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{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he first book students at Beacon Academy read is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea.”
They read about sweat and salt and the harsh light of the sun over the water, about the cramped left hand of the old fisherman who spends 85 days trying to make a catch. Then they set out on their own 14-month endurance journey.
The program’s 20 teens willingly give up their summer vacation and complete an additional year of school. The students are willing to do whatever it takes to make it; they’ll run laps until they can complete a 5K, learn hundreds of new vocabulary words for the Secondary School Admissions Test, and stay in study hall well into the night before riding city buses back home. They visit Martha’s Vineyard, take ski lessons, and learn how to tell soup spoons from dessert spoons. They hope that by the end, Beacon will slingshot them from underfunded public schools to elite preparatory boarding schools.
Founded more than two decades ago in the upstairs of Temple Israel in Boston, Beacon is a gap year program for students from “historically under-resourced and/or underrepresented communities” between the eighth and ninth grade, according to its website. The goal is simple: fill in the gaps — academic, emotional, and cultural — between low-income, primarily Black and Latino public school students and their predominantly wealthy and white peers that they’ll encounter at private prep schools.
In manufacturing privileged memories for minority and low-income students, Beacon adopts its own definitions of what kind of student excels at these elite institutions: one well-versed in both classic literature and the intricacies of navigating wealthier and whiter social circles. Beacon’s founders say the school’s methods are necessary for students to close the gulf that lies between them and their future classmates. Staff and alumni say Beacon changes the trajectory of its students’ lives. Some wonder what parts of their identity they may have to give up in the process.
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}ucked away in the upstairs of Temple Israel of Boston, Beacon had seven staff members and 25 students, all of whom had been part of a word-of-mouth campaign earlier that year to get the school off the ground. The temple had generously let the school rent a few rooms for dirt cheap — it couldn’t afford anything more expensive.
Beacon originated in the mind of Cindy Laba, a white woman who had built a career working in educational nonprofits. In the early 2000s, she worked at City on a Hill, a now-defunct charter school in Roxbury, a majority-minority Boston neighborhood. She saw firsthand how minority and low-income students were falling academically behind their whiter and wealthier peers. (In Massachusetts, the average test score of Black eighth graders was 37 points lower than their white peers.)
But one afternoon, while reviewing quarterly grades, Laba noticed that just five of the school’s 73 students had passed all their classes. These students weren’t just behind; they had been abandoned by the education system altogether.
Laba wanted to give her students a way back in, and the idea for Beacon was born. Following the eighth grade, kids could hit pause on their education, trading 14 months in exchange for an acceptance to New England’s elite private schools — a chance to infiltrate the bastions of privilege.
The idea for a “talent pipeline” into private high schools wasn’t new. In 1963, 23 headmasters of elite New England institutions met with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students to found A Better Chance, which aimed to funnel more Black students into historically white private schools. At the meeting, John M. Kemper, then-head of Phillips Academy, concluded that graduating more minority students from elite schools would give them access to better lives.
Fifteen years after the creation of A Better Chance, a Bronx high school teacher founded Prep for Prep, an afterschool program that identifies high-achieving students of color in New York City and academically prepares them for elite private schools. Like Prep for Prep, Laba’s brainchild was predicated on the principle that private schools could transform the trajectories of her students’ lives.
In the hallowed halls of New England’s oldest academies, whose oak walls and oil paintings often predate the nation itself, students follow in the footsteps of titans and presidents. They are bombarded with resources, from top-notch college counseling, to small classes taught by faculty with advanced graduate degrees, to state-of-the-art gymnasiums and libraries. And hanging over students’ heads are the expectations that they’ll one day be great.
But Laba knew that dropping students into entirely unfamiliar territory wouldn’t be enough for them to walk the halls with the same confidence as their peers. Her school wouldn’t just have flashcards and essays; it would also have to expose its students to the affluent culture of their future classmates. If Beacon truly wanted its students to integrate into their new schools, they would need to eliminate as many reasons as possible that low-income or minority students could be ostracized for.
“We always believe that competence is going to give you confidence,” Laba says. By introducing students to new, uncomfortable experiences, Beacon would teach them academic and social fluency. Students would be able to relate to their peers — to say, “I’ve also summered at Martha’s Vineyard” or “I’ve skied before.”
