Geometry, the movie

How do you build an urban high school that sends kids to college? Computers and cameras help, says Michael Goldstein. Time helps more.

Interview by Michelle Chihara

GIMMICK OR GODSEND? "The Amish have a higher literacy rate than any urban area or rural area in the country," says Michael Goldstein (left), who holds the charter for a new-media- and-technology high school in Boston. "So it's clear you don't need technology to make things happen. On the other hand, you can't ignore the amazing potential."

"Traditional schools," says Michael Goldstein, have "always done wonders -- Boston Latin, for example -- and horrors. Just look at MCAS scores and college dropout rates." Goldstein hopes he's found a way to mitigate the horrors. A former journalist, Goldstein is the founder of MATCH -- the Media and Technology Charter School, which last year was awarded a state charter to open its doors in Boston in the fall of 2000.

MATCH isn't the traditional attempt at an untraditional high school. It's more an untraditional attempt at a traditional school. Bringing technology into schools has become something of a sacred cause among educators, but Goldstein finds most attempts to be a waste of effort: schools have "tried to evolve," he says, "by halfheartedly, but expensively, purchasing computers."

The plan at MATCH, by contrast, is to reach underprivileged city kids by involving them in long-term creative projects in every medium -- from old-school radio to newfangled Web pages -- to supplement a school day of basic classwork in math, history, and science.

"I think he's on to a hot concept," says Linda Brown, director of the Charter School Resource at the Pioneer Institute, a nonprofit think tank with close links to the state Board of Education. "Any school that talks about educating hard-to-educate students has to have a gimmick, a capture. You've got to find a way to motivate kids who've spent the first eight grades not being motivated."

Goldstein's fusion approach, and his enthusiasm, won him a state charter; his was one of five proposals approved last year from a pool of about 30. With that approval comes an initial budget of about $8500 per student, and relative freedom to hire teachers and mold a curriculum. Goldstein is still looking for volunteers, more money, a location, and a few good teachers. But he's got 240 teenagers excited enough to have signed a list for placement in only 80 slots next fall.

Q: Technology is really hot right now, but critics wonder if it isn't diverting funds away from more-important basics in an already cash-strapped system. How do you justify your approach?

A: The tech skeptics are the people I respect. I'm very skeptical of technology in schools. I think it has been a disaster. I think billions of dollars literally have been spent in this country and I think there is no other way to describe the reality of what exists right now except failure. People are not sure what the goals are, and there are very different approaches you can have as to why you want technology in schools.

For example, there are people who see tech as a shortcut: okay, we're going to take the inner-city kids -- like a poor kid from Dorchester, nobody in his or her family has gone to college -- and we will wave the magic wand of tech at them. They'll take a class in HTML and get a $60,000-a-year job as a Web designer. Or they'll learn how to troubleshoot a Cisco network.

But you can't make an end run around the basic skills, and some people are mistakenly trying to do that. When we meet the technophiles, a lot of technophiles really want the bells and whistles -- a paperless school! -- just to get the fun vision of a pure technology school going. Which hasn't worked when it has been tried in other states.

The Amish have a higher literacy rate than any urban area or rural area in the country. So it's clear you don't need technology to make things happen. On the other hand, you can't ignore the amazing potential of technology to help kids learn in a lot of ways, and to help special-needs kids too.

Q: What have some of the problems been?

A: Technology has been hot in the schools on and off for the past 50 years. I mean, schools built $10 million TV studios in some areas, and these were places to broadcast football games. That's happening again in schools. They build a big computer lab and then they realize that there's no integration.

Schools have a big problem in that they are always financially crunched. They never have enough money. In the past few years they have gotten a lot of help in buying computers and wiring the school. What they don't have a lot of help with is network administrators and people that can keep the computers running.

[Another problem is] agreement on whether this is a vocational thing. Is it some kind of "technology skill" idea, where the goal is for the kids to learn Microsoft Word and learn how to do a search on Yahoo? Things that you can learn in about an hour? A lot of schools think that's their bottom-line mission with the technology.

Then you have more-sophisticated people saying kids actually need a stronger understanding of what they're looking at. Which is true. If a kid does a search for a report on the environment, he may end up on the Exxon Web site and not even think, "How is this biased? What or who is writing this?"

Q: How is a day at MATCH different from a day at other schools?

