Dubbed Tutoring’s ‘Patient Zero,’ Boston’s Match High School Weathers Trump Cuts
Started 25 years ago, the renowned charter has thrived through community — and a commitment to staying small.
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Boston
When they first walk into Match Charter Public High School, students confront a purely physical challenge: its steep marble staircase.
Erected in 1917 as part of a three-story auto accessory and, it frames the main hall of Match, one of Boston’s — and the nation’s — longest-surviving charter high schools. With its wide, sweeping opening and challenging rise, it offers an implicit message, students and teachers say: “You must demonstrate a basic level of dedication simply to get to class on time. Come on in. This will be hard, but stick with it.”
“It’s just a thing that happens for everyone who comes into the school,” said senior Caleb Tolento. “You have to get used to the stairs eventually, because you have to go through all the different levels of the school.”
But alongside the challenge is an unprecedented level of support, students say.
Founded in 2000 as the uppercase MATCH: Media and Technology Charter High School, after 25 years it remains stubbornly small and intensely personalized, offering a stunning contrast to how many other charter organizations have developed: Each morning, just 266 students from all over Boston — many of whom ride the bus or subway for more than an hour — crowd into the trim three-story edifice.
Once inside, students enjoy a college-prep curriculum and four years of classes in a place that both pushes and nurtures them.
“You grow up with this community of people that stay with you,” said alumnus Jeffrey Vittini, who graduated in 2023 and now attends Northeastern University. “You get to know everyone.”
You grow up with this community of people that stay with you.
Jeffrey Vittini, Match alumnus
In 25 years, Match, which also operates an elementary and middle school elsewhere in the city, has resisted expanding to other neighborhoods, let alone other cities. For the past 22 years, it has occupied the same space that until 2001 housed Ellis the Rim Man. The front corner of the building, facing bustling Commonwealth Avenue, once housed a mobile phone store — it’s now the school’s college counseling office, but everyone still calls it “the cell store.”
Match has kept itself intentionally small, even as a handful of innovations piloted there have spun off.
“We’re not a company,” said Jay Galbraith, the network’s managing director of academics, who offered something approaching Match’s credo: “If we have a good idea that works, share it.”
Since its founding, Match has seen its staffers found , a curriculum company, the coaching nonprofit and , a nonprofit tutoring provider. But it hasn’t expanded its schools portfolio, Galbraith said, “especially if that would come at the cost of not serving our kids as effectively.”
With just three schools, he said, “We can make faster moves,” changing curriculum, services or whatever needs tweaking. “We’re not trying to steer a ship of 100,000 kids.”
This fall, however, political realities are threatening Match’s model, which for a quarter-century has been built partly on intensive tutoring for nearly every student.
What comes after ‘no-excuses’?
Like many charter schools that serve predominantly low-income students of color, Match has spent the years since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests searching for a balance between its no-excuses roots and what many consider a more humane pedagogical and disciplinary approach.
That, several educators and students said, is a work in progress.
“What we’ve given up is high behavioral expectations that lead to exclusion,” said principal in residence Jermaine Hamilton. So while detention is back on the menu after administrators nixed it during the pandemic, out-of-school suspension isn’t coming back. “We don’t believe excluding our students sends the message that they are welcomed here, that we want them here, and that they are allowed to make mistakes and grow here.”
We don't believe excluding our students sends the message that they are welcomed here, that we want them here.
Jermaine Hamilton, principal in residence, Match
In the bargain, the school’s disciplinary team has grown from one “dean of school culture” to two.
In interviews, students welcomed the shift, which also meant the end of school uniforms in favor of a moderate dress code.
Nearly all stressed that close-knit relationships make the school tick.
“They started to realize that the community they’re building up, that’s the biggest aspect of Match that makes it what it is,” said Tolento, 17. “And they’re kind of leaning more into that, especially in the high school.”
In the absence of no-excuses discipline, Match has doubled down on personal relationships and the importance of teachers simply getting to know students.
“For a time, we replaced ‘no excuses’ with ‘all the excuses,’” said history teacher Andrew Jarboe. While that was challenging for teachers, he said, “Now I feel we’re in a place where we’re sort of correcting and finding the balance.”
For a time, we replaced 'no excuses' with 'all the excuses.'
Andrew Jarboe, history teacher, Match
Among the interventions that remain: intensive therapy sessions, extensive academic tutoring and college counseling services that would make a private school headmaster blush.
Nearly half of Match students sit for one-on-one therapy sessions of up to 50 minutes weekly, said Kerry Sonia, one of the school’s four full-time counselors. That reality creates “a culture around counseling where students are super-comfortable with us,” she said. Match students “love talking about their feelings, which is nice.”
(Match students) love talking about their feelings.
Kerry Sonia, counselor, Match
A Match alumna herself, Sonia attended both the middle and high school, where she was often the only white student in the building. She recalled that as a student, she often felt that adults, in their attempts to get students to sit up straight, track speakers’ eyes and not dawdle in the restrooms, were quietly offering a kind of implicit character education. But to students it often felt more like behavioral conditioning.
Years later, she sees that approach as dehumanizing. “If someone was trying to track how long it took me to go to the bathroom every day, that would also annoy me.”
The pivot, she said, should be more properly understood as going from “no excuses” to “high expectations and high supports,” emphasizing both more student accountability and self-advocacy.
