Low-performing High Schools Research Articles

Broadening conceptions of a “college-going culture”: The role of high school climate factors in college enrollment and persistence

As workforce participation increasingly requires a college degree, ensuring that more students from traditionally underrepresented populations have the opportunity to enter and complete college is an equity imperative. To that end, high school reforms have promoted “college-going cultures” in low-performing high schools through interventions such as rigorous course offerings and college counseling. College access research has focused on issues specific to academics and college-going processes. Yet this research has tended to ignore broader school climate factors such as school safety and extracurricular programming, which may play a critical role in postsecondary opportunity, especially for historically underserved students. The current study applies hierarchical generalized linear modeling to the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 to 2006 to examine the role of college-going culture and high school climate characteristics on college enrollment and persistence. We find that while some components of college-going culture are associated with the likelihood of college enrollment and persistence, that relationship is moderated by school climate factors. We conclude that efforts to implement a college-going culture may struggle if extracurricular opportunities, school safety, and overall school climate issues are ignored.

Exit Strategies: How Low-Performing High Schools Respond to High School Exit Examination Requirements

Background Over the past several decades, a significant number of states have either adopted or increased high school exit examination requirements. Although these policies are intended to generate improvement in schools, little is known about how high schools are responding to exit testing pressures. Purpose This study examined how five low-performing high-poverty high schools responded to the pressures of Texas’ exit testing policy. The goal of this study was to understand how schools responded to the pressures of Texas’ exit testing system (in terms of curriculum, instruction, and supports for low-achieving students) and how educators reconciled those pressures with other accountability pressures that they faced. Research Design This study employed qualitative case study design. Five low-performing high schools were sampled within the state of Texas, each of which served large concentrations of at-risk students. A total of 105 interviews were conducted across the five case study sites over the course of 2 years (2008–2009). Conclusions This study found that the Texas exit testing policy created a misalignment between educator and student-level accountability, which had particularly negative consequences for struggling students. The findings of this study suggest a need for policy makers to reconsider the assumptions on which exit tests are based and to more closely consider the goal of exit testing systems in the context of, and in relation to, the larger systems of accountability in which they are embedded. Acknowledgments The research reported herein was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. The author would like to thank the editors of Teachers College Record, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback on the manuscript. The author would also like to thank Meredith Richards and Rebecca Cohen for their assistance with data collection for the project.

Letter from the Editorial Board

Letter from the Editorial Board Bryan C. Hutchins and Scott A. Morrison The Pew Research Center recently reported that record numbers of young adults are completing high school, attending college, and finishing college. In fact, for the first time ever, one-third of 25- to 29-year-olds in the United States has earned at least a bachelor’s degree (Fry & Parker, 2012). Fry and Parker note that the sluggish economic recovery probably plays a role in the rising rates of high school and college completion, but they also acknowledge that broad public support for college-as-a-means-to-get-ahead contributes to the trend. While many see college as a very important means to achieve “success” in life, others are worried that there are mixed and problematic messages in the discourse that promotes “college for all.” For example, Samuelson (2012) argues that there are unintended and troublesome consequences when college (particularly a 4-year degree) is promoted as the optimal pathway after high school. Samuelson argues that the “college for all” paradigm drives down the quality of higher education by pushing under-qualified students toward college (see Arum & Roksa, 2011), reduces students’ motivation by signaling that their aspirations aside from college are not valued, and stigmatizes those who do not go on to college.1 Others question whether higher education is worth the investment (e.g., McArdle, 2012). Tuition costs are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and both private and public institutions are reducing loans, grants, and subsidies for higher education (College Board Advocacy and Advisory Center, 2012). Finally, Glass and Nygreen (2011) argue that the “college for all” discourse “overstates the need for math and science knowledge and skills” (p. 1), has increased debt burdens for low-income and racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students, and “maintains and reinforces long-standing class- and race-based structural inequities” (p. 7). At The High School Journal, we are in favor of measures that provide the necessary encouragement, training, and financial aid to make post-secondary education a possibility for all students. However, we also recognize the drawbacks to the “college for all” crusade. In the remainder of this letter, we cite recent studies that inform our position. We conclude by advocating for a more nuanced approach to helping students make decisions about post-secondary education opportunities that are supportive of their diverse ambitions and needs. Parents, teachers, counselors, and other adults often encourage young people to attend college—or to at least make an attempt (Rosenbaum, Stephan, & Rosenbaum, 2010; Schneider & Stevenson, 1999). However, among the class of 2011, approximately one-third did not enroll in any type of postsecondary program (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012a). Of those entering a bachelor’s degree program in 2002, only 57% graduated within six years, with lower-performing high school students being the most likely to drop out (Snyder & Dillow, 2011). In fact, over 80% of low-performing high school students that attend college eventually drop out, with half receiving zero college credit while racking up debt for remedial college courses (Rosenbaum, 2001). The College Board has set a goal for raising college completion rates (associates degrees or above) to 55% by 2025. Even if this goal were met, about half of our youth would still not complete post-secondary education. Some students have clear career goals that do not include going to college (Blustein, Chaves, Diemer, Gallager, Marshall, et al., 2002; Bozick & DeLuca, 2011; Burnell, 2003). However, most of these students do not take part in available [End Page 73] high school vocational or career and technical education (CTE) programs (Stone & Aliaga, 2007). This is not to say that all students who forgo college should take part in vocational or CTE programs. But it is surprising that so few work-bound students take part in programs that provide specific training for occupations that provide immediate employment after high school. Unfortunately, these students may be marginalized at school because of their work-oriented ambitions and may find career counseling and school-to-work training opportunities missing in school contexts where a 4-year degree is heavily promoted. A number of recent reports show that even during these uncertain economic times there...

Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Learning Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the United States

This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of a program designed to improve high school graduation and postsecondary education enrollment among low-performing high school students. Treated youths were offered mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards. The program was evaluated when the youths were 19, 21, and 24 years old. Treated youths obtained their high school diplomas earlier and were more likely than controls to attend postsecondary education. Five years after the end of the program, we find no significant overall effects of this intervention on employment outcomes. The program improved outcomes to a greater extent for the female enrollees than the male ones. (JEL D83, I21, I28, J13)

What Makes Students Engaged in Learning? A Time-Use Study of Within- and Between-Individual Predictors of Emotional Engagement in Low-Performing High Schools

Adolescents' emotional engagement plays a critical role in promoting their academic performance as well as overall psychological wellbeing. As a part of a 3-year longitudinal study, this study drew upon self-determination theory to examine three psychological predictors of emotional engagement within specific learning contexts. Ninety-four, low socioeconomic status (SES), ninth grade students (49% male; 32 Blacks, 30 Whites, and 32 Latinos) rated the perceived fulfillment of their autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs and their emotional engagement in learning settings at multiple time points over a 1-week period. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that the students' ratings of their psychological-need fulfillment and of their emotional engagement fluctuated over time and across contexts. After accounting for student gender, race/ethnicity, and prior achievement, we found that the fulfillment of each type of psychological need in a particular learning context was related to emotional engagement in that context (i.e., within-student level). The fulfillment of students' need for autonomy also was related to their emotional engagement at the aggregated level (i.e., between-student level). These findings illustrate how the psychological affordances of particular learning settings are associated with emotional engagement within and between students from low SES backgrounds.

The Incentive Effects of the Top 10% Plan

This paper investigates the incentive effects of the Texas Top 10% Plan on high school students’ academic achievement. The Top 10% Plan substantially improved the probability of admissions to state flagship public universities for students from low-performing Texas high schools. We find that under the Top 10% policy, low-performing high schools – 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quintiles in the school achievement distribution – experience a larger increase in academic achievement, as measured by 10th-grade TAAS pass rates, relative to schools in the top quintile. Furthermore, this pattern holds for students of all races. Sensitivity analyses show that our findings are not a result of pre-existing trends, school accountability requirements, or strategic choice of high schools.

Tackling the Toughest Turnaround — Low-Performing High Schools

The stories of two Texas high schools that improved student achievement reveal what worked for them and could work for others.

Pedagogy for developing critical thinking in adolescents: Explicit instruction produces greatest gains

Although the development and transfer of critical thinking skills are recognized as primary goals for education, there is little empirical evidence to help educators decide how to teach in ways that enhance critical thinking. In two studies, we compared explicit and imbedded instructional modes and assessed critical thinking with the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment, which uses both constructed response and multiple-choice response formats with everyday situations. Participants were high school students in the United States attending low-performing high schools with large minority enrollment. In both studies, the students receiving explicit instruction showed much larger gains than those in the imbedded instruction group. Grade point average was significantly related to critical thinking scores, but as expected its relationship with critical thinking was much weaker than standardized test scores. These results provide robust evidence that explicit instruction is an effective method for teaching critical thinking skills to high school students.

