Proving Ground

University of Chicago Magazine by Maya Dukmasova

On a sunny Tuesday morning in early June, with the end of the school year already palpable, three girls were hard at work in a Chicago Vocational Center Academy classroom. The Chicago Public Schools high school is a sprawling Art Deco building on the southernmost edge of Avalon Park, on the South Side of Chicago. About 98 percent of its students are African American, and nearly 94 percent come from low-income families.

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Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t.

New York Times by Susan Dynarksi

Charter schools are controversial. But are they good for education?

Rigorous research suggests that the answer is yes for an important, underserved group: low-income, nonwhite students in urban areas. These children tend to do better if enrolled in charter schools instead of traditional public schools.

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Match Education’s Sposato Graduate School of Education is One Leading Member of a New National Center to Advance Teacher Preparation

News release

The Sposato Graduate School of Education (SGSE) at Match Education is part of a new national center – called TeacherSquared—that will be dedicated to transforming the way new teachers are prepared to teach U.S. public school students. The center is one of three new centers that received funding through a new initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Click here to read the full press release.

Click here to read the Education Week article that details the other four grantees to receive funding through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new $34 million investment to improve teacher-preparation programs' overall effectiveness.

New Profit commits $1 million in support of Match Education

New Profit, a nonprofit venture philanthropy fund working to break down the barriers standing between people and opportunity in America, is investing $1 million over the next four years to support Match Education. The investment in Match will be a part of New Profit’s Reimagine School Systems (RSS) Fund (RSS) Fund, a cross-sector collaboration aimed at significantly and rapidly increasing the number of high performing schools serving low income students by transforming the way school systems work and lifting up successful school models that can scale across the country.

Click here to read the full release.

The Match Foundation Awarded 186 AmeriCorps Positions

The Match Foundation, Inc. was recently awarded 186 AmeriCorps Member positions through the 2015 AmeriCorps State and National Grant Competition.

The AmeriCorps Members will provide high-dosage, small group tutoring to low-income students attending public schools.  They will also foster family engagement through weekly communication with parents and guardians.

For more information, click here.

Match Beyond: No Excuses Meets Disruption in Higher Education

Co-founder and Executive Director of Education for the Clayton Christensen Institute, Michael Horn recently published an article in the Leadership section of Forbes on Match Beyond, our newest innovation aimed at achieving unprecedented college graduation rates and employment outcomes for low-income high school graduates in Boston.

Horn says that the most intriguing thing about Match Beyond compared to other online, competency-based providers is the "no excuses" mindset that our coaches use to push students to succeed.  This is the same "no excuses" mindset that has governed Match's high-performing preK-12 charter schools for the last 15 years.  Horn believes that this mix of individual support, affordability, and flexibility is what sets Match Beyond apart from other disruptive higher education upstarts.

Click here to read the full article.

Bringing a charter-school approach to college

On March 27th, The Boston Globe featured a story on Match's newest innovation called Match Beyond.  As an alternative hybrid college model, Match Beyond aims to significantly increase the college completion rates of low-income students, as well as to help them find middle class employment after obtaining their degree(s).

Match Beyond is partnering with Southern New Hampshire University's College For America, whose competency-based, online platform is much more accessible (and affordable) to these students for whom traditional college was not a good fit.  Of the 47 students who began the program last year, almost all are still enrolled and working with the Match Beyond team to complete their degree(s).  And of those still enrolled, four students already have completed their Associate's degree and moved onto the Bachelor's program.

Click here for the full story.

Boston Charter School's best practice shows promising results for Black and Latino boys

The New York Times recently ran an article highlighting the great success of Match's tutoring work in Chicago public high schools.  The article's author, David Kirp wrote, "These are staggering results -- I know of no initiative for disadvantaged young men of color that comes close."

Over the last year, Match has provided math tutoring to 1,300 young males in 12 Chicago public high schools as part of a study conducted by the University of Chicago's Urban Education and Crime Lab.  This is the third instance in which Match has implemented a high-dosage tutoring program in a district setting.

Click here to read the full press release.

NOT TOO LATE: Building on the promise of Match-style tutoring

The University of Chicago's Urban Education and Crime Lab released a report on the first-year data from their study conducted in Chicago public high schools. In the study, Match Education has been providing math tutoring to 1,300 students in 12 Chicago Public Schools.

On average, students that received Match tutoring and mentoring increased their math learning gains by 1-2 years more than the control group, and their test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam reduced the black-white test score gap by a third. Furthermore, the tutoring also reduced math course failure rates by 50%, and overall course failure rates by 25%.

Click here to read the detailed results.

Closing the math gap for boys

Over the last two years, Match Education has partnered with Chicago Public Schools and economists at The University of Chicago's Urban Education and Crime Lab to field and evaluate Match-style high-dosage tutoring for 1,300 boys in 12 Chicago high schools. The results are now in from the first year, which were recently highlighted in The New York Times.

On average, students that received Match tutoring and mentoring increased their math learning gains by 1-2 years more than the control group, and their test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam reduced the black-white test score gap by a third. Furthermore, the tutoring also reduced math course failure rates by 50%, and overall course failure rates by 25%.

In his article, David Kirp illustrates how the lives of these adolescents can be turned around with these tutoring and mentoring interventions.

Click here to read the full article.

Press Release: Andrew Balson Joins Match Beyond

Match Beyond, a division of Match Education that provides personal coaching and job placement services to high school graduates and GED-recipients seeking Associate's and Bachelor's degrees from Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America, today announced that Andrew Balson has joined the organization as Chief Executive Officer. In this role, Mr. Balson will lead the startup organization’s committed team with experience in education, workforce development, and coaching in empowering low-income young adults to earn their college degrees and prepare for and obtain middle class employment.

Click here to read the full press release.

Smartest kids: Massachusetts charter schools are few but mighty

Match Charter Public School is highlighted as one of the top schools in Massachusetts in a recent article published by Bridge Magazine at The Center for Michigan.  The article's author, Chastity Pratt, compares Michigan's current charter school system to that of Massachusetts's, whose whole education system has been top-ranked nationally over the last decade.

Click here to read the full article.

Out of grief, a new resolve for one valedictorian

As the valedictorian of Match High School's class of 2014, Brittany Washum-Bennett has had to overcome great personal obstacles to reach this point in her life.  Over the weekend, The Boston Globe highlighted Brittany's journey as the cover story in the Metro section.  She will be attending UMass, Amherst this fall where she will major in chemistry with plans to attend medical school in the future.

Click here to read the full article.