June 2017

California GEAR UP Schools,

On behalf of the California State GEAR UP program, I wish to express our sincere gratitude for the opportunity to collaborate with your schools. Since 2011, we have been inspired by you and your dedication to making a difference for All students. Your success has been shared broadly throughout California and with the national GEAR UP community.

As we near the end of this grant cycle, we are proud of the experiences and lessons learned on this journey with you. Because of your dedication, we have had broad systemic effect beyond the 48 schools that participated in the program. Our story is unique and it is important that we share the lessons that we have learned collaboratively with schools, partners, and other college access and community-based programs. Each of you has received a copy of The California State GEAR UP Program: An Innovative Model for Educational Equity and Postsecondary Preparedness. The report documents the evolution of the GEAR UP Whole School Services model for establishing a college-going culture at selected middle schools throughout the State. It is also available online HERE.

We know that school-centered reflection is the heart of our Whole School Services model. GEAR UP School Service Coaches have established critical relationships with your school leadership teams and become integral to the school community. The attached document Impact and Insights highlights the actions that we have taken together and, in particular, the role of GEAR UP Coaches in your schools. These “lessons learned” underscore California GEAR UP’s impact as well as may inform future programming.

Looking forward, there is good news for GEAR UP: the United States Department of Education has formally announced a competition for 2017. Along with many other states, we have submitted an application for a new grant that would continue our efforts from 2017-2024 with announcements anticipated by Fall 2017. The State grant will remain focused on ALL students and the development and sustainability of a college-going-culture. If the grant is funded, the current cohort of 48 schools will be contacted and invited to apply for participation. For information on the application and activities of California GEAR UP, visit our website: www.castategearup.org or contact our office at (510) 587-5139. Additionally, many of your students have received Education Trust Awards. Please direct any questions you may have to Crystal Robinson Crystal.robinson@ucop.edu.

We are indebted to you, your school site contacts, school leadership teams, and staffs for your contributions that reflect the breadth of collaboration with schools, families and students. We know that you will continue to Make A Difference for ALL Students and we are proud to have collaborated with you to achieve this important goal.

With sincere gratitude,

Shelley Davis, Director-California State GEAR UP Program

University of California Office of the President

 

(from the Dept. of Education blog)

Congratulations! You’ve been accepted to multiple schools. Now you need to determine which schools are most affordable so you can factor school cost into your decision. If you listed a school on your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) form and have been offered admission by that school, the school’s financial aid office will send you a financial aid offer. The amounts and types of aid you’re offered will likely vary from school to school, so it’s important to compare your financial aid offers. Here are a few tips and resources to make understanding and comparing your financial aid offers easier.

1. Know the different types of aid

The financial aid offer includes the types and amounts of aid you may receive from federal, state, private, and school sources. Types of aid include free money that does not have to be paid back (grants and scholarships), money you borrow and must pay back with interest (loans), and money you can earn working a part-time job to help pay for education expenses (work-study). You may see any combination of these types of aid in your financial aid offer. Learn more about the different types of aid. If you’re curious, you can also learn how schools calculate the amounts of aid they offer you.

2. Understand each school’s net cost

Net cost is an estimate of the actual cost that you and your family need to pay in a given year to cover education expenses for you to attend a particular school. It is calculated by taking the school’s cost of attendance and subtracting any grants and scholarships you’ve been awarded. The net cost is the amount you will have to pay out of pocket. The net cost is the dollar amount you’ll want to compare across different schools to determine which school is most affordable.

Thousands of schools use the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet to present financial aid offers. But, some schools use a different format to present financial aid offers, making it difficult to compare net costs across schools. To help with this, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) developed an interactive comparison tool to help you compare your financial aid offers.

3. Make sure you can cover the net cost

Because the net cost is the amount of money you’ll have to pay out of pocket, it is important to make sure that you have resources to cover the net cost. Scholarships, earnings from work-study or a part-time job, personal savings, gifts, and loans are resources you can use to help cover the net cost.

While loans can help cover your net cost, you should borrow only what you need. You don’t have to accept all of the loans you’re offered—and you don’t have to accept the full amount of any particular loan.

You may also be interested in 7 options to consider if you didn’t receive enough financial aid.

Things to remember when understanding and comparing your financial aid offers:

• There are different types of aid—grants, scholarships, loans, and work-study.
• The amounts and types of aid you’re offered may vary from school to school.
• Calculate your net cost by subtracting the grants and scholarships you’ve been awarded from the school’s cost of attendance.