A: If you want kids to connect all the equipment that you're buying -- all these cameras, computers, etc. -- to the core subjects they are studying, you've got to give them a way to make projects on the topics that are in their classes. If you are studying the Spanish-American War, there's got to be a way for kids to do that, whether it's seeing a history channel or making their own little short video documentaries that they edit together. There's got to be something that they actually do.

There is a big problem with this: any time you put together a story, in one of these projects, it takes a ton of time. And in Massachusetts -- and this is true of almost every state in the country -- the framework is set up to cover tons and tons of material. We want kids to have a chance to do in-depth projects, but if they don't master enough basic topics in history, Massachusetts won't let them get a diploma. There is this real tension between any sort of in-depth project and this enormous pressure on a teacher to just cover stuff.

Given that we can't sacrifice students -- they have to pass the MCAS -- we want to use media in the same way that colleges use seminars. You might have classes that cover a lot of information, but the projects focus in and feel more like a seminar. It gives teachers a chance to do some depth, as well as the necessary breadth.

So you've got to get more time from the kids. You've got to lengthen the school day. That creates a few big problems right there. One is: a lot of the kids already don't like school. They don't want to be there another hour, let alone another few hours. And to say to kids: hey, all your friends are going to go to a public high school in Boston that gets out at 1:40 in the afternoon, and a lot of times we want you to stay late in the afternoon. And we are going to need you to come in on weekends, and we are going to do stuff in summer -- the kids stare at you and they say: "What are you talking about? Why would I sign up for your school?"

But if you can make a separation for what we'll call the core school day, where you have math, English, science, and say, "Okay, we'll have a core school day that looks somewhat like what other kids are doing, so that you won't feel that an unfair reality is being imposed upon you. However, we will be requiring that you make a lot of these projects in different media." And a lot of kids will like that. That's the best part of the day for them.

People generally like telling stories, especially with different kinds of media. And they are willing, at least the 240 kids that signed up for our lottery are, and compared to other charter schools, that's a tremendous response. Kids are signing up for a brand-new school that doesn't have a building, that doesn't have its teachers, that doesn't yet exist. And they are signing up to do more work. Because they love the opportunity to really get a chance to make things, not just to use them.

Q: MATCH sounds like a fun place to be a student. But it sounds expensive.

A: Yes. If you open a charter school, you get about $8000 per kid per year to run the school. It's a political number, like most allocations are. We know that Boston public schools spend closer to $10,000 per year per kid. In addition, you don't get a school building; you have to pay for a building, whether you are going to rent it, buy it, and/or renovate something -- all those payments are privately raised. And then on top of that, the whole technology infrastructure of the school has to be privately raised.

So what happens -- and this is true of all charter schools -- is that people like me, who aren't necessarily the most skilled or experienced in fundraising and would much rather be spending our time trying to get to know our kids, we spend a lot of time trying to meet with prospective donors, building relationships with corporations.

Q: Besides the lure of technology, what's the value of your approach?

A: College. It's not just getting into college. Two-thirds of kids who start college don't finish, across the country. And this is equally true in Massachusetts. Two-thirds of them who start a four-year college don't finish within six years.

What we're hoping to do through some of these larger projects is help the kids get some skills so that they can survive in college -- and graduate and excel in college. Why do all these kids drop out? A lot of it is: how do you organize your time? What do you do when there is no teacher who cares whether you show up to class or whether or not you've done the day's reading -- who cares whether or not you are keeping up with the homework?

Everything becomes dependent on one large exam or term paper at the end of the term. That's a big change for a lot of kids. And I think by giving them a large project that takes several months to complete, we'll get plenty of kids who, no matter what we do, they're going to wait till the last minute and they're going to lose their disk and eight million things will happen. And they will fail. But they will fail in an environment where they can get the support to get back on track. It's not the high-stakes failure where suddenly you're out, you had financial aid and part of it was dependent on such and such a GPA, and now you're out.

Q: Can you describe some other helpful aspects of the projects?

A: Yeah, another great thing about projects is that you are constantly having to revise, focus, edit and improve something over a long amount of time. The way most schools are set up, for example, you have tests, and you take the test and then you get it back and it's graded and you've moved on already to the next topic. But that whole idea of relentless revision . . . I think that everybody, but especially teenagers, needs to get used to that, working on something not till it's just satisfactory, but until it's actually good -- until you have something you are pleased with.