Perhaps no one describes this philosophy better than Mervan Osborne, a founding faculty member. Osborne, who previously taught at the ritzy Boston prep school Buckingham Browne & Nichols Day School, came to Beacon as a history teacher and served as the Head of School until 2018. He and the other staff members talked about Beacon like being “dropped from a helicopter with a parachute into these different communities.” The school aims to give students the “tools” to make it in their groups, no matter where the parachute lands.
And even if students stumbled at their new schools, Beacon would always be there to support them. The school’s explicit mission is to help students succeed at elite private high schools. For years after students graduate from Beacon, the program provides them with dedicated support — from hosting networking events to helping at least one graduate fundraise for his successful Boston City Council campaign. If a graduate started struggling in high school, Laba and Osborne would sometimes drive out to meet with the student’s parents and the school’s support staff.
What Beacon is not is a pipeline to Harvard and its ultra-selective peers. Unlike schools that advertise themselves as Ivy League feeders for low-income students, the program doesn’t focus on funneling its students into top colleges, though they typically go on to successful careers. (Multiple alumni said that, had they not gone to Beacon, they wouldn’t have attended college at all.) Beacon doesn’t select for students with 4.0 middle school GPAs: it chooses “kids that were excited about school,” according to Marsha Feinberg, a Beacon co-founder who worked for many years as the program’s financial czar.
But to create these opportunities and offerings, Beacon Academy needed resources of its own. Laba recruited Feinberg, a friend she had worked with at the educational nonprofit City Year The pair approached Wanda M. Holland-Greene, then-interim head of a private school in Brookline, a Black woman who had led private schools for years. Holland herself had participated in a talent pipeline program in New York City, attending The Chapin School. As they followed referrals from donor to donor, they raised more than $406,528, according to public tax documents, enough for their founding class.
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{shortcode-9e32dfdb8c377e15033f759ef2c5d6c2398b7977}ohnathan Charles was 14 years old and had just been rejected from every private school he applied to. He was a young Black student in Boston public schools who looked a little old for his age. He felt his own teachers were intimidated by him and often unforgiving in their feedback.
Both of Charles’ parents were immigrants from Haiti who prioritized education above all, but they struggled to understand the intricacies of the American education system. The family worked with Action for Boston Community Development, a nonprofit that helps low-income families connect with career and education resources. Still, they needed to shake the right hands to get into the private schools they wanted. But they had no idea how to even get into the rooms where it happens.
“A lot of doors were shut,” he says. His mom, desperate to secure a quality education for her twin sons, heard about Beacon through an open house. A few months later, Charles and his brother became two of Beacon’s first 25 students.
Charles’s first day of school at Beacon came earlier than usual, in July. The year started with a summer “audition” to see whether students were prepared to endure the rigors of Beacon. Each day began with last-minute flashcards over breakfast, followed by six hours of classes. Then came afternoon exercises — if the weather permitted, running, even in the rain; in the event of cold, squash. The students finished the day with more studying: a mandatory study hall through dinner, then an option to continue later into the night until the commute back home. Even on Saturday, there was study hall.
When Catherine Ashley started at Beacon in 2011, she was shocked by the intensity of those first few summer months. There were regular exams, and she and her classmates feared being let go from the program if they couldn’t keep up. Ashley had discovered Beacon through Tenacity — an afterschool program for Boston public school students that combines tennis lessons with reading workshops. She quickly quit tennis, as well as piano lessons.
“They kind of said, ‘You should be putting all of your energy into this while you’re here,’” Ashley remembers teachers telling her class. Beacon’s staff regularly reminded students of the prestige that came with a Beacon diploma, which Ashley recalls being both motivating and intimidating. Over time, the stress of the never-ending days compounded, and she felt like she was always sprinting to catch up.
“I was just not producing the work that was being expected of me, and that made me really sad and confused,” she says. “I think the confusion turned into frustration, which turned into just disappointment in myself.”
Ashley stayed in the program, hitting her stride by the end of the fall, but by the end of the year, seven students she had started with were gone. Some left of their own accord, finding Beacon’s model wasn’t the right fit for them. Other times, students who lagged behind were invited to leave. Every Friday, Beacon’s teachers gathered to assess students on their drive for Beacon’s mission and stamina for its methods. They meticulously evaluated each student on a scale of one to 10 in three areas — academic, character, and effort — and shared their ratings with the kids. If the numbers were too low, the student risked being cut.