 

Marla Dominguez, Principal Caruthers Elementary, has been the principal for five years. She shares her GEAR UP story and passion for her profession with us.

Please tell us about the community. 

Caruthers Unified is located in the central San Joaquin Valley, approximately 15 miles south of Fresno. The District covers a large rural area (120 square miles) of approximately 2,500 residents, including the two small unincorporated communities of Caruthers and Raisin City. An additional 4,800 people live in the area surrounding Caruthers. Of our 1,442 students, 1266 or 89 % of them are LI and qualify for free and reduced lunch and 434 or 30 % are designated as EL students. Students in Caruthers benefit from the support they receive in a small community and are given the opportunity to participate in a variety of extracurricular programs involving athletics, community service and the arts.

The Caruthers community has taken huge steps in the support of our district. In the past 5 years the community has passed two school bond measures. Measure C for Caruthers High School and more recently Measure V for Caruthers Elementary. Both bond measures are the first in the history of the school district. CUSD students are also prepared to move on for future study. Over the past five years over 42% of Caruthers High School graduates have been eligible to attend a four year college or university.

Our school is a TK-8 and we do not have a lot of turnover, we currently have 875 students, so for a rural school we are rather large. Our community is a tight knit community that supports each other and we know our students and their families for many years.

Our students are respectful and they work hard…they are appreciative and grateful for what we do here at school, so are their families.

Our students and families sometimes move in and out, so it is not unusual to have a family move in, leave, and then come back.

Our schools create the community…we are unincorporated and there are no parks, police force, the school is the largest entity and we work together. The community supports the school and students and the school supports the community.

What’s your ‘GEAR UP story’?

GEAR UP was FANTASTIC! The grant was so well planned with events that really provided thought provoking and challenging perspectives. Our coaches were instrumental in helping to guide and offer resources to keep our school going in a forward path. GEAR UP took all these different schools and gave us a common ground and a network that was much larger than I have ever had access too. The best is that this made my school a better place for my students and their future.

What changes have you observed at Caruthers since becoming a GEAR UP school?

Our students are talking about life beyond high school. They talk about college and which college that they aspire to go to. They ask questions and are aware that they need to learn things now for their future.

Our families have also supported this movement…they are learning too.

We had a parent on our committee the entire grant cycle and this was extremely helpful. It was great to always have the parent perspective and perception there. It also was a key element in making this a part of the community, not just the school.

Share with us was key factors contributed to demonstrable change.

PIQE was one of the best key factors that came out of GEAR UP. We have had a large group of parents that have been empowered by knowledge and understanding of how schools work, expectations of their students and teachers. I have always said that when parents are asking questions you know what you are doing is making changes. I love that a large portion of our only Spanish speaking families feel a part of the school and have a voice.

The college walls, college weeks, all of these activities that are visual will continue year after year, but the sustainable items that go beyond GEAR UP that will continue to make change will be a College and Career Course that all 7^th grade middle school students take, articulating with the Caruthers High School counselor on activities, students and transitions. These things are going to be embedded and will continue.

We now have a middle school counselor because of GEAR UP.

Our 7^th and 8^th grade students go on college field trips…when they go to high school they will have been on a Junior, State, UC and Private College…this is probably their first time but I hope it is not their last, we are planting the seed early.

Why did you become an educator? 

My story did not start out with dreams of becoming a teacher. I went to college to become a Physical Therapist and worked at a Physical Therapy Office for ten years. While waiting to get into the PT program I decided I would get a teaching credential because one of my friends kept telling me what a great teacher I would be. When I thought about what I did in the field of Physical Therapy, teaching all ages how to rehabilitate themselves from injuries or prevention, I thought…why not! I had a great deal of science background and loved sharing knowledge and it wasn’t until my final student teaching that I TRULY FELL IN LOVE with TEACHING. I have never looked back.

If you had advice to other principals as to how to change a school to support a college going culture, what would it be?

As administrators, we have to make it a priority because our time can be taken up by many issues, but you have to build a group of teachers, counselors and parents who believe in the same mission and make it a priority. I found that setting meeting dates at the beginning of the year and having our action plan with goals already gave us a clear direction and path. This work cannot be done by one person alone, but it must include the support of the administration.

Why is it important to start in middle school in preparing for college?

High school is TOO late. We have to start educating students earlier so they can plan, start thinking, have time to explore, and ask questions and set goals for themselves.

If you could be a principal of a GEAR UP school again, would you? What would you do the same or differently? 

