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Spotlight
Thurston Domina
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.
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