Charles, too, feels that the intensity of the school got to him, even if he did receive the illustrious admission at the end of it all. When he applied to private schools the second time around, he still got rejected from all but one of them. He ultimately ended up attending Connecticut’s Frederick Gunn School, then called The Gunnery School, which typically runs its boarding students $80,000 per year for tuition. He played football at Muhlenberg College and now works for the private Catholic Xaverian Brothers High School.
But while Charles’s Beacon experience worked on paper, the reality was messier. He was a “good kid,” but he still failed his tests at Beacon because of a learning disability he didn’t realize he had at the time. (He says it was “obvious” in hindsight.) And as the pressure of the founders’ vision trickled down through his teachers, Charles’s performance was not taken well.
“The first thing was, ‘I’m disappointed in you,’” he remembers.
{shortcode-3f3e57005be88db1897fbe0aab6a26f27b883007}eacon is grounded in Laba’s ethos of delivering the truth, even when it hurts. It’s unapologetically practical — if she was going to send kids “to school on Pluto,” she wanted them to taste the air first. The temptation, she knew, was to soften the intensity of her program in the name of encouragement. But that, in her eyes, would leave her students vulnerable. Her lessons carried the urgency of borrowed time, and she never failed to remind students that the clock was ticking.
When Matt Dunkel joined Beacon’s faculty in 2008 as a young math teacher, he administered a 60-second math quiz to his students in the first few days of class. The quiz was borrowed from his fellowship at the Shady Hill Teaching Training Center in Cambridge. Beacon students failed at an alarming rate, with some receiving marks of only 10 percent.
“What grade is this at Shady Hill?” Laba remembers asking Dunkel. When he replied “fourth,” she insisted they tell the class the gravity of their situation. Despite Dunkel’s hesitation, Laba went ahead and told the students.
“You’re in a hole,” Laba recounts telling students. “It’s not your fault that you’re in this hole, but you are compared to wealthy kids,” she adds.
Dunkel joined Beacon excited by the school’s mission — finding students with a “visible spark” who had been shortchanged by their previous schools, and giving them a chance to flourish. Dunkel was later promoted to Dean of Students — but his early experiences turned into nagging doubts.
As the years tallied up, the school’s intensity increasingly troubled him. It seemed as if teenage students were being entered into a reality television show, complete with judges’ ratings.
“I feel like boiling any human being down to this spreadsheet of indicators is imperfect at best,” Dunkel says. He tried his best to comfort students who scored low, as well as parents worried that a “4” in character or a “3” in effort could mean getting cut the following week.
As time went on, Dunkel grew skeptical of the “pressure cooker” that was Beacon. He admires the students who made it through, but he knows others who carry lasting anxiety from Beacon’s months-long competitive environment. He felt that a lot of that responsibility fell on educators to avoid “what could sometimes sound like kid-blaming.”
Dunkel says he grew to think Laba practiced what some critics call “deficit thinking.” The term, coined by education psychology researcher Richard Valencia, refers to blaming students’ upbringing for perceived shortcomings, rather than the schools they’re part of. It’s often applied out of sympathy or pity, a way to prevent students from blaming themselves; but Valencia believed it implicitly pitted students against their backgrounds.
To some, like Brian Asare, the deficit mindset lingered past the gap year. Following in his sister’s footsteps, he came to Beacon, and made it through the program. He has complicated reflections on his time at Beacon — a love for the people (his English teacher, Ms. Hugh, was very influential in Asare’s career choice as a writer), but even after he left, the intensity of the school stuck with him, and — when combined with childhood trauma — it exacerbated the pressure he put on himself in high school.
“I learned a lot of good things from Beacon, but I did carry a lot of emotional baggage into high school and a lot of imposter syndrome and just this mindset of pressure to exhaustion and burnout,” Asare says.
For other students, Beacon’s blunt approach was a wake-up call they say they needed. Danny Matos, for example, came begrudgingly to Beacon in 2015 upon his mom’s insistence. Like many, Matos had a hard time adjusting to the rigor of the summer program. He started his year at Beacon making C’s, which “doesn’t fly,” he says.
