Chattanooga’s educators are working to overcome the barriers that are holding people back. PEF is the lead local agency for the Partnership for College Access and Success (PCAS) initiative, an eight-city program funded by Lumina Foundation for Education and administered by the Academy for Educational Development. PCAS brings together a broad variety of organizations – the local school district, institutions of higher education, community and faith-based organizations, businesses and government – to help prepare students to succeed in college.

“The idea was, rather than having isolated programs, we should all be working together,” says Susan Street, founder of Chattanooga’s College Access Center, which works to increase the number of residents from Chattanooga and Hamilton County who attend and complete college. “We’ve operated in isolation for too long.”

PCAS aims to increase family awareness of opportunities for getting into and paying for college. To achieve those goals, the partnership is focusing on three Hamilton County schools that represent diverse urban, suburban and rural populations. Among the strategies being employed are:

• College night programs.
• Retreats for seniors and sophomores.
• College tours.
• Test-preparation activities.
• Training for faculty and administrators.

Chattanooga’s College Access Center also is the county’s representative for Tennessee’s annual College Goal Sunday event, a program that encourages and helps families to complete financial aid forms. The bottom line is helping students and parents know how to get into and pay for college.

PCAS chose Chattanooga as one of its eight sites, in part, because of initiatives already under way there. The city participates in the Carnegie Foundation’s Schools for a New Society school-reform initiative. In addition, Hamilton County’s elected officials have taken the controversial step of abolishing the high schools’ multitrack curriculum in favor of an academically rigorous single track designed to challenge and prepare all students.

“When that was pushed here, there was a real donnybrook,” recalls PEF’s Challener. “The university and the business leaders turned the tide.”

Employers and educators understand that high school graduates, even those with high grade-point averages, often are unprepared to do college work. For instance, Amanda Green, who has a 3.4 GPA heading into her senior year, scored well below the national average the first time she took the ACT.

“I’m really bad with tests,” she says. “I tend to freak out.”

Of course, standardized tests can’t measure work ethic or grit. Still, in her low moments, Amanda questions whether she will attain her dream.

“Sometimes I get kind of worried that I won’t be able to,” she says. “I feel like I’ll be here, going to a community college. That’s something I really don’t want. I can’t explain why. I guess I want to explore more than here.”

The story is a familiar one to students who struggle to overcome demographic disadvantages.

Consider Jacob Huskey. A popular high school athlete at Red Bank High School just north of Chattanooga, Jacob took what he thought were the classes he needed to prepare for college, earning academic honors. In his senior year, he took Advanced Placement literature and composition. Following graduation, he planned to attend the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

His plans began to unravel at college orientation. Because he had not scored well on the ACT, he had to take a college placement test – without the aid of the pocket calculator he had relied on in high school math classes. The result was that Jacob had to take developmental classes in math as well as writing before he could begin taking regular college classes. (More than half the students who attend local colleges require remedial math, Susan Street says.)

Discouraged, Jacob thought about ditching college and joining the military. A relative encouraged him to consider enrolling in a new program called Camp Tiger at Chattanooga State Technical Community College. Developed as part of the PCAS program, Camp Tiger is an intensive 10-day summer college-prep program. It exposes students to a range of topics that can help them navigate the transition to college, including lessons on effective listening, time management, writing and note taking, college reading strategies and business etiquette.

Jacob completed Camp Tiger and enrolled last fall at Chattanooga State, where he took the required developmental classes, among other courses. He finished the year with a 3.64 GPA and plans to transfer this fall to UT-Chattanooga.

Administrators have already moved to align the educational standards of Hamilton County and Tennessee with the ACT test that helps determine high school graduates’ postsecondary options. That move acknowledges that graduates with high grade-point averages often perform poorly on standardized tests and are unprepared for a rigorous college-level curriculum. To underscore the seriousness of the overhaul, Sale Creek’s administrators are requiring teachers to take the ACT themselves.

The misalignment of high-school curriculum with college-entrance tests is pervasive, says Achieve Inc.’s Michael Cohen.

A study completed by the group two years ago determined that, for high school graduates to be prepared to succeed in college, they need four years of college preparatory English and four years of math, including Algebra I and II, geometry and a fourth year of rigorous math. A subsequent survey of the 50 states found that only two require Algebra II. In addition, the survey looked at proficiency exams that students must pass to earn a high school diploma in some states. Close to 60 percent of the “algebra” questions on those tests actually measured “pre-algebra” skills, Cohen says. “One reason our kids don’t learn a lot is we don’t expect or demand a lot,” he points out.

In rural areas and elsewhere, collaboration between high schools and local colleges is a big step in the direction of bolstering K-12 education and closing the proficiency gap between high school and college, educators say.

What’s making the difference in high schools? “Dual enrollment programs and close connections with community colleges and other higher education institutions nearby,” says Rachel Tompkins, president of the Rural School and Community Trust, a national nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Va. “Kids are able to take some college-credit courses while they are in high school. They’re building relationships with nearby colleges. When that happens, you see kids making the transition to college an easier one.”

