Early Assessment Program (EAP) English and Math Assessments
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Advanced high school courses predict subsequent student success, but fewer Black and Hispanic students take advanced courses compared to their White peers. One strategy to increase advanced course enrollment is to use an “opt-out” approach, in which all students are enrolled in advanced courses unless they decline. We use a synthetic control design to evaluate the impact of an optout policy in a large urban district in Texas on the early uptake of Algebra I in the 2019-20 school year. The policy increased enrollment in Algebra I before high school by 11.7 percentage points relative to a synthetic district. The Hispanic–White enrollment gap decreased substantially, while the Black–White enrollment gap did not change.
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Keywords
automatic enrollment, advanced course taking, Differences in Differences
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/s914-9n20
