Education Week - November 5, 2014 - 12

WAR ON POVERTY: Progress and Persistent Inequity
"YOU HAVE TO PUSH YOURSELF
and make it known to the guidance counselors that you want to go farther in life."
JACQUELYN COLEMAN, senior, Tennessee High School, Bristol, Tenn.
Higher Ed.
Programs
Fall Short
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
tough for families with few resources
or postsecondary experience to help
their students plan for and succeed
after high school. "The careers are
changing rapidly, the set of skills
needed for that job are changing. Do
you have to have a bachelor's degree to
be a plumber? How do you know, how
do you research that?"
As more middle-class jobs require
postsecondary training, school districts
face increasing scrutiny and
accountability for their students' college
enrollment and success. Yet the
federal programs originally intended
to bridge high school and college, Upward
Bound and Talent Search, were
not designed to serve all students, and
have not been given the resources to
cope with the dynamic and exponentially
growing need, particularly in
rural communities like those around
Johnson City.
Anthony P. Carnevale, the director
and research professor of the Georgetown
University Center on Education
and the Workforce, in Washington,
sees the push to get more students
from poor or minority families to college
breaking down, as more colleges
become "selective" and gaps continue
between students at selective institutions
and those with open enrollment.
"The underlying socioeconomic
structure of society always wins, unless
you are willing to give people
special treatment and additional resources
just to improve upward mobility,"
Mr. Carnevale said, adding that
evidence shows the programs most
effective for getting disadvantaged
students to and through college usually
are "labor intensive" and costly for
their operators.
Raising the Bar
In 1964 and 1965, when Congress
respectively passed the Economic
Opportunity Act and the Higher Education
Act to provide the foundation
of modern student-loan and collegebridge
programs, President Lyndon B.
Johnson announced, "It is a truism
that education is no longer a luxury.
Education in this day and age is a
necessity."
It made for good headlines, but the
high school diploma was seen at the
time as the key to middle-class jobs,
and gaps in college completion have
been slower to close in the intervening
years.
In 1960, 80 percent of adults in
poverty-as well as 80 percent of all
black Americans and 57 percent of all
white Americans-had not graduated
high school, and policymakers focused
both the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 and the Higher
Education Act of 1965 to ensure all
Americans earned that basic diploma.
By contrast, only 8 percent of white
students and 3 percent of black students
completed college in 1960.
Today, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau, both high school graduation
and college completion have dramatically
increased: 80 percent of adults in
poverty have a high school diploma,
including equivalency diplomas, and
28.5 percent of Americans 25 and
older had earned a bachelor's degree
by 2013. Yet the gap in postsecondary
enrollment between high school graduates
from high-income families and
those from low-income families has
barely budged: 29.7 percentage points
in 1975 versus 29.9 percentage points
in 2010, according to census figures.
Ellyn R. Artis, the higher education
and program director at the Education
Delivery Institute, a nonprofit focused
on the K-12-to-college link, said
racial gaps in college attainment loom
large: 39 percent of white students
earn a four-year degree, compared to
20 percent of black and 13 percent of
Hispanic students. Nearly four out of
five students in the highest income
quartile earn a four-year college degree,
compared to only 11 percent of
bottom-quartile students.
Building a 'Bridge'
Upward Bound and Talent Search
were each created to provide academic,
cultural, and social experiences
for low-income students who
would be the first generation in their
families to attend college. In both programs,
students must go through a
rigorous application process to join,
and participants receive a wide array
of services depending on the site, from
tutoring and access to challenging or
dual-credit classes, to college visits
and trips to museums, plays, and
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 5, 2014 | www.edweek.org
other cultural activities.
"For those first-generation students,
there are big hurdles of, 'What is college,
even?' " said Jill M. Constantine,
a vice president at Mathematica Policy
Research and the co-principal investigator
of the federal What Works
Clearinghouse, who helped develop a
federal guide on college access. "Just
feel-good, buddy mentoring is not great
for that. You need much more targeted
mentoring about how to apply, a site
visit. ... There's a lot of good evidence
now that support in completing those
steps is important."
In a federal evaluation, the Talent
Search program proved effective in
walking more students through the
process and paperwork of applying
for admission, financial aid, and other
paperwork that can derail first-generation
college-goers, said Ms. Constantine.
"It's not just about postsecondary
institutions finding students
out there and saying, 'We'll give you
some support and send you off to college
and assume it's all going to work
out OK,' " Ms. Constantine said. "You
need a bridge."
Ronnie Dale Gross, the executive
director of trio programs at East Tennessee
State University, in Johnson
City, wants to make that bridge for the
students in Hampton High and other
area high schools the programs serve.
His own parents left school after 9th
grade, he recalled, and "Their goal for
me was to finish high school."
When recruiting students in the
1980s and 1990s, "we had to talk
to parents and students a lot about
the benefits of college," Mr. Gross
said. "The generation after that, we
didn't have to sell them on college as
much. Now, parents get really out of
sorts because they know college is
important, but they don't know how
to support [students] or what to do."
But the college-access programs
in the War on Poverty were never
intended to serve a large majority of
students. For example, today Upward
Bound serves only about 6 percent of
eligible students, and those students
include only first-generation, lowincome
students who take it upon
themselves to apply.
Serving a Broader Group
"They were intended to solve a real
injustice of students who were academically
ready to go to college, but
just were low income and needed
information," Ms. Constantine said.
"When this started there was not an
expectation that everybody would go
to college, so why would they focus on
struggling students?"
In a way, Upward Bound and Talent
Search were made for a school
like Dobyns-Bennett High School,
less than an hour north of Hampton
High, in Kingsport. The 2,100-student
school is a regular on the Newsweek
"Top High Schools" list. It offers 22 Advanced
Placement classes, and most
students graduate with nine hours of
college credit. Seventy percent go on to
higher education.
But even at Dobyns-Bennett, the
high school graduation rate for lowincome
students, at 81 percent, is
more than 10 percentage points lower
than that of their wealthier peers, and
the rate of overall college completion
ranges from 40 to 60 percent from
class to class.
"I believe the academic foundation is
critical, and the earlier and better the
quality, the better that student will be
in college," said Dobyns-Bennett Principal
Chris Hampton. But he added:
"There's a level of mentoring and
advising that doesn't go on in public
high schools-that doesn't go on in
this public high school. There's a social
equity that we struggle to provide. We
do have some colleges who do a 'fafsa
night,' but if the student doesn't know
they need to do that, it doesn't matter
how many times we announce it on
the loudspeaker."
Hunter Malone, a senior at Tennessee
High School in Bristol, north of
Johnson City, said his school also has
"college nights" and advertises the
state's new initiative to provide two
years of free community college tuition.
But, he said, it's easy for seniors
to get wrapped up in sports and other
activities that have deadlines and demands
now, and not think about planning
for after graduation.
"You have to push yourself and
make it known to the guidance counselors
that you want to go farther in
life," said Jacquelyn Coleman, also a
Tennessee High senior.
Both students are in Upward Bound,
and Mr. Hampton, an Upward Bound
alumnus himself, said the program
was "probably the single most influential
experience of my life, because it
allowed me to reinvent myself with a
new peer group ... where everyone was
coming in on a level playing field."
Yet critics argue Upward Bound -
at more than $4,000 per student,
on average-has not been shown
to be more cost-effective than lessintensive
college-access programs. In
part, this could be because Upward
Bound uses an intensive application
process, meaning that the program is
likely helping the students who were
already very motivated to attend college.
A long-term federal evaluation of
the program by Mathematica found
limited benefits, though a former federal
program manager has critiqued
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Education Week - November 5, 2014

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