Education Department Agrees to End Controversial Upward Bound study

This article orginally appeared in the Feb. 24 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was reposted on the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission's Website as a pdf file in its news clippings sections. It is from HEPC's Website that this article is adopted.

By KELLY FIELD

Washington, D.C. - Yielding to pressure from Congress and grant recipients, the U.S. Education Department has reluctantly agreed to abandon a controversial evaluation of the Upward Bound college-preparation program.

The study, which began last year, was designed to measure whether Upward Bound would have a bigger impact on college-going rates if it were refocused on higher-risk students. The program helps prepare low-income and first-generation students for college.

But the evaluation, which required grantees to recruit twice as many students to their program as normal and assign half of them to a control group, was unpopular from the start (The Chronicle, August 17, 2007). Critics, led by the Council for Opportunity in Education, a lobbying group for the federal TRIO programs for disadvantaged students,said it was unethical, even immoral, of the department to require programs to actively recruit students into programs and then deny them services.

"They are treating kids as widgets," Arnold L. Mitchem, the council's president, told The Chronicle last summer."These are low-income, working-class children that have value, they're not just numbers."

He likened the study to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which the government withheld treatment from 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis so that scientists could study the ravages of the disease.

But Larry Oxendine, the former director of the TRIO programs who started the study, says he was simply trying to get the program focused on students it was created to serve. He conceived of the evaluation after a longitudinal study by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., a nonpartisan social-policy-research firm, found that most students who participated in Upward Bound were no more likely to attend college than students whodid not.

The only students who seemed to truly benefit from the program were those who had low expectations of attending college before they enrolled.Mr. Oxendine concluded that the program was serving too many high-achieving students—students who really belonged in Talent Search, a less-intensive, less expensivefederal college-preparation program that is also part of TRIO.

To test this theory, he proposed a study comparing Upward Bound participants who were at high risk of not attending college with a control group of nonparticipants and with Upward Bound participants who were more likely to enroll in college.

"Upward Bound has lost its focus," Mr. Oxendine, who retired last summer, told The Chronicle in July.

"My hypothesis is that we're serving the wrong students now, and ifwe serve the right ones, we will see significant improvement."

Battle Against a Study

But the Council for Opportunity in Education, which says the Mathematica study was "contaminated" because students were allowed to participate in other collegepreparatory programs, including Talent Search, fought the plan tooth and nail. In May, it began a lobbying push that sought to undo the department's actions through legislation.

The effort, which the group dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, focused on members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Robert C. Scott, a Democrat of Virginia who sits on the U.S. House of Representatives education committee. Their fight bore fruit last summer, when both chambers of Congress adopted amendments to legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that would prohibit the department from proceeding with the study, or at least from forcing institutions to participate in it.

Then, in December, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill for the 2008 fiscal year that barred the Education Department from spending any of its budget on the evaluation.

Changing Course

But the department did not knuckle under until last Thursday, when Assistant Secretary Diane Auer Jones sent a letter to grantees saying she had decided "to terminate theevaluation and to engage stakeholders, including Congress, in discussions about a new evaluation that would be responsive to our collective needs and concerns."

Ms. Jones said that the department had already set aside enough money to continue the study through the end of the year, but that "in the context of the controversy surrounding the evaluation," had decided to end it sooner.

Mr. Oxendine could not be reached for comment on Friday.

In a statement, Mr. Mitchem credited Congress with the department's reversal.

"With those strong bipartisan messages, it was clear that the department could notcontinue on its current path," he said. "We are greatly relieved that this ill-advised evaluation is finally behind us."