ABSOLUTELY! I would set up and imbed ‘college-going’ activities and events early and then focus on instruction-which is what is going to make students successful in college. I would also explore workshops and trainings for my team on poverty and education, equality, and more of the issues that we didn’t have time to get into which our students are faced with daily and can affect their future.

I would want to set up a foundation so we can continue scholarships, educational trust awards, and invest in our students even earlier than middle school. These are things that I would still like to do even though I do not have GEAR UP, but I struggle like all others to balance and juggle all of the priorities and mandates that are on our plates in the education field. One day I know it will happen!

What else would you like to share about your GEAR UP journey? 

Thank you to all the people involved in GEAR UP, the journey was wonderful, but I know that this ride is not over. I challenge all of us to keep the work of GEAR UP a priority and continue to pave the path for our students to get to college and be successful. Thank you!

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There is a national crisis in American higher education, and it threatens to exacerbate the most pressing challenges facing our nation. Consider this sobering fact: For every 10 African-American students who enter college, only four will graduate. Just four in 10. That is a shameful record, and we cannot hope to address the underlying causes of social and economic inequality in our country if this trend continues.

College enrollment in the U.S. continues to stand at record highs.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. colleges and universities enrolled 20.5 million students last fall, an increase of 5.2 million students compared to 2000. This upward trend is likewise true across ethnic categories. Between 2000 and 2014 (the latest year for which we have national data on ethnicity), undergraduate enrollment among African-American students increased a phenomenal 57 percent, and enrollment among Latino students more than doubled.

But, as a college degree has become a prerequisite for getting into the middle class and beyond, enrollment is not enough. In the marketplace, job applicants with some or no college will lose out to a college graduate almost every time. Additionally, students who do not complete their degrees often face thousands of dollars in debt without the means to repay it.

USA Today reported last year that students who drop out of college are four times more likely to default on their student loans compared to those who graduated. If six in 10 African-American students aren’t completing their degrees, it doesn’t take much to see the ramifications for individuals, communities and the entire nation.

Fortunately, there is hope. A report issued earlier this year by the Education Trust, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for academic success, demonstrated that the derisible national data aren’t uniform across the nation’s colleges and universities. Some institutions have demonstrated considerable success in eliminating the achievement gaps across ethnic and socioeconomic designations. While the success stories are heartening, the report shows just how far we still must go. Out of 676 universities considered, only 55 had been able to completely eliminate the graduation rate achievement gap between African-American and White students.

As chancellor of one of the institutions highlighted by the Education Trust as a success story, I wanted to share a few strategies that have helped us eliminate graduation rate gaps across ethnic and socioeconomic categories.

First, we need data. Every two years, the University of California (UC) conducts the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), a comprehensive appraisal of our students’ experiences at UC. Thanks to the UCUES, we know that our African-American students spent more time working in paid employment outside of their academic interests, spent less time with their families and had more difficulties with food insecurity and finances. These insights are invaluable in building programs and initiatives that result in student success.

Second, universities must understand that cultural identity is a critical component of success. Affinity groups on college campuses provide homes away from home for students. Our African Student Programs office has been in operation for 45 years, connecting students to academic support, mentors and community organizations. Their success has been replicated across the breadth of communities on our campus.

Third, someone needs to be in charge of coordinating the promotion of student success for a diverse student body across campus units. UC Riverside was one of the first institutions to create an administrative position tasked with partnering with all campus leaders and constituents to promote diversity and inclusion.

Realizing student success requires a comprehensive and cooperative approach that deploys resources intentionally across the entire university. Creating that collaboration needs to be someone’s job.

Finally, universities must recognize that our campuses can be inhospitable, and sometimes hostile, to students on the margins of society. Even diverse institutions have to recognize that it is not how many students of color are on campus, it is how they are treated.

The research is clear. When universities do not actively promote a campus climate of inclusion and mutual respect, student success suffers. A few politicians and pundits can poke fun at “safe spaces” and “diversity coordinators,” but their superficial arguments belie their ignorance. Campuses that fail to adequately address concerns over campus climate will be left wondering why some students leave and never come back.

Our nation’s colleges and universities need to do better for the sake of all of our students. Addressing this crisis will require spending precious resources, but fortunately the examples of how to succeed are widespread. Now it is simply a matter of finding the will to make it happen.

Dr. Kim Wilcox is the chancellor of UC Riverside.

High school graduation rates in California climbed for the seventh year in a row, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, announced Tuesday. The class of 2016 had a record-high graduation rate of 83.2 percent, with significant gains for student populations that have historically lagged behind.

