Thurston Domina

New Evidence on College Remediation

Using college transcripts, we separate the effects of remedial coursework from high school preparation. For two-year colleges, taking remedial classes was not associated with less academic success. In four-year colleges, there are negative effects of remedial coursework, but many minority students who complete a bachelors degree do so after taking remediation.

The Changing Bases of Segregation in the United States

The nature and organization of segregation shifted profoundly in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. During the first two-thirds of the century, segregation was defined by the spatial separation of whites and blacks. What changed over time was the level at which this racial separation occurred, as macro-level segregation between states and counties gave way steadily to micro-level segregation between cities and neighborhoods. During the last third of the twentieth century, the United States moved toward a new regime of residential segregation characterized by moderating racial-ethnic segregation and rising class segregation, yielding a world in which the spatial organization of cities and the location of groups and people within them will increasingly be determined by an interaction of race and class and in which segregation will stem less from overt prejudice and discrimination than from political decisions about land use, such as density zoning.

Raising the Bar: Curricular Intensity and Academic Performance

Using national transcript data, the authors examine inequality in access to an advanced curriculum in high school and assess the consequences of curricular intensity on test scores and college entry. Inequalities in curricular intensity are primarily explained by student socioeconomic status effects that operate within schools rather than between schools. They find significant positive effects of taking a more intense curriculum on 12th-grade test scores and in probabilities of entry to and completion of college. However, the effect sizes of curricular intensity are generally modest, smaller than advocates of curricular upgrading policies have implied.

The Link between Educational Expectations and Effort in the College-for-all Era

From the Wisconsin status attainment model to rational choice, classical sociological, social-psychological, and economic theories of student educational transitions have assumed that students’ expectations are positively related to their ultimate attainment. However, the growth of the college-for-all ethos raises questions about that assumption. Noting that American students’ educational expectations rapidly outpaced their educational attainments, Rosenbaum (2001) argues that increasingly unrealistic expectations have perverse negative effects on the school engagement of American high school students. In this article, the authors test the relationship between student expectations and effort using data from a unique longitudinal study of student motivation and three national cohort studies. Contrary to the college-for-all critique, the authors find that educational expectations continue to have robust positive effects on student perceptions regarding the future utility of high school academics and student effort in high school. The relationship between expectations and effort is somewhat attenuated for very low-achieving students and it is weaker today than it was in 1980. Nonetheless, the authors’ analyses indicate that the expansion of college expectations has had a net positive effect on American high school students’ effort.

What Works in College Outreach: Assessing Targeted and Schoolwide Interventions for Disadvantaged Students

By offering information, counseling, and tutoring, college outreach programs attempt to smooth the path between high school and higher education for at-risk students. But do these program work? This paper uses longitudinal data from the Education Longitudinal Study to construct two quasi-experiments to assess the effectiveness of college outreach. The first compares outreach program participants with a propensity score matched sample of program non-participants to measure the effects of targeted college outreach programs. The second assesses the effects of school-wide college outreach programs by comparing students in school-wide outreach high schools with students in a matched sample of high schools that offer no formal outreach. The results suggest that targeted outreach programs do little to change the educational experiences of participating students. However, there is limited evidence to suggest that school-wide outreach programs may have modest “spill-over” effects, improving the educational outcomes of relatively unengaged students at participating schools.

Paving the Way: K-16 Partnerships for Higher Education Diversity and High School Reform.

Partnerships between colleges and universities and K-12 school districts attempt to improve access to higher education by tailoring college outreach and teacher professional development programs to local needs as well as aligning high school curricula with higher education admissions criteria. In this article, we conduct a quasi-experimental evaluation of partnerships between universities and school districts in California. Our fixed-effects models indicate that comprehensive K-16 partnerships substantially increase student graduation and nonselective university enrollment rates in participating school districts, but that these effects take time. We argue that local partnerships are an effective, but resource- and time-intensive, K-16 school reform strategy.

Higher Education Policy as Secondary School Reform: Texas Public High Schools After Hopwood

The higher education diversity programs that Texas enacted after Hopwood v. University of Texas banned affirmative action had unexpected positive consequences for the state’s high schools. The Texas top 10% law, the Longhorn Opportunity Scholarship and Century Scholarship programs, and the Towards Excellence, Access and Success Grant program each explicitly linked postsecondary opportunities to high school performance and clearly articulated that link to students across the state. As a result, these programs worked as K–16 school reforms, using college opportunities as incentives to improve educational outcomes at the high school level. Using panel data describing Texas high schools between 1993 and 2002, the author demonstrates that Texas’s post-Hopwood higher education policies redistributed college-related activity at public high schools and boosted high school students’ academic engagement.

Does Raising the Bar Level the Playing Field?: Mathematics Curricular Intensification and Inequality in American High Schools, 1982–2004

Over the past three decades, American high school students’ course taking has rapidly intensified. Between 1982 and 2004, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who earned credit in precalculus or calculus more than tripled. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of mathematics curricular intensification for social stratification in American high schools. Using representative data from U.S. high school graduates in 1982, 1992, and 2004, the authors estimate changes in race-, class-, and skills-based inequality in advanced math course credit completion. Their analyses indicate that race, class, and skills gaps in geometry, Algebra II, and trigonometry completion have narrowed considerably over the study period. However, consistent with the theory of maximally maintained inequality, inequalities in calculus completion remain pronounced.Over the past three decades, American high school students’ course taking has rapidly intensified. Between 1982 and 2004, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who earned credit in precalculus or calculus more than tripled. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of mathematics curricular intensification for social stratification in American high schools. Using representative data from U.S. high school graduates in 1982, 1992, and 2004, the authors estimate changes in race-, class-, and skills-based inequality in advanced math course credit completion. Their analyses indicate that race, class, and skills gaps in geometry, Algebra II, and trigonometry completion have narrowed considerably over the study period. However, consistent with the theory of maximally maintained inequality, inequalities in calculus completion remain pronounced.

Brain Drain and Brain Gain: Rising Educational Segregation in the United States, 1940–2000

The post‐industrialization of the American economy, combined with the expansion of American higher education, has created a new form of residential segregation. This paper examines recent trends in residential segregation between college graduates and high school graduates, demonstrating that Americas educational geography became increasingly uneven between 1940 and 2000. During this period, educational inequality between American census divisions, metropolitan areas, counties, and census tracts increased dramatically. This trend is independent of recent developments in racial and economic segregation. Segregation between the highly educated and the less educated increased dramatically in the late 20th century, even as racial segregation declined, and economic segregation changed very little.

Aiming High and Falling Short: California's Eighth-Grade Algebra-for-All Effort

The United States is in the midst of an effort to intensify middle school mathematics curricula by enrolling more 8th graders in Algebra. California is at the forefront of this effort, and in 2008, the state moved to make Algebra the accountability benchmark test for 8th-grade mathematics. This article takes advantage of this unevenly implemented policy to understand the effects of curricular intensification in middle school mathematics. Using district-level panel data from all California K–12 public school districts, we estimate the effects of increasing 8th-grade Algebra enrollment rates on a 10th-grade mathematics achievement measure. We find that enrolling more students in advanced courses has negative average effects on students’ achievement, driven by negative effects in large districts.