Miles Ahead Scholars

  • PROBLEM + SOLUTION
    Male Underachievement in Education
    Kashmere High School facade
    Across the nation, school districts are working to tackle one of the most vexing problems in urban schools: improving academic outcomes for African-American and Latino boys. President Obama, when launching the “My Brother's Keeper” Initiative stated that improving the lives of young men of color is a “moral issue for our country.”
    “In most American cities, dropout rates for African-American and Latino males are well above 50%, and they’re less likely to enroll or graduate from college than any other group.” —Schott (2010)
  • Austin HS student
    THE MILES AHEAD SCHOLARS SOLUTION
    To solve this challenge, HISD has launched the Miles Ahead Scholars (MAS) Program. The Miles Ahead Program will begin with a founding cohort of 60 9th and 10th-grade boys who demonstrate academic promise from Wheatley, Worthing, and Kashmere High Schools, with the ultimate goal of increasing the enrollment of boys of color in our nation’s most selective colleges and universities.

     

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    How much more or less each group is represented going freshmen at top colleges relative to the U.S. population.
  • "Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago" by Jeremy Ashkenas, Haeyoun Park and Adam Pearce Aug. 24, 2017
  • "A consistent finding in educational research is that low-income students with qualifications similar to their more advantaged peers are less likely to attend college, are more likely to attend two-versus four year colleges, and are less likely to apply to top-tier institutions...
     
    ....These students missing from the [selective college] application pool tended to be concentrated in high schools with little or no tradition of sending students to selective colleges."
     

    Potholes on the Road to College Match Participation in College Application, Four-year College Enrollment, and College Potholes on the Road to College : High School Effects in Shaping Urban Students' Participation in College Application, Four-year College Enrollment, and College Match

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  • Undermatching matters because less competitive colleges have lower graduation rates for boys of color. There is signifcant variation in graduation rates across categories of school competitiveness. See the graph below to learn more.

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