Analysis: Why not hold Boston students to state standards?
Here’s a common-sense way to better prepare Boston public school students for college: Require them to take the same basic courses as other students around Massachusetts.
Ninety to 100 percent of graduates at most other high schools statewide meet the minimum number of courses in English, math, science, and other core subjects that state guidelines call for. That includes 100 percent of graduates from urban schools in Chelsea and Lawrence. But the Boston public school system has largely ignored those guidelines, called MassCore.
Instead, officials have opted to keep lower standards for earning a diploma, helping to push high school graduation rates to historic highs. Today, for example, Boston requires only three years of math instead of the four required at schools following MassCore.
Lower standards have consequences: In 2017, only 31 percent of Boston high school graduates met the state’s MassCore guidelines, according to state data, putting the rest behind their peers at other Massachusetts schools.
In Boston, there are plenty of reasons for urgency: Almost half of Boston high school graduates who enroll in college fail to earn degrees within six years, according to a report in April by the Boston Private Industry Council. A state report showed that nearly three-quarters of graduates who went on to community college in 2012 required at least one remedial course.
And more than a quarter of 93 valedictorians who were interviewed by the Globe and graduated from 2005 to 2007 said they felt academically unprepared for college, including some who had not taken basic courses they needed for success.
Yet since the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education passed MassCore in 2007, the Boston school system has made only fleeting efforts to implement it. Just two high schools — Boston Day and Evening Academy and Boston Green Academy — had 100 percent of their graduates complete MassCore in 2017. Even the city’s highly regarded exam schools don’t fare well on MassCore completion: Boston Latin School recorded 72 percent; John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, 45 percent; and Boston Latin Academy, 29 percent.
Huge gulfs also exist among students of different demographics. For instance, 43 percent of white graduates districtwide completed MassCore, compared with just over a quarter of black and Latino graduates. That divide may help explain the lagging performance of black and Latino males across the school system.
A 2014 report on the achievement gap by the Center for Collaborative Education and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University initially appeared to galvanize the school system into action. When Tommy Chang became superintendent in 2015, he incorporated MassCore adoption into his plan to boost academic rigor. But he and his team confronted skepticism from high school administrators and faculty.
“All stakeholders lack understanding of what [MassCore] is and why it’s important,” according to a PowerPoint presentation by public school officials that laid out the benefits and challenges of adopting MassCore.
Some members of the School Committee’s Opportunity and Achievement Gap Task Force also raised concerns about the plan, arguing that more rigorous standards would reduce the graduation rate and increase costs, according to minutes from a December 2015 meeting.
Laura Perille, the interim superintendent, said in an interview in November that the school system plans to raise graduation requirements for math to four years next year. She said implementing MassCore systemwide is challenging because courses would need to be tailored to meet the unique needs of students, including some who have significant disabilities and recent immigrants who don’t speak English and missed schooling in their native countries for several years.
“We absolutely recognize that MassCore is an important tool,” Perille said. But she sees it as just one piece of the effort to overhaul high schools, which includes new facilities and adding seventh and eighth grades to several of them. The school system also recently reorganized the central office staff that oversees high schools to offer greater assistance in improving their programs.
As of this month, Perille had not presented a proposal to the School Committee to increase the math requirement districtwide. A school spokesman said on Jan. 7 that “we are not able to comment on a timeline at the moment,” although he insisted the proposal is not on hold.
The MassCore standards — which include four years of English and math, three years of science and social studies, and two years of world language — were designed to be a better measure of college readiness than standardized MCAS testing. That’s because MCAS measures only 10th-grade knowledge.
The guidelines match admissions criteria for the state’s public universities, including the University of Massachusetts. For courses to count under MassCore, they must meet the state’s grade-level standards for those subjects; remedial courses don’t count.
If Boston’s valedictorians from the mid-2000s often struggled in college, their classmates were dropping out at an alarming rate. A groundbreaking 2008 study, Getting to the Finish Line, found that fewer than 40 percent of college-enrolled students from Boston public schools had earned a degree within seven years. The rest essentially did not make it.
The stunning data raised questions about whether the city’s high schools were adequately preparing students for college and whether colleges were doing enough to ensure that Boston students would succeed. Vowing to raise the college graduation rate to 70 percent for the BPS class of 2011, then-Mayor Thomas M. Menino launched a citywide effort called Success Boston.
Colleges and nonprofits that signed up for Success Boston promised more comprehensive support services to help students transition to college, such as financial aid counseling, academic support, and social programs. A central component was one-on-one coaching with students during their first two years of college.
The program also provided a way to track BPS graduates in college. “We are able to measure [student progress] now … . It’s more visible now to students and policy makers,’’ said Joseph McLaughlin, research director at the Boston Private Industry Council, who worked on the Getting to the Finish Line study.
The number of BPS graduates working with a transition coach to navigate the first two years of college more than tripled, from 313 for the class of 2011 to more than 1,000 graduates currently, the Boston Foundation said. Those who received coaching were 11 percent more likely to make it to their second year of college and 21 percent more likely to make it to year three.
High schools have largely come through with providing more challenging courses that better prepare students for college. Data show that at non-exam schools the number of Advanced Placement courses rose from 71 in the 2007-08 academic year to 128 in 2015-16, district figures show. Unfortunately, after the initial gains of Success Boston and other initiatives, improvements in the graduation rate leveled off, far below the 70 percent Menino had vowed.
