High Schools’ Role in Promoting Equity for Multilingual Learners’ Access to College

• In Event: Dismantling Oppressive Practices and Envisioning Tailored Practices to Foster Multilingual Learners’ College and Career Readiness

Abstract

High school plays a pivotal role in preparing students for college (Hossler & Gallagher, 1987; Perna & Thomas, 2008). Accordingly, a large body of research exists on the role of high school in shaping students’ college options (e.g., Duncheon & Relles, 2019, McDonough, 1997; Reay et al., 2005; Weis et al., 2023). Despite this robust body of research for general education students, there is a dearth of research on high schools’ role in multilingual learners’ (MLs’) college access (with a few notable exceptions: Callahan, 2005; Jaffe-Walter & Lee, 2011; Author, 2021). MLs’ educational experiences have one key unique feature: They are still developing English language proficiency. The requirement to demonstrate English language proficiency affects MLs’ learning opportunities in a way that does not affect English L1 students (Dabach, 2014; Umansky, 2016). It is therefore important to examine high schools’ role in shaping MLs’ postsecondary pathways. In this study, then, adopting a case study approach (Yin, 2017), we compare and contrast the role of two Massachusetts public high schools with similar ML populations in structuring MLs’ access to college.
This study adopts a theoretical lens of schools as sites of inequality and sites of equity, distinguishing the terms equality and equity (Brayboy et al., 2007; Jurado de los Santos et al., 2020). Equality refers to all students having the same resources and opportunities irrespective of backgrounds. Since the current U.S. education falls far short of that ideal, however, equity refers to a system of fairness that redistributes resources so that more is channeled to historically marginalized populations with the ultimate goal of achieving equality. In this paper, we explored how Sargent HS and Winslow HS, both with large numbers of immigrant Latinx MLs from low-income families, strove to support their college access. We spent one school year at each site from 2018 to 2020. At each school, we tracked six ML high school seniors’ college planning and application. We interviewed each student twice at the beginning and end of their senior year and observed them twice in their classrooms. We also interviewed several educators at each school and collected documents such as high school transcripts, WIDA ACCESS scores, and college essays.
We found that while there were several educators dedicated to MLs’ equitable education at both schools, Sargent HS was more successful in expanding MLs’ access to college than Winslow HS. The differences were evident both in the number of students applying to and enrolling in colleges (4yr and 2yr) and in students’ reports of feeling supported. We attribute these differences to Sargent HS’s school-wide approach to promoting equity. Departments across the school collaborated to eliminate barriers and to provide sustained and individualized college guidance to MLs. At Winslow HS, in contrast, equity-minded educators worked in silos and struggled to support MLs in a White-centric system. The results suggest that the presence of equity-minded individual educators is not enough; a system-wide collaboration is needed to move the needle of achieving equity for MLs’ college access.

Authors

• Yasuko Kanno, Boston University

• Erning Henry Chen, Boston University

• Kuang Li, Boston University

• Nicholas David, Boston University