“Graduation rates have gone up seven years in a row,” Torlakson said in a written statement, “reflecting renewed optimism and increased investments in our schools that have helped reduce class sizes; bring back classes in music, theater, art, dance, and science; and expand career technical education programs that engage our students with hands-on, minds-on learning.”

The uptick this year is incremental  – only a .9 percentage point increase from the previous school year – but there been a major shift since 2010. In the seven years of consecutive increases, the graduation rate has increased by 8.5 points.

“It has been quite an impressive increase,” said Estela Zarate, professor in the department of educational leadership at California State University Fullerton. “Particularly if we look at English learners, Hispanic Latinos, and African American students.”

The achievement gap between Asian and white students on the one hand and African American and Latino students on the other has narrowed. The graduation rate for Latino students reached a record high of 80 percent, up 1.5 points from the year before and an 11.9 percentage point increase since 2010. For black students, the rate is 72.6 percent, up 1.8 percentage points from last year and 12.1 percentage points since 2010.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, rates went up 4.8 percentage points to 76.99, from a 72.23 percent rate in the 2014-15 school year. Graduation rates increased by 6.3 percentage points for English language learners and by 6.2 percentage points for African American students.

“If there’s a secret, the secret is out and it’s personalization,” said Frances Gipson, chief academic officer for LAUSD.

Gipson credits the introduction of individualized graduation plans for students starting at the middle school and graduation dashboard to keep students on track.

But observers and experts cautioned that increases in graduation rates mean little if students aren’t graduating ready for future opportunities.

“Yes, we should absolutely celebrate progress, but we have to go further to ensure that all of our students are receiving the opportunity to graduate college with options for a rewarding career,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based non-profit.

“A high school diploma should mean that you are being given every opportunity to find a career of your choice and an opportunity to go to the college of your choice,” he said.

Many disparities still persist. Only 50.8 percent of foster youth, for example, graduate on time.

And some researchers are skeptical of the numbers. Morgan Polikoff, associate professor in the education school at the University of Southern California, would like to be able to examine what proportion of the graduates have actually passed the college prep courses, known as A-G classes, and how many relied on less rigorous credit recovery programs.

“That would give you a better handle on the likelihood that these changes and these gap closings are real or fictitious,” Polikoff said.

“We don’t want a bunch of students graduating high school who are not qualified and really shouldn’t be graduating high school,” said Polikoff, “because that would probably water down the value of that degree.”

And as a college diploma becomes even more necessary for most career paths, Zarate notes that the high school diploma no longer holds the same significance.

“I question what its impact will be in terms of achieving economic or social equity given that the goal post has shifted.”

(reposted from the Brookings Institution) 

Researchers and policymakers devote considerable effort to understanding gaps in academic achievement between low-income students and their better-off classmates.^[1] And rightly so: the income-based achievement gap is a large and growing source of educational inequality in the United States. The test-score gap between high- and low-income students is 40 percent wider today than it was 25 years ago.^[2]

One widely-used marker for poverty in schools is a student’s eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch. But while nearly half of students nationwide are eligible for subsidized meals, only a quarter of US children live in poverty. These two statistics make clear that eligibility for subsidized meals is a blunt measure of economic disadvantage. This rough measure may be perfectly appropriate for determining which children should receive school lunch subsidies, but it may be less useful for other purposes, such as measuring income gaps in achievement, determining the effectiveness of educational interventions targeted to low-income families, or steering resources toward the neediest children. Yet it is, for now, the only measure available to the many researchers and practitioners who work with administrative data to evaluate the effects of educational programs, measure gaps in student achievement, and steer resources toward the neediest children.

We use administrative data from Michigan to develop a more detailed measure of economic disadvantage. Our data contain information on the entire population of students in the Michigan public schools. We leverage the longitudinal nature of these data to document systematic variation in outcomes within the population of children who are eligible for subsidized meals. We do this by counting the number of years in which a given student qualified for subsidized meals, over multiple years of school enrollment.

In Michigan, roughly half of 8^th graders are currently eligible for a subsidized meal; in math tests, they score about 0.69 standard deviations below those who are not eligible. By contrast, just 14 percent of 8^th graders have been eligible for subsidized meals in every year since kindergarten. These persistently disadvantaged children score 0.94 standard deviations below those who were never eligible (and 0.23 standard deviations below those who were occasionally eligible). This gap is 40 percent larger than that measured using the conventional approach, which considers only current disadvantage.

