Texas Finds It Takes a Valley to Raise Achievement

Any one of these factors is considered a challenge for teachers and administrators tasked with preparing students for college. Facing so many of them at once is daunting indeed.

“Sometimes I feel like there is just so much to do to meet everyone’s needs—there are special education students, gifted and talented students, students with language and cultural barriers, and students with substance abuse and family life issues who need careful, individualized guidance to meet their social and personal needs,” said Edinburg High School Principal Maria Luisa Guerra. “But these are the students who come to us. They belong to us and we take care of them.”

Guerra’s attitude is shared by many education leaders in the four counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. As a result of many different initiatives, an ambitious push-and-pull effort has evolved there that is preparing more students for higher education.

On the high school side, educators like Guerra push students to higher levels of college readiness. On the postsecondary side, institutions like the University of Texas–Pan American use outreach programs to pull more students to higher levels of achievement. Both sides also work to engage parents, businesses, and governmental entities in their efforts, and both sides depend on ACT programs to help them get students ready for college.

“Right now in Texas, one of the areas where students score the lowest is in math. So we’re working with Texas Instruments to provide math teachers with the training they need,” said Martha A. Cantu, the director of GEAR UP at UTPA. Cantu oversees more than 30 partnerships in the valley to provide services to 8,950 students in 28 middle schools and 19 high schools. Among the corporate partners—in addition to Texas Instruments—are Ford, SureScore, Hewlett-Packard, Kaplan, Princeton Review, and AVID.

Cantu said her staff adopts a “whatever it takes” approach to preparing their seventh- to twelfth-grade GEAR UP students for college.

At the seventh-grade level, that means assessing the students with EXPLORE to determine the skills they will need to build to be college ready by the time they graduate from high school. Later it means assessing again with PLAN, and near the end of high school ensuring students take the ACT. Throughout the middle school and high school years, GEAR UP provides tutors and mentors, information about the college admissions process, and encouragement to be involved in extracurricular activities—even helping with transportation if needed.

Throughout middle school and high school, Cantu’s program focuses on bringing parents into the process. “The parental involvement component is very big. For me it’s the best part,” Cantu said.

UTPA’s GEAR UP program teaches parents about getting ready for college and the application process, in what it calls its Las Platicas Academy. Parents then take that knowledge and educate other parents in “neighborhood walks” and as leaders of parent meetings. “They take this very seriously. Often they just blossom in this program,” said Cantu. “Even though a lot of these parents are low income, they have very high aspirations for their kids.”

In fact, 84 percent of Rio Grande Valley parents say they want their children to get a college degree. “That’s a very high percentage rate for a population that largely doesn’t have running water or drainage,” said Cantu. “Just because they are not college educated does not mean that their children can’t go to college.”

The UTPA program received a $7 million federal grant last year, the second biggest GEAR UP grant made nationwide. It is the university’s second multi-year, multimillion-dollar GEAR UP grant, but only one facet of its outreach. UTPA also has an outreach program for parents, separate from the GEAR UP office’s program; it provides professional development for area teachers; and it sponsors a faculty mentorship program for individual schools.

“I think this university does more outreach than any university I’ve ever heard of. Our goal is for students to go to college. We are very happy if they come to UTPA, but we don’t recruit for this college. Our goal is to make sure our students are ready for any college,” said Cantu.

A good portion of the students from the Rio Grande Valley who go to college will stay close to home. Principal Guerra knows that many of her students will attend UTPA, which requires an ACT score of 15 for admission. “I want to make sure they achieve at least that score,” she said.

In the eight years she has been principal, Guerra has made steady progress with her students. The average ACT Composite score at Edinburg High School has gone up each of the past five years, from 17.1 in 2001 to 17.8 last year. The number of students testing has also increased from 246 students in 2001 to 361 in 2005. As her school’s score has risen, the Texas state score has dropped from 20.3 in 2001 to 20.2 in 2005, and the national score has dropped one-tenth of a point from 21.0 to 20.9. Guerra’s goal is an average Composite score of 20, and she wants to reach that goal next year.

“For us to make the gains we have made in the last five years is wonderful. We’re very proud of that, but we have to work harder to get to that 20 score,” said Guerra. “I know we can do it.”

To get there, her staff pegs their curricula to the College Readiness Standards and to results from EXPLORE, PLAN, and the ACT. “Everything I do is centered on the College Readiness Standards, with particular attention paid to math and reading,” Guerra said.

At first, she used school activity money to administer PLAN to all sophomores. The results were so useful that four years ago Guerra convinced her district—which serves 26,700 students—to administer EXPLORE to all eighth graders. “I believe data drives the curriculum. We use data from PLAN, EXPLORE, and the ACT to develop curriculum that is aligned with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards. EXPLORE helps us know what strengths and weaknesses our incoming students have,” Guerra said. “It has been very, very valuable.”

Guerra’s staff looks at EXPLORE scores for each incoming freshman. At first, Guerra said, “We identified the students who did well in math and created a math cohort. The teacher knows these students are above average and accelerates the curriculum to help them meet their academic potential. This year I added cohorts for English II, pre-AP students.”

In tenth grade all students take PLAN. Those who score above average on the math and science portions, on top of having earned a high grade in Algebra I, take what Guerra calls “double science”—pre-Advanced Placement physics and AP physics taken concurrently.

“I’m real excited about that,” Guerra said. “The physics teacher is confident the students will perform very well in the AP physics exam. We started this with the ACT, but it’s carrying over to the AP program. Initial efforts toward improving our ACT Composite scores have resulted in the overall improvement of our AP program because we have more students better prepared and more students enrolled in our rigorous courses.”

Guerra also uses the PLAN scores to reach out to parents. She sends congratulatory letters to parents of students who do well, and uses the letters to explain what a good score means—advanced courses and the possibility of attending college.

This year, when Guerra looked at the PLAN scores, she noticed that 26 high-scoring girls had indicated an interest in an engineering career. She asked the counselors to interview each of the girls to verify they are, indeed, interested in engineering. “I was real careful. I know that engineering is not for everyone. Engineering students have to want to be in that field and have to have a good foundation in Algebra I.

They have to take the most rigorous math and science courses that we offer.”

Twenty-six girls were called in, and 26 said they were interested in engineering. So Guerra arranged to take them all to the University of Texas at Austin for a two-day program sponsored by the UT–Austin Women in Engineering Program. She also planned another trip to the engineering program at UTPA.

“UT–Austin is all excited to have 26 girls from the Rio Grande Valley coming to this program. They want to talk to me about how I got these 26 girls. I’m going to tell them, ‘I looked at their PLAN scores and decided to spark an early interest in engineering. These girls have potential and are interested in engineering.’”