Dynamics of High School Course Enrollment

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Dynamics of High School Course EnrollmentAbstractThis project will investigate the dynamics of high school course enrollment in order to understand some of the mechanisms that contribute to long-term inequality in society. High schools offer courses of different levels of rigor. In some schools students, with their parents' blessing, are free to select the level of rigor of their courses for study, while in others student choice plays a limited role. Yet, in the former schools, some students and parents may be unaware of how great the differences are among courses, and thus may select courses that do not fully build on the students' potential. The cost of such under-placement may last long after high school is over, delaying or even denying the individual as well as the nation the contributions the student might ultimately have made. Such costs may be especially acute in the sciences, and may play a role in gender inequality in the pursuit of science. Further, racial/ethnic differences may be traceable, in part, to differences in the information parents and students may have about courses. Studying the course enrollment process of disparate schools can help to identify practices that can support each student in selecting the most rigorous courses for which the student is qualified. Findings of such practices can then be shared with school districts and school-site actors via journals and presentations. Analysts have studied course enrollment before, but schools have changed appreciably since such studies were completed. While completing a comprehensive, systematic review of existing evidence, the project will also gather empirical data on the course enrollment process. Researchers will analyze materials used to convey the course enrollment process to students and parents to discover the range of official course enrollment procedures. At the same time, parents of students attending diverse schools will be recruited for several group interviews (focus groups) in which parents can reflect upon and report on their and their child's experience of the course selection process. Further, researchers will compare the official course enrollment process and parents' report of their experiences in order to investigate whether some kinds of materials and processes are more likely to help parents help their children navigate the course selection process.