New Research Published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Shows How College Admissions and Outreach Programs Can Improve Struggling High Schools.
Irvine, Calif., October 1, 2007
Texas became a national leader in school reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, adopting standardized testing and school accountability policies that provided a model for the No Child Left Behind Act. But all that changed in 1996 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit banned affirmative action at Texas colleges and universities. The Hopwood decision was discouraging news for minority high school students in Texas, and in the year after the decision, the state's public high schools slipped on several important indicators of school quality, from student attendance to advanced course taking and college enrollment. Hopwood also threw the state's educational policy-makers for a loop. In the years that followed the decision, the state put its high school reform program on autopilot as it scrambled to maintain racial and ethnic diversity at its flagship public universities in the post-affirmative action era.
Between the discouraged students and the distracted policy-makers, it sounds like a recipe for educational disaster. But as UCI Professor Thurston Domina demonstrates in a paper published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Texas high schools posted record numbers just two years after Hopwood. And in the years that followed, those numbers kept climbing.
What happened? Domina argues that Texas's higher education establishment got involved in the state's high schools.
In his paper, Professor Domina studies the Texas top 10% law, school based college outreach programs operated by the University of Texas and Texas A&M, and a merit-based scholarship program. Each of these policies was designed to improve access and diversity at the state's flagship universities. But using high school data for the 1995-2003 period, Prof. Domina shows that these had unexpected positive influences on the state's public high schools. By devising clear college admissions and financial aid standards and broadcasting them widely to students throughout the states, higher education policy in Texas improved academic engagement in the state's high schools.
