Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic high school is ranked 67th in the national high school rankings and 4th for New Jersey high schools according to U.S. News & World Report. The scorecard for McNair high school, which is calculated by looking at the number of students who took at least one AP exam, (100%) of said students passed an AP exam (83%), their mathematics proficiency (89%), reading proficiency (98%), and the graduation rate (100%), is 99.61 out of 100.
William L. Dickinson high school is ranked 8,702nd in the national high school rankings and 268th for New Jersey high schools according to U.S. News & World Report. The scorecard for Dickinson high school, which consists of the same parameters has only 40% of students taking an AP exam, 11% passing one AP exam, an 11% mathematics proficiency, a 30% reading proficiency, and a graduation rate of 78%, has an overall score of 49.54 out of 100.
What if I told you that both McNair Academic high school and Dickinson high school are located in Jersey City, NJ, are both public high schools with a minority enrollment of 81-87%, and are separated by a mere 4 blocks? What if I told you that the student to teacher ratio for Dickinson high school was 12.7:1, whereas the student to teacher ratio for McNair Academic high school was 15.5:1? You would undoubtedly question the drastic difference in rankings among the two high schools and wonder at the disparities. To improve the scores of Dickinson high school, we want to design and implement a personalized one-on-one mentoring initiative focused on improving the factors that contribute to Dickinson’s scorecard, with an emphasized focus on graduation rate. The initiative will also serve to aid professional development and academic support, by exposing students to potential career paths, networking, and internship opportunities, and advising throughout the college application process.
My team and I will work to collect data from peer-reviewed journals and studies on the benefits of mentoring, as well as look at different mentoring programs in high schools throughout the United States to have an idea as to how we should model our own mentoring initiative. We will conduct a feasibility study to assess the practicality of the project by comparing the cost required and the value that can be attained. We plan to create a Qualtrics survey to take the opinions of Dickinson students on what they would like to get out of the mentoring initiative. We will use the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program to conduct any statistical analyses we may need. Our work will include working with both the administrative staff of Dickinson High School and McNair High School to collect further data, as well as the Jersey City Board of Education and Rutgers.
The end goal of this project is to create a mentoring initiative that the administrative staff of Dickinson high school, as well as the Jersey City Board of Education, will adopt and implement because they see the value of such an initiative and its potential to improve Dickinson high school’s scorecard, and the factors that contribute to it, in the years to come.