Empowering Dallas Students to Navigate Through High School to College: Education Opens Doors

“I always heard I should go to college, but don’t know people who have gone. Now I know what college is, and the actual steps to get there.” This inner-city eighth grader’s words echo a common sentiment among students participating in the Roadmap to Success program, our first pilot program,at Education Opens Doors (EOD).

EOD is a grassroots nonprofit formed in response to a glaring opportunity gap for students resulting from a lack of college knowledge and soft skills. As a Teach for America middle school teacher in Dallas-Fort Worth, Jayda Batchelder saw firsthand how content mastery alone was not adequately preparing her students for high school success. In 2010, she spearheaded the creation of Roadmap to Success, a new classroom manual featuring interactive and self-guided learning opportunities, created in collaboration with her colleagues and designed to empower students to purposefully navigate through high school to college. Since then, we have continued to develop Roadmap to Success into the cornerstone of EOD’s programming, which consists of an accompanying curriculum, implementation support, and data collection tools. Our Dallas-area spring pilot, launched in spring 2013, provided weekly lessons for 1,500 students in grades 6 through 9 and their thirty-three teachers across nine sites.

Among low-income students nationally, 95 percent aspire to attend college, 70 percent graduate high school, 41 percent enroll in college, and a mere 8 percent complete their bachelor’s degree. Two driving factors contributing to the low percentage of college completion are inadequate academic infrastructure and reduced college expectations (Intentional Futures 2012). We know that:

If educators are to use college and career readiness as a strategy for accomplishing the goal of postsecondary education access and success, they must couple academic preparedness with the knowledge and skills students need to navigate the college-going process (Roderick, Nagaoka & Coca 2009)

Though Dallas County has an 81 percent graduation rate, only 13 percent of graduates are deemed “college-ready.”¹ In addition to the Roadmap to Success manual, EOD aims to close this gap by targeting the underlying mechanisms of student identity development. We raise students’ college expectations, confidence, and skills to navigate the college-going process.

Roadmap to Success provides a way for students to plan and track their college-going efforts, starting in middle school. The manual helps students understand the impact of their GPA, choice of classes, and SAT scores on their college applications and career success. It offers templates and explanations of college and career topics such as interviews, resumes and cover letters, evaluating college, choosing a major, the value of service and extracurricular activities, and paying for college.

We recognize that the battle to empower students with college knowledge cannot most effectively be fought alone. As a start-up nonprofit, our collaboration with local education leaders, universities, nonprofit networks, and stakeholders in the community are crucial to assuring that we are thoughtful, impactful, and successful in closing the opportunity gap.

An instrumental factor in gaining community support has been our continued commitment to measuring and improving outcomes. Just as Roadmap to Success helps our students track their progress, EOD also collects and analyzes data to provide a roadmap for our own success. This ongoing evaluation aims to ensure and document the difference we are making for our students, their schools, their families, and our community. We do so through comprehensive content knowledge assessments, research-aligned surveys, and on-site observations. The results are helping us continuously make real-time improvements to our practice and develop additional curriculum for our future programming.

To quantify the need for our program, we compared initial college knowledge by grade level and found no statistically significant difference. Those findings suggest that, regardless of age or grade, as students progress in their academic careers, they are not receiving this crucial information during the school day or at home around the dinner table. Yet, when we tested Roadmap to Success students at the end of the pilot semester, we saw 12 percent growth on average in college knowledge across the board. Even more exciting were the results among our sixth-graders, who averaged 36 percent growth, indicating they were not too young to begin college preparation.

While we did not find significant differences in growth by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, implementation setting, grade level, or other hypothesized factors, we did find that classroom presence and program mindset of teachers were big differentiating factors for outcome scores. This creates many new questions about how we can improve moving forward: How can we better support teachers? How can we create lessons that are equitably delivered? How can we change teachers’ underlying mindset around their students’ ability to graduate from high school and attend college? How do we scale our program while ensuring fidelity of model to empower more students?

These results are guiding our next steps and show that we have only scratched the surface. We are maintaining a hands-on, supportive role on-site, improving teacher professional development, providing more thorough curriculum, and developing an online teacher platform to improve communication and resource delivery. We will continue our emphasis on data by tracking our students longitudinally to measure program effectiveness – how many take the SAT/ACT, graduate high school, enroll in and graduate from college, etc. Our future plans include a video portal and mobile app aligned to Roadmap to Success for both students and their parents to use for ongoing college and career preparation.

Our students deserve and desperately need data-driven organizations backed by quantitative and qualitative results. The enthusiasm and eagerness to acquire college knowledge that students have shown in our pilot program challenges schools, nonprofits, and other community partners to make sure their young people have a pathway to acquire this necessary knowledge. In the words of one Roadmap to Success teacher, “Education does indeed open doors, and our kids are ready to sprint – not walk – through them.”

For more information see: Education Opens Doors