MATCH set: charter-school founder Goldstein, left, and Sagan, teacher and philanthropist photo:Chris Hildreth

oston's Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) hardly looks like the high-tech secondary school of the future. Housed for now in the upper floors of the city's oldest synagogue, MATCH is not crammed with flat-screen LCD monitors and tangles of Ethernet cables. Its staff does not tote PDAs or digital walkie-talkies. Its TV studio consists of little more than a couple of donated laptops and some used lighting equipment. Its labs have one computer per two students, but the DSL lines in almost every classroom are not connected to computers.

What is a Charter School?

MATCH students will not graduate as trained information technology experts or web designers or computer programmers. Their high-school diplomas will not qualify them to join the upper echelons of the digerati, at least not right away. The vision behind MATCH is far grander, far nobler, and far more ambitious than that. "We're not necessarily trying to prepare anyone for a career in the technology world," says founder Michael Goldstein '91. "We're trying to prepare them for college. We're trying to be a really good, rigorous, regular small school, and then figure out ways that technology can help."

MATCH's goals sound conventional enough: to create a school where students feel safe, where teachers are both effective and accountable, where parents feel they are invested in the process and, by far most importantly, where all students--no matter how disadvantaged, no matter how far behind when they begin--graduate from college. While those goals may not sound radical, they are the very ones that schools around Boston and the nation fail to meet every year. They represent the hopes of millions of American parents still imagining a dream their own parents told them was real. The dream behind MATCH is delivering the promise of a brighter future, not to a specially selected cadre of overachievers, but to students whom almost everybody else has given up on.

When George W. Bush spoke during the 2000 campaign about "the soft bigotry of low expectations," he may well have had the typical MATCH student in mind. Seventy-five percent of the school's students live in poverty. The vast majority come from Boston's most notorious neighborhoods: Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park. More than 93 percent are African American, Caribbean American, or Hispanic.

Unlike the droves of teenagers--most of them wealthier and whiter than the public school population as a whole--who pass entrance exams to enter Boston's prestigious magnet schools, MATCH students start out on a track to failure. The average MATCH student arrives in the ninth grade reading on the fifth-grade level; he or she was likely absent 20 percent of the time in middle school. The school has no selection criteria--there are no entrance exams, essays, or other requirements. Instead, MATCH uses a random lottery, which netted eighty students out of 240 applicants in the school's first year.

Without massive intervention, these students will fail the mandatory state achievement tests administered in the tenth grade. If they do, they cannot pass high school in Massachusetts. That this two-year-old charter high school wants to turn such students around is not revolutionary. What is revolutionary about MATCH is that it's working.

Goldstein's interest in education began when he was an undergraduate majoring in public policy at Duke. Coming from a relatively large and homogenous suburban high school in Pennsylvania, he says he was struck by what he found while tutoring Durham students: "Seeing what Durham public schools were like, just seeing how much kids were struggling, made a big impression."

But the road to MATCH didn't begin there. Instead, Goldstein moved to New York City to work for Richard Frankel Productions, the Broadway producers responsible for Stomp! and The Producers. After working as a freelance journalist for such publications as New York magazine and BusinessWeek, he returned to public policy. He enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where the charter-school concept sparked his interest.

In his study of charter schools, Goldstein saw many advantages that would later figure prominently at MATCH--small schools, with 100 to 300 students, schools where a teacher or principal could know every single kid. Choice, for both parents and students, that would allow even the most disadvantaged families to "vote with their feet." And finally, Goldstein saw a way to apply technology to the larger goal of making successful college students.

"Most inner-city kids start college and drop out," he says. "I thought it would be useful to have a mission that says we can create kids that not only enroll in college, but make it all the way through." MATCH became his master's thesis. The school opened its doors in 2000 with a ninth-grade class of eighty.

MATCH may be the product of a top-flight policy education, but many of Goldstein's ideas sound like homespun common sense. The school will remain small, aiming for approximately fifty students per class. Its current student-teacher ratio is 10 to 1. Class sizes are never more than twenty, and most are smaller. Principal Charles Sposato--a veteran principal and former Massachusetts Teacher of the Year--greets students at the door every day; he and his staff telephone each student's parents at least once a week. Students are expected to follow the school's dress code--slacks and collared shirts or MATCH T-shirts--and never be late for class.

"We don't let even the little things go by unchallenged," Goldstein says. "If you're one minute late, you're late. If you miss homework, you might have a homework detention. We focus a lot on those low-level things to try and breed some responsibility."

The same is true of the school's commitment to safety. With no metal detectors or security guards, MATCH relies on its culture--and the cooperation of teachers and students--to keep its environment safe. "I think if you ask the kids about to what degree they feel safe in the school, it's pretty high. You need that before you can move on to getting kids to learn. Feeling safe is the first rung on the ladder." The school expelled three students last year for weapons violations. "We have zero tolerance for the more serious things," says Goldstein.

MATCH also has zero tolerance for failure. The school flunked 40 percent of its first freshman class, diverting them instead into "9x" and "9y" remedial programs that address underperforming students' specific needs. Goldstein shuns "social promotion" and makes clear to parents that sending their child to the school may mean that it takes five years to graduate.

Spending even four years at MATCH takes far more of a student's time. A typical day of classes lasts from 8:30 to 4:30. After that, students spend at least eight hours per week in tutoring, most of which is directed at improving their scores on the state's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests. A Boston public high-school student must score at least 220, or "Needs Improvement," to pass the tenth grade. MATCH is aiming higher: The school expects its students to score 240, or "Proficient," even though MATCH students' starting median math score was 204--well below failing. To bolster their skills further, a majority of students also spend five weeks at the school's Summer Academy.

Although the school is able to offer few formal after-school activities--its lease runs out at five o'clock--its size has allowed both students and staff access to different opportunities. For instance, students are taken to a local bookstore every month, with the school footing the bill for everything they buy. An elective law class taught by a local attorney serves just two students. MATCH was able to join with an organization called the Home For Little Wanderers to bring social workers and psychologists to school, and it is the first placement in the country for the Tech Foundation's "Geeks For America" program, which provides free technical support and computer advice.

Technology, Goldstein is fond of saying, is no panacea. He is proud to note that MATCH spends more money buying students books every month than it has on its video production equipment. In fact, he describes most schools' use of technology as an outright failure. But where traditional high-school technology tends to be expensive, poorly integrated with the curriculum, and constantly hampered by inadequate human knowledge to apply it, MATCH offers a different focus. The school tries to use the cheapest software it can find, opting for low-cost alternatives to heavyweight applications like Adobe PageMaker and Photoshop. The staff wired the school's DSL lines themselves, saving more than $10,000. And most importantly, Goldstein never lets technology divert the school from its mission.

"It goes back to the way we prioritize," he says. "We focus on small class sizes. We focus on excellent literacy, writing, instruction. We won't let the technology tail wag the dog in terms of where the money goes, either." Spending on technology has been especially limited by the school's temporary location; when it moves to its own building at the start of the next school year, Goldstein expects to devote more resources to a permanent technology infrastructure.

Rather than offering students devoted technology classes, Goldstein tries to integrate technology and media into the core curriculum. Where a traditional high-school class might watch a video about the Cuban Missile Crisis, MATCH students might design their own radio documentary, or create their own PowerPoint presentations. Technology has helped students deal with tragedy, too: When Geoffrey Douglas, a tenth-grade MATCH student, was murdered last December, students created a video memorial in his honor.