1. To increase the number of students who obtain college degrees, it is necessary to focus on expanding opportunity for underrepresented students.
2. To do that, it is necessary to shift the focus in policy and practice from raising standards as a policy emphasis to creating new and diverse academic pathways of high quality educational opportunity.
3. To enable the systemic changes to transform educational systems it is necessary to build organizational capacity for change, including an explicit focus on research-informed interventions in colleges and universities.
Theme 1: Expanding Opportunity for the Underserved
The focus on expanding opportunity for underserved students runs through all three parts of this book. Educational policy that centers on raising standards has resulted in an approach to research and development that focuses on replicating best practices, exporting practices from well-funded educational institutions to institutions that are not as well funded. The assumption has been that replication of best practices will ensure that students in underfunded schools will have the same level of preparation and academic success available to them as their better-funded peers. This assumption is problematic for both high schools and colleges. In part I, we examine the results of state efforts to reform high schools and introduce the alternative of capacity building based on inquiry. In part II, we present the results of our efforts to work with IHEs in the State of Indiana using an inquiry-based approach to educational reform. The research and cases presented illustrate that it is possible to use this approach to expand opportunity, but the result of this work falls far short of system transformation. These analyses demonstrate examples of targeted reform rather than large scale change, which we expect is also possible. Below we briefly introduce our approach to integrating a focus on expanding opportunity for underrepresented students into analyses of K-12 reform and higher education interventions.
Our emphasis on underrepresented students is based on Nussbaumās (1999, 2000) theory of human capabilities. She argues that education to a level sufficient to support a family is a basic human right, especially for women. Given the emphasis on college-preparatory (Conklin & Curran, 2005) and workforce education (Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2007), high school reforms that emphasize advanced Math and literacy for all students can appropriately be considered part of a new human capabilities standard. If all high school students had a chance to graduate with this level and quality of preparation, they would be eligible academically to attend college. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider the opportunity to attend college as a human capabilities standard akin to a basic right for all high school students, including the underserved.
Race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and gender are critical to all policies and practices that focus on expanding opportunity, whether or not the problem is explicitly recognized. In the context of antiaffirmative action rhetoric, the language of reform frequently shift s when issues of race and class are raised. In higher education, the litigation over the Gratz and Grutter cases in the early 2000s (e.g., Moses, & Cobb, 2001) often quieted discourse on the underlying problem of class and race, as did the focus on individual benefits over the public good (Pasque, 2007). In K-12 education, the language of āsuccess for allā and āno child left behindā supplanted terms like the disadvantaged and equal education in the policy discourse. Yet for the sake of the public good, it is crucial to consider how public policies and organizational practices influence opportunity for low-income and ethnic minority students because these excluded groups must be included if the goals of expanding opportunity are to be realized.
Throughout our collaboration on the development of educational and financial indicators (used in part I) and in the use of state databases (parts I and II), we included a focus on underrepresented groups in the assessment and evaluation research. While many of the policies and interventions we study did not always have improving equity as an official intent, we present research and analyses in this book that address the underlying issues of race and class.3 In part I, we address issues of racial inequality in preparation for and access to higher education in the United States as well as in Indiana.
We focus on racial inequality in the national assessment because: (a) inequality in opportunity for African Americans and Hispanics continues to be one of the most challenging issues in American society; and (b) data on race/ethnicity for national and state populations was more consistently available for 1992 to 2006, the period studied in part I, than was data on income. Since there are changes in the distribution of income over time along with inflation or deflation, income comparisons continue to be problematic in trend studies of college preparation and access. Take Pell grants for example. We cannot use Pell eligibility as a source of comparison in trends for college students because: (a) the Pell maximum changes from year to year so that some students may be eligible one year and not the next; and (b) this variability in aid eligibility can mislead efforts to discuss trends in access for low-income students. Consequently, trends in racial/ethnic representation continue to be the best indicators of inequality and underrepresentation in trend studies, which are part of our foci in part I.
In the studies of interventions in part II, we discuss how we used the assessment research to raise issues related to race and class for policymakers and practitioners. We could consider income differences along with race in these studies because we were using a cohort database for which information on income and aid was collected.4 In fact, the first study in part II (chapter 5) focuses on low-income students in the 2000 Cohort, which provides an interesting contrast to the study of academic preparation by all SAT takers in the cohort in part I (chapter 3) comparing the Indiana cohort to a national sample. In many cases, the interventions undertaken did not have an explicit focus on race and income even though they addressed issues that could reduce inequality.
There is an underlying problem with how public higher education has been financed in recent decades. If we treat education to a college preparatory level as a basic right, then we must not only be concerned with expanding opportunity but also with equity in the distribution of opportunity for post-secondary education whether or not opportunity is expanded. In other words, low-income students should not be the last served, nor should they be the first left out of the educational system when methods of public finance change or when private markets are introduced. While affirmative action provided a means for elite universities to remedy inequality by race during the late 20th century, the extent of equality and inequality across income groups remains largely dependent on public finance strategies. Changes in access to higher education, especially four-year colleges, are closely linked to strategies used in the public financing of education.
We view public finance as an underlying issue in inequality related to our interpretation of John Rawlsās theory of justice. In his discussion of distribution of right, Rawls (1971, 1999, 2001) was careful to distinguish the roles of merit and equity as being important and necessary. If there is not prior inequality, then individuals should have a right to com...