The Trust also helps schools to develop community-based learning that engages students. Among the programs that work, she says, are oral history projects with local historical societies and science projects that have clear, practical applications in the local community. For example, at Jackson Middle School in Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish, students are studying the spike in automobile crashes involving a growing population of deer, which have been driven into the area by hurricanes and land development.

“They’re using GPS (global positioning system technology) to help the highway department know where to put signs,” Tompkins says.

Such programs help break through the persistent, negative stereotypes about the rural poor – stereotypes that, if not confronted, have a way of becoming internalized.

“There is a culture of low expectations that has to be challenged,” says Leslie Lilly, president and CEO of the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, based in Nelsonville. “When the name Appalachia comes out, people think about shoeless hillbillies … or they think about this remote, rural place where people live in the hollers.”

“Right (near) here in Athens, we have this world-class university (Ohio University), but people growing up in the shadows of the university don’t think it’s for them,” Lilly says. “They think it’s for somebody else. They feel they aren’t worthy of it and can’t afford it.”

A difficult past, but a hopeful future

To celebrate her 27th birthday this summer, Angela Sepulveda attended a Pat Benatar concert. The rocker’s hit songs include Hit Me With Your Best Shot, an anthem of perseverance in the face of hard knocks. Sepulveda can relate.

She became pregnant in the 10th grade and dropped out of West Mesa High School in Albuquerque, a decision she didn’t regret one bit at the time. With the exception of English, she disliked her classes, especially math. And she had even less affinity for the “rude” white women who taught them.

“Class was just not interesting,” Sepulveda recalls. “Nowadays they have a lot of hands-on stuff. When I went to school, it was just blah-blah-blah.”

She gave birth to a daughter, Erika. Sepulveda says she left Erika’s father to escape his drinking and physical abuse. She met another man, and he fathered a second daughter, LeAnn. He went to prison for trying to stab Sepulveda.

She dreams of earning an associate’s degree in business and getting a good job that will afford her girls a better life. “I picture working in a big, huge, major company or a law office or something,” she says, but she has a long way to go. The first step is to earn her general equivalency degree (GED). So far, she has passed all but one part of the test. Her old nemesis, math, continues to trip her up.

Sepulveda is matter-of-fact about her troubles, but her demeanor changes when the conversation turns to her children’s future.

“Now you’re going to make me cry,” she says. “I want them to graduate school. I want them to have a good job. I don’t want them going down the same path I did.”

In Albuquerque and other Latino strongholds, parents like Angela Sepulveda are getting involved in their children’s schools through a Lumina-funded program called Engaging Latino Communities for Education (ENLACE). (See related story, ENLACE fosters partnerships.)

ENLACE is a multiyear initiative working in seven states to strengthen the educational pipeline and increase opportunities for Latinos to enter and complete college. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation provided startup funds for the program, which creates partnerships among universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, community-based organizations, students and parents.

Eager to promote parental involvement as a key means of improving children’s preparation for college, ENLACE has worked with educational leaders to establish 25 on-site family centers in Albuquerque schools. ENLACE envisions the centers as safe places where parents and other community partners can support, empower and encourage Latino students and families.

Students come to the centers to get help with their homework, to prepare for the ACT and SAT, and to be around supportive adults. The parents learn about college entrance exams, financial aid forms and other intricacies of the college access maze.

“Our networking comes from talking to the nurse, the teacher, the principal, the counselors – talking to the janitor and the maintenance man. It’s a total community,” says Brenda Chavez, who works in the ENLACE centers. She has a daughter and a niece in the program, and she has been a mentor to Sepulveda.

“It’s [about] working together. It’s the environment of leaning on each other.”

“We already know that kids want to learn,” Chavez says. “The obstacles that come in between all that make it hard for kids.”

Collaboration is key

And it’s not only the youngsters who confront obstacles. For instance, before the family centers could be effective, many Latino parents had to overcome their fear of public schools. Then, after the parents had discovered their voice, some school administrators deemed the parents overly assertive. A few years into the experiment, however, both sides say the difficult period of accommodation was worth the struggle.

“This is a collaboration among communities,” says Judy Touloumis, principal of Carlos Rey Elementary School. That type of collaboration is key to a successful program, experts say.

A recent Lumina-funded project surveyed a number of ENLACE-type programs to learn what makes them effective. (See box below.) This study shows that the most important step is to transform parents from individual, passive bystanders into a network of active community leaders.

Here's what works

According to Amy Aparicio Clark, director of the Postsecondary Access for Latino Middle Grades Students (PALMS) Project, five traits characterize successful pre-college programs:

1. Visiting parents and students in their homes.
2. Offering parent-child learning activities.
3. Having a professional home-school liaison to connect parents with teachers and administrators.
4. Developing the skills parents need to be involved in their children’s schools.
5. Encouraging parents’ ownership of programs designed to help their children succeed in college.

“Our biggest word is collaboration,” says Violetta Bluitt, who began mentoring and tutoring students at Washington Middle School through ENLACE’s Los Compañeros program while she was an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico (UNM). After graduating from UNM in 2004, she became an ENLACE educational-site coordinator.

continued on next page