Matos recalls Laba telling him that he wasn’t “good enough” and “could be doing better.”
“Why are you wasting your time here if you’re not going to give it your all?” she asked him.
While harsh, Matos says that the conversation “really just opened up my eyes to the potential that I have.”
{shortcode-3f3e57005be88db1897fbe0aab6a26f27b883007}eacon’s founding members designed the extracurricular curriculum to teach students social and cultural fluency — so that when they arrived at their new schools, they would be versed in the norms native to their peers. During Osborne’s tenure at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, he remembers bringing a student to an art museum for the first time. Trying to absorb every detail, the student leaned in closer and closer to a painting, triggering the alarm. She was met with judgmental eyes, and Osborne recalled that she looked like she “wanted to crawl in a hole.”
“It’s just simply because she just didn’t know. She’s just never been there before,” Osborne reflects.
At Beacon, he never wanted students to have to endure these “microcuts,” as he describes them. Instead, he could teach them the unspoken rules of predominantly white and upper-class spaces before they had to learn the hard way. And while the truth was difficult for students to hear initially, many recognized that it would be necessary for their eventual transition to high school.
“Because what do kids want?” he says. “They want to be a member. They want to belong.”
After Beacon landed Anthony Anderson a spot at the coveted Brimmer and May School in Chestnut Hill, he was able to travel to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Belize, and Myanmar. He credits Beacon for encouraging the independence that enabled him to take advantage of his high school’s opportunities. And rather than feeling like he needed to assimilate, he believes that Beacon empowered him to remain authentic. Beacon, he says, teaches students to “take ownership for their academic career trajectory, as well as just life goals.”
Moneé Vance went on to the Stoneleigh-Burnham School. Known for a world-class equestrian program, the school attracts families willing to pay thousands on top of an already steep tuition rate to board students’ horses. Coming from a public school in greater Boston, Vance thought Stoneleigh-Burnham looked like the pinnacle of wealth, and Beacon was the only reason she knew what to expect.
“If I went to Stoneleigh before going to Beacon, I would have been completely shell-shocked,” Vance says. “There was a very clear divide between the haves and have-nots.”
Vance thanks Beacon’s cultural activities for her ability to integrate later on. Stoneleigh-Burnham’s promotional materials, which proudly depict students playing field hockey, staring at Renaissance paintings, and rowing, don’t hide the school’s intentions of providing white experiences to minority teenagers. While some students believe Beacon’s cultural curriculum eased them into wealthier environments, others feel more alienated from their backgrounds.
When one white teacher presented these same photos to prospective families, a Black mother raised her hand to ask the question on the minds of many who attend Beacon: “Are you trying to make my son white?”
Deborah Offner, a psychologist who worked with Beacon, doesn’t recall whether the mother’s child ended up attending, but she does remember how the question encapsulated the ever-present tensions between assimilation and integration at the school. And for young students still forming an identity, internalizing expectations of what successful students look like can put them in conflict with their own upbringings.
“Students at that age are at a really pivotal place where they still have an emerging understanding of who they are and their place in the world, and it’s being disrupted,” says Garry Mitchell, an assistant professor at Duke who studied college preparatory school programs, including Beacon.
“It made them view their community, their homes, their physical homes, their families, in completely different lights, and often they felt that they didn’t have the requisite skills to really make sense of that and process through that,” he adds.
Some students, like Vance, credit Beacon with giving them the language to interact socially with their future classmates and ease into life at prep school. But Offner, who worked with Beacon students who needed mental health support in high school and college, remembers students feeling culturally displaced by the school’s programming and policies.
On several occasions, administrators couldn’t decide whether the dress code should allow durags, a type of scarf worn to protect waves or cornrows, popular in Black culture. Beacon’s staff feared the worst: the students would be ostracized at their high schools and associated with crime or gangs. But in fearing the worst, Offner explains, Beacon was always making judgment calls between what was appropriate for their future schools and completely assimilating to their future peers.
“In an effort to make sure that the kids feel comfortable in a white privilege environment, it’s almost like you are being asked to forsake your own style, your own culture,” Offner explains.