Demographics differ starkly by these measures of economic disadvantage. In Michigan, 90 percent of those who were never disadvantaged are white, compared to 60 percent of those who were ever disadvantaged and 46 percent of the persistently disadvantaged. Students who had ever been disadvantaged by 8^th grade were six times more likely to be black and four times more likely to be Hispanic, compared to those who were never disadvantaged. Students who were persistently disadvantaged by 8^th grade were eight times more likely to be black and six times more likely to be Hispanic, compared to those who were never disadvantaged. The persistently disadvantaged are more concentrated in urban areas, while the transitorily disadvantaged are more concentrated in suburban areas.

The demographics available in state administrative data systems are limited. We turn to nationally-representative, survey data to shed further light on demographic differences between children who are persistently disadvantaged, transitorily disadvantaged and never disadvantaged. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) includes information on household income and subsidized-meal eligibility.

In the ECLS-K, about half of 8th graders in 2006-2007 were ever eligible for subsidized meals (similar to Michigan) and about 10 percent of 8th graders were eligible in each survey wave of the ECLS-K (again, similar to Michigan).^[3] As in Michigan, persistently disadvantaged students in the ECLS-K are much more likely to be a racial or ethnic minority (73 percent compared to 46 percent among transitorily disadvantaged and 11 percent among the never disadvantaged). They were also much less likely to live with both parents at the start of the survey (51 percent compared to 65 percent among the transitorily disadvantaged and 91 percent among the never disadvantaged) and much less likely to have a parent with any college experience (29 percent compared to 56 percent among the transitorily disadvantaged and 85 percent among the never disadvantaged).

An indicator for eligibility for subsidized meals is often included as a control in a regression that includes other student information, such as race, ethnicity, sex, and school characteristics. For quantitative researchers, a key question is therefore whether these other observables “explain” the larger achievement deficit among persistently disadvantaged students. If other observable characteristics can explain the differences, then an analyst need only include these variables in the regression in order to eliminate biases that may otherwise be induced by unobserved heterogeneity within the population of currently disadvantaged students.

We find that other observable differences between the persistently disadvantaged and other students do not explain their larger test score deficit. When we control for race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as their interactions, the gap between the never disadvantaged and the persistently disadvantaged (0.76) is still nearly 40 percent larger than the gap based on standard measures of contemporaneous eligibility (0.55). Comparing children only within the same school (by controlling for school fixed effects) reduces gaps further, but the within-school gap between the never disadvantaged and the persistently disadvantaged remains 40 percent larger than the gap based on the standard measure of contemporaneous eligibility.^[4]

In Figure 1, we plot the relationship between scores and the number of years spent in economic disadvantage and 8^th grade scores. There is a negative, nearly linear relationship (this pattern holds after controlling for student demographics and school fixed effects, as described above). A natural interpretation is that this is an exposure effect, with each additional year of disadvantage further reducing scores. However, this linear relationship is nearly identical in 3^rd grade, before children have been differentially exposed to five more years of economic disadvantage.

Figure 1. Each additional year of disadvantage is associated with a roughly constant increase in the achievement gap

What explains this pattern? The number of years that a child will spend eligible for subsidized meals appears to be a reasonable proxy for her current level of income. When in kindergarten, the children in ECLS-K who will be persistently eligible have an average family income of $18,000. For the transitorily eligible it is $31,000 and for the never eligible $71,000.  That is, family income in a given year is negatively correlated with the number of years that a child will spend eligible for subsidized meals.

Our results imply that the number of years that a child spends eligible for subsidized meals can be used to proxy for household income. While still a crude proxy, this proposed measure captures greater variation in economic resources and educational outcomes than does the dichotomous variable currently used by researchers, which measures a child’s current eligibility for subsidized meals.

Our proposed measure can be used to estimate heterogeneous effects in program evaluations, to improve value-added calculations, and to better target resources. Two classrooms may have identical numbers of currentlyeligible children but different numbers of persistently eligible children. A value-added measure that does not account for these differences will be biased against teachers of the most disadvantaged children. Our measure of persistence can also be used in program evaluation, in order to estimate heterogeneity in causal effects or as a control to reduce omitted variables bias.

Our proposed measure can also be used to better target resources toward the most disadvantaged children. Many federal, state, and local programs distribute money based on the share of a school’s or district’s students eligible for subsidized meals. In Michigan, schools that have identical shares of students who are currently eligible for subsidized meals vary considerably in the share of students who are persistently eligible (Figure 2). By taking these differences into account, practitioners and policymakers can better target resources intended to support the most disadvantaged children and their schools.

Figure 2. School-level share of eighth graders currently disadvantaged versus share persistently disadvantaged

The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. They are currently not officers, directors, or board members of any organization with an interest in this article.

Footnotes available here.

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