College Readiness

If you won the birth lottery and 18 years later find yourself holding a high school diploma but totally unprepared for college emotionally and/or academically, you have several choices.  You can get your parents to subsidize a trip to a foreign country and experience living and maybe working abroad. If you are more community-minded, you could volunteer for City Year or some other non-profit. Or, if you want to boost SAT scores or GPA’s to improve your chances at a better college, you can go to

I was recently meeting with the former principal of a local Middle School, and we were discussing the difficulties our students are having with math. While the problem is greater with our immigrant students, probably due to literacy issues, it is also a problem with our low-income, native English speakers as well. He made a comment that our educational system marches forward and rarely circles back to go over old material. Therefore, if a students misses some critical building block in mathematics (e.g. negative numbers), this

We have all been following the story of Eric Balderas, the Harvard student, who came to this country illegally as a 4-year old with his mother. As valedictorian of his Texan high school, he is now studying biology on a full scholarship to Harvard.  He was detained in Texas after visiting his mother and faces deportation. It gets you thinking. On May 11, Salem CyberSpace feted its own high school seniors who all graduated high school in 4 years and are all going on to college

At Salem CyberSpace almost of all our students live in homes where English is not spoken and over half are native speakers of languages other than English.  For the students who came to this country as teenagers, getting up to speed in English in order to succeed in college is indeed a tall task.  However, all students who do accumulate the required number of high school credits and pass MCAS will earn a ticket to the local community college. Community Colleges provide open enrollment to any

Despite much criticism over the years, the SAT 1 is still a requirement for entrance into most 4-year colleges. This test, touted as a Reasoning Test, is a 4-hour test broken into several 20 to 25-minute sections.  In each section, students race against the clock to answer all the questions.  Even for native English speakers, the time constraints on this test are a challenge.  If you have a documented learning disability you can get extended time and other accommodations (such as a reader or scribe). So

High school reformists incorporate the 3 R’s for student success: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Students need to be challenged academically, to understand how that challenge relates to life in the “real world,” and to know that adults in the system care about them and are invested in their success (what I have called in previous blogs, social capital).  Most urban high schools offer a range of rigor in course selections including honors and AP level courses.  However too many students lose the connectedness between their learning