Baltimore City and Los Angeles Unified: Large City Partnerships

• In Event: Research and the Nature of the Collaborative Partnership: Insight on What Was Learned

Abstract

Understanding College Readiness among Baltimore City Students

The concept of college readiness is complex because of its many components, and its meaning is further complicated by disparate definitions applied by different postsecondary institutions. The research featured in the current study attempts to measure college readiness according to traditional indicators, such as high school GPA and course taking, but also by assessed need for developmental courses upon college arrival. The analyses feature a cohort of graduating students from the Baltimore City Public Schools, which are part of an urban, high poverty, predominantly African American school system. This research is part of a larger effort to inform the school district’s efforts at improving college readiness, and was conducted by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC), a partnership of local university researchers and school district representatives.

In determining readiness for college-level courses, most Maryland colleges use a placement test, either the nationally prominent Accuplacer or an internally developed assessment. When examining the percentage of assessed students who were ultimately placed into developmental courses, we found over 95% of students at community colleges were placed into developmental math, while around two-thirds of assessed students were determined to need developmental coursework in reading and English. There was also a significant amount of overlapping need, as less than 20 % of graduates who enrolled at either of the two most popular community colleges required remediation in only one subject. Over 60 % were required to take at least one developmental course in all three subjects. The research featured here dovetails closely with City Schools’ current imperative to support students and families by increasing their awareness of both the opportunities and hurdles they will confront in the college-going process by providing rich, descriptive analyses addressing the extent to which the academic characteristics of graduates corresponded with readiness definitions at their most frequently attended postsecondary institutions.


Understanding the College Enrollment and Persistence Patterns of Students from the Los Angeles Unified School District

With the advent of LAERI several years ago, LAERI, UCLA, and LAUSD began a unique local partnership to use research to inform and improve educational practice in the school district. Our partnership work recently focused on applied research to develop on-track indicators for the school district’s new high school graduation requirements. We extend this work by a) investigating college preparation strategies used in LAUSD and b) examining post-secondary outcomes of whether/where students go to college and whether they persist to degree completion. Because LAUSD has only recently begun to track college going, persistence, and completion rates, this project provides a singular opportunity - one that has not been available in the recent past - to assist LAUSD leaders overseeing the high schools in this study to identify gaps and disparities in college going, and understand aspects of the high school experience that are most predictive of students’ likelihood of attending and succeeding in college. Benefits and challenges to both organizations that emerge in collaborating on this partnership work and these particular studies are discussed.

Authors

• Rachel E. Durham, Johns Hopkins University

• Faith Connolly, Johns Hopkins University

• Kyo Yamashiro, Claremont Graduate University / Los Angeles Education Research Institute

• Cynthia Lim, Los Angeles Unified School District