As Laba scrutinized the students’ speech and grammar, she replaced each one of their “aks” with “ask” and “brung” with “brought.” Asare, the writer, recalls when Laba told him he had a Patois accent, which is typically associated with West African influences and Jamaican Creole.
“There were certain things where it felt like she was trying to remove the vocalisms and the dialect out of my accent,” Asare says.
And unlike Anderson and Vance, some students never found their footing in high school. Not privileged enough to integrate at his private school, but too removed to relate to his home, Isaac Middleton felt more alone than ever. He had graduated from Beacon in 2019, but transferred out of his boarding school and lost touch with classmates from both schools. Now, he works as a dropout prevention specialist in Chelsea, Mass.
“I was only lucky enough to get into one private school, and even then, I couldn’t conform to the culture there, nor did I see myself enjoying it there at all. It really separated me from my family and the people that held dear and isolated me a lot,” he says.
Offner says that preventing long-lasting detriments to students’ identities starts with upfront conversations about the intention behind Beacon’s cultural activities. But Beacon didn’t give students just one message. Laba says she was clear they were framed to students as a strategy for fitting in at their high schools; Feinberg says the students thought they were just for fun. Offner believes the school shied away from frank discussions about the cultural experiences, making it harder to convey that the skills weren’t intended to cheapen the students’ backgrounds.
“Currently, we are intentional about how we engage, celebrate and support students as they develop and embrace their identities and build lives of agency and impact,” Head of School Charles E. Carter writes.
Beacon has outgrown its humble beginnings in Temple Israel. The school now occupies a 17,000 square foot granite church in Roslindale, both founders have left, and Charles E. Carter, a Black man, is CEO and Head of School. In hushed tones and vague details, alumni and staff allude to a divide between the “Old Beacon” and “New Beacon.” Over its two decades, the school has changed in synchrony with evolving national conversations around race — and as students think more critically about Beacon’s experiment, the school has softened its rules around making students participate in all of its programming.
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Back in 2005, the Old Beacon was perhaps a product of its time. It was founded in a moment when Americans were more hopeful than ever about race — Dunkel, the math teacher, remembers Obama’s election during his first year teaching at Beacon.
“For that class, at that time, there was such a sense of hope and possibility that they really felt part of,” he says.
Beacon gradually began holding more difficult conversations in response to alumni concerns over Beacon’s cultural programming. And in 2020, following the nationwide racial reckoning in response to the murder of George Floyd, Black students at preparatory schools around the country began openly discussing their experiences with racism. For Beacon alumni and students, underlying criticisms of the school’s model came to the forefront. Offner says alumni always tended to question Beacon, especially as they moved on to colleges where affinity groups allowed them to freely celebrate their culture. But today, she says that current students are more likely to speak up when they have concerns.
Laba decided it was time to let a Black man lead the school instead.
“It’s time for me to leave and get out of the way, so let’s hire a person of color to run the school,” Laba recalls.
Carter describes “New Beacon” as a culture that prioritizes the well-being of its students by “creating flexibility in the daily schedule for student downtime; engaging practitioners and professionals who offer culturally relevant activities and increasing our capacity for providing mental health support.” The school, he adds, “nurtures social and emotional growth of students and alumni.”
Now, the national conversation around race is shifting, leaving Beacon in the crosshairs once again. Two years ago, affirmative action fell, raising concerns from Black students about their acceptance to college. States across the country are rapidly moving to dismantle programs intended to support Black and Hispanic students and promote racial awareness. The school is relatively insulated thanks to its completely private sources of funding, but it remains to be seen whether the school will be forced to adapt once again.
Laba knows that, for many students, Beacon is hard: that’s a feature, not a bug, after all. She knows the school’s methods are intense and unorthodox. But she says she didn’t hear her students complain. Perhaps they were more focused on all that Beacon promises: admission to prep school, access to a bright future, an answer to the universal teenage wish to feel like you belong.
“The kids never really pushed back on us,” Laba says. “Maybe they pushed back later, but they were so interested in learning what we wanted to tell them about how they might fit in in these schools and minimize the things that would make it harder.”
—Staff writers Neeraja S. Kumar and Sarah E. Yee contributed reporting.
—Magazine writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.
—Magazine writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.