So even as the school has followed the lead of many high schools in instituting a cell phone ban, seniors may keep phones this fall. It’s a bid to give them a measure of control before they take off for college and careers.
Jarboe, for his part, is delighted. “This is my first year in more than a decade where the cell phone is not ubiquitous,” he said. “My first week of teaching this year was actually quite remarkable. Students were laughing at my jokes again. They were paying attention again.”
He added, “It feels like I’ve got my students back.”
Tutoring takes a hit
One recent morning, tutor Saul Escorza, a recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, sat at a high-top table on the school’s open-concept third floor, as a series of students approached for extra help with geometry. In his first five weeks, he has noticed that many students struggle to keep up with classes that simply move too quickly.
“If you’re in an environment where they give you a day or two for the concept and then move on, but you need more, you’ll start to fall behind,” he said. “So for me, it’s just trying to figure out where they started falling back.”
Many students are capable of learning math but struggle to recall the basics. “So it’s just making sure that their foundation is solid, and then hopefully from there it becomes much more easy for them to grasp the higher-level things.”
If Match is known for anything, it’s this. It was one of the first charter schools to pilot intensive tutoring for nearly all students. The policy far predated the COVID-19 pandemic — a recent book on the topic called Match “patient zero for tutoring at scale.”
The program began as a partnership with MIT students, who earned federal work-study salaries to tutor Match students a few times a week. By 2003, offered every student two hours of tutoring daily.
But this fall, Escorza is lucky to be here. Federal funding cuts have forced the school to trim its tutoring — each fall, it typically opens its doors with an eye-watering 20-person, full-time tutoring staff. Due to the Trump administration’s nearly $400 million in cuts to the program, Match has had to scale back to just nine part-time tutors.
About 30 Match sophomores — somewhere between 40% and 50% of the class — now get geometry tutoring every day. A few tutors work on life skills for students who need them, while others help students catch up on missed classwork.
Devin Baker, who directs Match Corps, said she’s working on ways to bring it back to its former glory, perhaps by hiring local graduate students. Most years, virtually every freshman and sophomore sits with a personal tutor several times a week. That in particular has long helped Match stand out, since for many students it can mean the difference between taking basic coursework and tackling Advanced Placement courses.
Tutors attend meetings with students’ classroom teachers and special ed staff and are “uniquely positioned to get to know the kids and advocate for the kids on a level that classroom teachers just can’t get to in the same way,” said Baker, herself a tutor as a member of City Year, the AmeriCorps program that until this fall underwrote Match’s tutoring.
Several teachers said the loss of funding carries bigger stakes than just a smaller tutoring corps. It’s “the foundation and the fabric that weave this place together,” said Kyle Winslow Smith, Match’s director of curriculum and instruction for the humanities.
He and colleagues have relied on tutors not just for boosting kids’ math skills but for helping students with executive functioning and planning. It’s also a key pipeline for Match teachers — more than a dozen current teachers started as tutors.
The AmeriCorps funding cuts, Smith said, are devastating to a community like Match. “Because Title I charter schools and AmeriCorps serve communities of color, it is a systematically racist policy that they’re imposing upon these schools,” he said. “And it seems like it’s an intentional move to deconstruct a system that is helping communities of color.”
‘It’s so easy to get help’
Asked what they like most about the school, virtually all students say some variation of this: The place is crawling with adults offering assistance.
“The school being so small, it’s so easy to get help,” said senior Brianny Pimentel, 17, who prefers to be called by her nickname: “Zero.”
“If you really need help with homework, or if you really need time to finish a test or a quiz, it’s so easy to look for that help,” she said. “There’s so many teachers and tutors around that can help you.”
There's so many teachers and tutors around that can help you.
Brianny Pimentel, student, Match
Between classes, virtually the entire staff emerges from classrooms to shoo students to their next period. After the last bell, many students stay to socialize, get extra help and chat with teachers, said Devon Burroughs, the school’s vice principal. “They’re just hanging out with each other in the lobby, or they’re sitting with a teacher and just talking about life — not necessarily academics, but just to be around a person. Sometimes we have to [say], ‘O.K., it’s 5:40.’” Even then, he said, students linger in the park near the school, reluctant to go home.
Once they get to junior year, Match students gain access to a five-person college counseling staff that rivals those of elite private schools. Each counselor’s case load typically ranges from just 15 to 20 students, and counselors often help families, tax returns in hand, fill out the federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Over four years at Match, the typical student receives about 400 hours of college counseling, the school says. Most end up visiting more than 20 colleges.
That support typically pays off: 92% of the class of 2025 attend college, with 83% enrolled in four-year institutions. About 50% of alumni who attend college complete a degree within six years. That’s high compared to other charter organizations such as KIPP, which boasts a .
Senior Tolento, who first attended Match in sixth grade, has his eyes on “a lot of high-end schools,” including Cornell University. Match, he said, is “advocating for me to keep pushing myself upward.”
This spring, his classmate Pimentel will be the third in her family to graduate from Match. Though admission is by random lottery, students with siblings already attending get a leg up. She’s looking at studying business or early childhood education, possibly at Framingham State University.
“Since Day One, since you’re a freshman, they immediately are like, ‘Put in all your effort,’” she said. “They’re really adamant about you trying the hardest you can to accelerate every year, and this year specifically they’re really putting in the work to help us.”
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