to waste."
Jason Beerman can be reached at jason@jasonbeerman.com.
