Following the release of a report that revealed just 35 percent of college-bound Boston public high schools graduates from the class of 2000 had earned a degree by spring 2007, Mayor Thomas Menino launched a citywide initiative challenging educators and community members to improve college completion rates for Boston Public Schools (BPS) graduates.
The initiative, Success Boston, is centered around three tenets: get ready, get in and get through.
A new Kresge Foundation-funded research effort launching this summer will better equip teachers and administrators at two Boston high schools in getting their students prepared for college. The project seeks to provide the mechanisms for school officials themselves to determine how to better align student academic achievement outcomes with supplemental college access programs.
The National College Access Network, an advocacy organization for college-access programs that devised the study and secured funding, has recruited the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California to bring to the high schools tools it has used at many colleges to close educational outcome gaps between students of various racial/ethnic groups.
Since 1999, CUE has helped colleges and universities across the nation close the equity gap in areas such as degree attainment, transfer success and science and technology participation. CUE researchers have equipped faculty and administrators from more than 40 institutions with techniques to improve academic outcomes for underserved students.
“We founded the center to address important problems not being addressed by diversity initiatives,” says Dr. Estela Bensimon, a professor of higher education at USC and founder of CUE. “Most diversity initiatives (focused on) how different ethnic groups could better understand each other. None of them were really looking at outcomes for the students who made diversity possible.”
Bensimon challenged institutions to consider such questions as: What proportion of first-time African-American students graduate in six years? Is that proportion equivalent to the average? How many African-Americans or Latinos are pursuing degrees in science and technology? Are minority students participating in honors programs and thriving?