Expanding the pathway to postsecondary success: How recuperative back‐on‐track schools are making a difference

Districts and states that have begun to get traction in improving their graduation rates are pursuing a reform agenda that includes both the redesign of failing high schools and the development of multiple alternative pathways that help young people get back on track to graduation and to postsecondary education. Unlike traditional alternative education, new back-on-track models assume that challenge, not remediation, will make the most difference, especially for youth who are over age for grade and far behind in accumulating the credits they need. The goal is for students to make up for lost time by accelerating their learning so that they can complete high school and move successfully to postsecondary education and careers. Although these small schools do not in themselves constitute a replacement or transformation strategy for large low-performing high schools, they are a necessary part of a comprehensive approach to turning such schools around.

Examining Teachers’ Beliefs about African American Male Students in a Low-Performing High School in an African American School District

Background/ContextThe study examines teachers’ and administrators’ perspectives on the persistent academic failure of African American male high school students. The study took place between 2003 and 2005 in a low-performing high school in Summerfield County, a Black suburban county in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States with a poverty rate below 8%, according to the 2000 United States census. At the time of the study, there were a number of initiatives across the state designed to address what was being referred to as “the minority achievement gap.” The researchers—most of whom were African American faculty and graduate students at the University of Maryland—were interested in understanding what teachers and other school personnel such as counselors and administrators would have to say about why African American students, particularly males, tended to persistently underperform on standardized measures of achievement, had higher rates of suspension and expulsion from school, were overrepresented in special education, and had significantly higher dropout rates than all other subgroups in this mostly Black and middle-class suburban school district.Purpose and Research QuestionsIn the present article, we build on the work of scholars of critical race studies in education and scholars concerned about teachers’ impact on student achievement to explore teachers’ beliefs about African American students, and we discuss the possible implications for African American males in troubled schools. We used critical race ethnographic methods to collect data on the following research questions: (1) How does a low-performing high school in a low-performing school district cope with the persistent problem of African American male underachievement? (2) In particular, how do teachers and administrators understand the problem? (3) How might this impact their ability to work successfully with African American male students?SettingThe study took place in Summerfield County, a majority-Black suburban county in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The county is known as the wealthiest Black county in the nation. With over 100,000 students, its school district is one of the largest and lowest performing in the state. At the time of the study, the district was ranked 23rd out of 24 districts in the state in measures of standardized achievement. The research took place in a midsized all-Black high school in a section of the county that is contiguous with one of the poorer sections of a nearby city. The high school, with a 99% Black population of slightly fewer than 1,000 students, was one of the lowest performing high schools in the district.ParticipantsThe main participants in the study consisted of two groups: (1) a sample of 50 teachers, administrators, and counselors, and (2) a subsample of 6 teachers in art, music, technology, social studies, and math who participated in ongoing individual interviews, a focus group, and classroom observations.Research DesignThis study involved a series of focus groups, formal and informal interviews with teachers, counselors, and administrators, and 18 months of ethnographic observations in the school.ConclusionsResearchers found that school personnel overwhelmingly blamed students, their families, and their communities for the minority achievement gap. In short, the school was pervaded by a culture of defeat and hopelessness. Ongoing conversations with a smaller group of teachers committed to the success of African American male students revealed that the school was not a safe space for caring teachers who wanted to make a difference in the lives of their students.

Circumscribed Agency: The Relevance of Standardized College Entrance Exams for Low SES High School Students

The authors interviewed Black and Latino students from five high-poverty high schools as they attempted to make the transition into college. Their ability to exert individual agency with regard to their entrance exams and their college transition was circumscribed by the messages and behavioral norms that dominated their low-performing high school context. Students preserved their sense of academic competence, yet they drastically misestimated the relevance of their scores while remaining uninformed about their level of college readiness or how to improve it. The framework for analysis comes from three theories: college choice process, cultural capital, and self-efficacy.

