‘It’s like giving us a car, only without the wheels’: a critical policy analysis of an early college programme

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to examine the perceptions and experiences of Latina students, who were underperforming in an early college high school (ECHS), regarding their achievement and experiences. Additionally, the school’s institutional documents were used to critically assess the viability of the ECHS as an equity-oriented, social justice policy intervention to increase educational opportunity. Conceptual frameworks of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum frame the analyses, which reveal a myopic focus on achievement to increase educational opportunity is naïve. While the ECHS studied may have been designed with good intentions, as a policy intervention it was not broadly effective. A perspective existed that opportunities for advanced achievement were accessible to all students in the programme. Unfortunately, this perspective naively ignored the constraints students faced in their lives. These constraints were often unavoidable and tended to undermine students’ progress towards high achievement and increased the likelihood, students would make choices that negatively impacted their achievement. Findings reveal significant gaps between policy-makers’ assumptions regarding how to expand educational opportunity and what students need to achieve. Equity-oriented, social justice policy interventions, like the ECHS, do little in terms of increasing achievement if they ignore the holistic lives of students.