Educational study guide

A group of eighth-graders is creating a guide on the city's high schools that could make school officials squirm because of its candid portrayals.

The students wrote their handbook in the spirit of Zagat dining guides, which publish breezy snapshots and nuts-and-bolts details on restaurants. The school guide is aimed at helping students and families use hard data to choose from among the city's various options, which range from large traditional campuses to small, career-focused academies.

The teens are designing the guide as participants in the 8th Grade Academy at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit organization that works in the Boston public schools, and used data provided by the School Department and the state.

Among their findings:

Except for the city's three exam schools, two charter schools posted the best MCAS scores.

New Mission High School, a small pilot school in Mission Hill, had a 99 percent attendance rate, the highest in the city.

Hyde Park High School had the highest dropout rate, at 18 percent, while Tech Boston Academy had the lowest.

As they spent afternoons poring over the numbers and graphing them, some of the eighth-graders began changing their minds about their futures.

Christie Andre, 14, had had her heart set on Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury. Her friends were headed there, and it offers a wide array of career paths. But this fall she will instead enroll at Boston Arts Academy, a pilot school in the Fenway with a dance program. The arts academy has about 400 students; Madison Park has 1,700.

One of the big factors in Andre's decision was the difference in the schools' dropout rates. Boston Arts Academy's rate was 2 percent in 2002; Madison Park's was 9.6 percent.

"I just didn't like that," she said. "How would I turn out going to that school? I didn't want to drop out."

The guide will be published this fall for all families. Last Thursday the students outlined some of their results at Northeastern University. They said they want the guide to prompt their peers to choose wisely.

"It'll show them instead of going where their friends go, they should check out the school before they actually pick it," said Joshua Johnson, 13, who will go to the Media and Technology Charter High School.

Not surprisingly, headmasters at Boston's high schools are urging the students to dig a little deeper.

Headmaster Karen Daniels at Excel High School, one of three small schools in the former South Boston High School, said numbers do not tell the whole story of how the school district is overhauling its struggling high schools. South Boston High, the epicenter of racial violence during court-ordered busing in the 1970s, was split into three schools that focus on information technology, marine science, and public service.

The numbers paint a mixed picture for the three schools, with relatively low MCAS scores and attendance rates. Results for each of the schools will be released this year, but as a whole, 62 percent of students passed the English portion of the MCAS in 2003 and 51 percent passed the math test. Citywide averages were 70 percent passing English and 67 percent passing math.

"The data doesn't tell the story. It . . . doesn't speak to how we're trying to individualize the experience for kids," Daniels said.

The guide will detail information for most of Boston's 32 public and charter high schools and include information on private schools with student-written descriptions, said John Werner, director of the 8th Grade Academy. In addition to teaching the teens about statistics, the guide led them them to think more about the next four years of their lives.

"They'd say, `I'm going to Hyde Park because my cousin goes there.' Or, `I'm going to Madison Park because they have a beautician program,' " said Dan Restuccia, a teaching fellow at Citizen Schools who helped with the statistical analysis. "Ninety percent of the kids in the program thought about high school in a dramatically different way because of this."

Thomas W. Payzant, superintendent of the Boston schools, said he liked the eighth-graders' desire to be better informed about high school.

"I applaud what they're doing, and they'll have a lot more information than their peers have had in picking high schools," Payzant said. "I would just encourage them to put the quantitative information, the data, in the context of what they see when they visit and talk to students in these schools."