Educating More Americans Requires Broader View of Learning

America as the most educated country in the world? When President Obama set this as a goal of his Administration--based on every American completing at least one year of college--the pronouncement sounded familiar. Less than 20 years ago, the first President Bush and the nation's governors, meeting at an Education Summit in Charlottesville, declared that our students would be the best in the world in math and science by the year 2000. They didn't even come close. But who was going to set a goal for being second or third in the world? Their goal was more PR than policy making, and the college-for-all ambition of the current Administration could ring just as hollow. I suspect, however, that the current goal is a proxy for ensuring that we become a smarter society, on average, than in the past. Giving everyone some college experience is one way of defining a more capable workforce and citizenry, and undoubtedly millions of adults would benefit from it. Helping adults learn computer and research skills or take responsibility for learning independently could increase productivity at work. For many young people, however, the message that you must go to college is an incentive to do just the opposite. As evidence of this, the high school dropout rate stubbornly stays the same even as young people experience the highest unemployment rate since the U.S. Department of Labor started keeping track more than 40 years ago. The message from policy makers that hasn't been heard by these students, and by many of those who try to educate them, is that there is a good economic life for those who graduate from high school with some connections to careers immediately after high school. Their future lies not in another spate of traditional classwork leading to a two-year degree, but in jobs with specific training. Changes in the workplace and education are shaping a hopeful path for students scared by the college-ready craze. Assembling the Pieces There are several pieces to put together to show how this is happening. For 15 years, MDRC conducted random-assignment research on career academies in a diverse group of high schools, following students for eight years after graduation. Career academies, now numbering about 2,500 across the country, organize students into small learning communities around career themes and develop partnerships with employers for apprenticeships and other job training. Students' academic scores don't soar because they're in the academies, but students tend to graduate at higher rates, find stable employment, and earn more than comparison groups (like $30,000 more over eight years). Those with the best results tend to be minority men in urban areas. CNA and the Hudson Institute followed more than 144,000 students through high school and into postsecondary education for 12 years, beginning in 1995. As other studies confirm, higher levels of education produce higher earnings, with one important exception: Students who complete certificates from two-year colleges have about the same median earnings as those who receive associate degrees. Researchers concluded that obtaining a certificate significantly increases the earnings of low-performing high school students relative to students with similar records who attend college but do not obtain a credential. …

Improving Low-Performing High Schools: Searching for Evidence of Promise

Noting that many of the nation's high schools are beset with major problems, such as low student reading and math achievement, high dropout rates, and an inadequate supply of effective teachers, Steve Fleischman and Jessica Heppen survey a range of strategies that educators have used to improve low-performing high schools. The authors begin by showing how the standards-based school reform movement, together with the No Child Left Behind Act requirement that underperforming schools adopt reforms supported by scientifically based research, spurred policy makers, educators, and researchers to create and implement a variety of approaches to attain improvement. Fleischman and Heppen then review a number of widely adopted reform models that aim to change "business as usual" in low-performing high schools. The models include comprehensive school reform programs, dual enrollment and early college high schools, smaller learning communities, specialty (for example, career) academies, charter high schools, and education management organizations. In practice, say the authors, many of these improvement efforts overlap, defying neat distinctions. Often, reforms are combined to reinforce one another. The authors explain the theories that drive the reforms, review evidence of their reforms' effectiveness to date, and suggest what it will take to make them work well. Although the reforms are promising, the authors say, few as yet have solid evidence of systematic or sustained success. In concluding, Fleischman and Heppen emphasize that the reasons for a high school's poor performance are so complex that no one reform model or approach, no matter how powerful, can turn around low-performing schools. They also stress the need for educators to implement each reform program with fidelity to its requirements and to support it for the time required for success. Looking to the future, the authors suggest steps that decision makers, researchers, and sponsors of research can take to promote evidence-based progress in education.

Are NCLB’s Measures, Incentives, and Improvement Strategies the Right Ones for the Nation’s Low-Performing High Schools?

This article examines the extent to which adequate yearly progress (AYP) is a valid and reliable indicator of improvement in low-performing high schools. For a random subsample of 202 high schools, the authors investigate the school characteristics and the federal and state policy contexts that influence their AYP status. Logistic regression models reveal that the strongest predictors of AYP status in low-performing high schools are the number of student subgroups for which schools are accountable and their No Child Left Behind improvement status. Analysis of state report card data further paints a confusing landscape in which improving low-performing high schools are sanctioned whereas similar schools showing less improvement are not.

Practices That Support Data Use in Urban High Schools

This article presents initial findings of a case study focusing on data use in five low-performing urban high schools undergoing comprehensive schoolwide reform. The case study investigates: (a) the ways in which disaggregated data can be used to examine progress and guide improvement in the process of restructuring urban, low-performing high schools; (b) factors and conditions that either promote or act as barriers to data use; and (c) the policy and practice implications of achieving effective data use in a high school reform process. Study findings point to several key factors that have an impact on data use in the study sites: the quality and accuracy of available data, staff access to timely data, the capacity for data disaggregation, the collaborative use of data organized around a clear set of questions, and leadership structures that support schoolwide use of data. The findings build on current literature and also contribute new knowledge of the key roles played by a data team and a data coach in fostering effective data use in high school reform.

Expanding the University of California's Outreach Mission

In 1998-1999, the University of California added a new dimension to its K-12 outreach: partnerships between the university and educationally low-performing high schools. The program aimed to improve the academic performance of targeted high schools and their feeder middle and elementary schools. This paper examines the processes that led to the four-pronged outreach plan, the various political and organization processes that shaped outreach, and the institutional significance and impact of UC's foray into school reform.