Joan Becker, vice provost for academic support services and undergraduate studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said the work ahead must focus on students who continue to lag, particularly blacks and Latinos. Data also show that male students are not doing as well as female students. She stresses that leaders need to focus on these equity gaps more systematically.
Critical to the next phase, she and others say, will be the creation of more workplace connections, internships, and jobs for low-income and first-generation students during and after college to ease their transition to the job market and eliminate another barrier that derails graduates once they earn their degrees.
In addition, researchers and educators agree that more creative approaches are needed to build on Success Boston’s gains. Two years ago, Mayor Martin J. Walsh established the Tuition-Free Community College Plan to address affordability issues and help more students attend and complete Bunker Hill, MassBay, and Roxbury community colleges. Students in the program not only get a coach, their classes are paid for.
But only 295 students have participated in the program thus far, illustrating the struggle to reach low-income students for whom college costs are a major barrier.
About 20 years ago, David Laude, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin, noticed that too many students in his general chemistry class were not cutting it. That was especially true of first-generation students, who were flooding Texas public colleges because of a state law guaranteeing admission to students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Laude discovered that many of them had what he calls “adversity indicators” — among them being economically disadvantaged, coming from struggling urban high schools, and growing up in families in which no one else had gone to college.
As an experiment, he started a special class for 50 of those students, far smaller than the usual class of 500. He taught the same course material and gave the same tests as in the bigger class. But he added student mentors, academic advisers, and seminars in leadership skills. The four-year graduation rate for students with “adverse indicators” soared from 20 percent in 1999 to 60 percent last year.
Today, the effort, called the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, is replicated across the University of Texas at Austin, making Texas a leader in finding ways to help first-generation students succeed.
Other colleges are becoming much more proactive about targeting students in academic trouble. The schools’ approaches share a core mission: providing a sense of belonging.
At Westfield State University, roughly 20 percent of freshmen — many of them low-income, first-generation students — drop out every year. The university recently began working with juniors at nearby urban high schools in Westfield, Holyoke, and Springfield, exposing them to coursework, advising, and an overnight experience that helps them envision themselves as college students, said president Ramon Torrecilha, a former first-generation student himself.
Some colleges have long worked to ease the transition for urban students of color — most of them first-generation and low-income students. Boston College’s Options Through Education Transitional Summer Program, established in 1979, helped people like Maria Martinez, the 2007 valedictorian at Boston’s now-closed Media Communications Technology High School, acclimate to campus. “It’s just nice to have a group of people who understand you,’’ she said. But while such programs have improved student retention, they have not been universally successful. Another Boston valedictorian interviewed by the Globe said that BC’s summer program didn’t prevent him from dropping out.
Tufts University last year took the unusual step of opening a center on campus solely for first-generation students. Tufts also created a mentoring program pairing the students with staff and faculty from similar backgrounds.
They were Boston’s valedictorians, many of them loaded with scholarships that covered part or all of their college tuition and other expenses. Even so, more than half are still carrying student debt — a figure that’s roughly on a par with the national average for young adults with a bachelor’s or postgraduate degree. Some, like Delcy Miranda, ended up not only deeply in debt, but with no four-year diploma to show for it. Miranda, who struggled academically at UMass Amherst, dropped out after suffering a series of personal tragedies and worked for a while in a factory making powdered cappuccino sachets.
Jill Schlesinger, a certified financial planner and CBS News business analyst, has straightforward advice for people facing Miranda’s dilemma: “Don’t freak yourself out.” The first step, she said, is to make a budget. Get a handle on your debt load and monthly payment, and factor them into your monthly spending and earnings. Student debt shouldn’t prevent people from achieving other financial milestones, such as buying a house, she said, but potential borrowers should try to keep student loan repayments to 20 percent or less of monthly income.
There are lots of ways to take some of the sting out of loan repayment. Students who work for the government or for nonprofits can have their student loans forgiven, and graduates with good credit scores and a solid paycheck can shop around and refinance their loans to save money. Miranda, who later earned an associate’s degree and today runs her own massage studio, said she still owes nearly $50,000 in student loans. But she got her payments under control by opting for an income-driven repayment plan, which can reduce payments for people with lower incomes.
Abby Shafroth, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said borrowers have several such plans to choose from, including some that cap loan payments at 10 percent of discretionary income and offer loan forgiveness after 20 years.
Shafroth added that graduates should be skeptical of any company that claims it can save money on student loans for a fee. These schemes are most likely scams that charge you for things you can do online yourself for free — and they could cause you to default on a student loan, which can have disastrous consequences.
“The government can seize payment from your paycheck, and the default will hurt your credit, making it harder to rent, get a mortgage, or potentially even land a job,” Shafroth said.
Financial advisers also strongly urge graduates, even those with large student loan payments, to begin saving for retirement as soon as they start working. Many recommend starting a Roth IRA or taking advantage of a 401(k) match if an employer offers it. Small amounts invested on a regular basis can grow exponentially, and advisers say it’s important to start the habit of saving for retirement early in your career.
Eric Roberge, founder of Beyond Your Hammock, a financial planning firm in Boston, said Bano’s brand of penny-pinching makes sense. He urges clients in their 20s to live well below their means and build up an emergency fund in case they lose their job or have a medical emergency. Advisers recommend having three to six months of living expenses on hand.