I think for some of the kids what is so good about the media projects is that they can be public. The Web sites that the kids create are online. We can have a film-festival night, and all the parents and volunteers and all the kids can show up and see what everybody has done in a short amount of time. And when you have that kind of public exposure, it creates a certain type of accountability.

Q: How did you get to the point of starting this school?

A: I was working in New York City as a journalist, as a magazine writer. And I sort of had the New York life backward. A lot of my friends were teachers using that to subsidize their writing, and I was writing to subsidize my teaching. I just loved working with teenage kids -- whether it was tutoring, teaching, coaching, I found that that was really what got me excited. I decided to go to graduate school to study education policy at Harvard, at the Kennedy School. And that's where I first had the idea for this school. Partly because I saw kids really excited about the opportunity to work with different media, but also because I saw this untapped reservoir of volunteers. There were a lot of people I knew in New York and was meeting in Boston who were professional people and had a lot of technology sophistication and wanted to work with schools, but the logistics were really hard. There were a lot of people who really felt they wanted to give back to kids who weren't in Wellesley and weren't in wonderful school systems and really needed some help.

I thought we could create a school small enough so that we could tap into this potential network of volunteers; in other words, small enough to deal with all the logistical issues. If somebody calls me up and says, I have some skills with Web design and I would really love to work with the kids -- that's great! I can take the time because I've got 80 kids coming in next year and I can find a really good place for that one person. If that same person calls a high school with 1500 kids, they definitely want the help and they'll do everything they can to make that happen. But it just becomes really hard to plug people in at a one-at-a-time-type situation.

When you are talking about a 13- or 14-year-old student and she hasn't really been doing so well the past couple of years at school, really the only thing that's going to turn her around is a meaningful positive interaction with some adult. The problem is, that's not replicable. You don't know who that person is. You have to expose that teenager to different adults, and somebody is going to click. But it's not like you can create programs that predict who those "right people" are.

People respond to people. And that had a lot to do with the design of the school. Trying to create a place where we can bring a lot of rigor, have really high expectations of students, have a pretty fun culture, a sort of work-hard, play-hard kind of ethic. And also bring in lots of exciting people from the community who are already doing neat things, and have that kind of excitement and energy pollinate our school.

Q: Is there a particular experience that helped you make up your mind to do this full-time?

A: Yeah, there was a small group of kids, actually -- this was in the Washington Heights section of New York, which is mostly Dominican -- and we were doing a project, we were publishing a school newspaper for a middle school on 204th Street. And there were six kids and collectively they were hilarious. You had the class-clown type of kid, and the very studious, serious kind of girl that all the kids kind of picked on. You had a very cheerful kid with special needs (he had trouble with reading); you had another kid who was just angry to be there, but when you'd say, "Hey, maybe you don't want to be here," he'd say, "No, I want to be here." It was a great group.

Over time, as they got the chance, different kids connected to different things. The kid who had trouble reading, he got into layout. He got into Pagemaker. One of the seemingly angry kids really liked the idea of writing stories that would question an authority figure. So we prepared him for an interview where he could go and ask the health teacher at the school, "Why don't you cover this kind of information? Are there rules that prevent you from saying this word or this word?"

Q: What happens if the technology vogue fades?

A: "Technology" is such a broad word. It's a very ethereal thing and we can all project whatever we want onto it. It's true that kids get excited about it, and you need to ask very direct questions. Parents say, oh yeah, my kid loves to use the computer. Then you ask what they do. . . . It turns out your kid likes to play Quake and Doom and send e-mail. And your kids like instant messaging. That's great, but it doesn't translate into an ability to function in the world.

If we get a great facility with every modern whatever imaginable, and we get so-so teachers, we'll have a so-so school. Because that's happened before in plenty of schools. They got the good stuff and they didn't get the right people.

We are not a vocational school. It is college prep. Our school will be a hit -- if it's a hit -- because of the staff and the volunteers. And not because of the technology structure and whether we have Apples or IBMs and our own photo lab. It's all going to come down to the quality of the people, and whether we solve the kids' problems.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com. Volunteers interested in MATCH can e-mail volunteer@matchschool.org or call Holly at (617) 266-9669 for more information.