Education Dept. to End Controversial Study of Upward Bound

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By KELLY FIELD

Washington

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 students at greater risk of not pursuing a higher education. The program helps prepare low-income and first-generation students for college.

But the evaluation, which required grantees to enroll twice as many students as normal and then assign half of them to a control group, was unpopular from the start.

The 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 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 from 1933 to 1972, in which the federal 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 others were. The only ones who seemed to benefit from the program were those who had low expectations of attending college before enrolling.

Mr. Oxendine concluded that the program was serving too many high-achieving students — students who really belonged in Talent Search, a less-intensive, less-expensive federal college-preparation program that is also part of TRIO.

To test that 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 if we serve the right ones, we will see significant improvement."

Charges of Contamination

But the Council for Opportunity in Education, which says the Mathematica study was "contaminated" because students were allowed to participate in other college-preparatory programs, including Talent Search, aggressively fought the plan.

In May the council began to lobby Congress to undo the Education Department's actions. 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 House of Representatives education committee.

The effort bore fruit last summer, when both the House and the Senate adopted amendments to legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that would forbid the department to proceed with the study, or at least to force 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.

But the department did not knuckle under until last month, when Assistant Secretary Diane Auer Jones sent a letter to grantees saying she had decided "to terminate the evaluation 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," officials had decided to end it sooner.

Mr. Mitchem said his group was "greatly relieved that this ill-advised evaluation is finally behind us." He credited Congress with prompting the department's reversal. "With those strong bipartisan messages, it was clear that the department could not continue on its current path," he said in a statement.

But Mr. Oxendine expressed disappointment with the department's decision. "Anecdotal indications are that the Upward Bound program is very effective when serving students for whom the program was created, those with 'academic needs,'" he said. "The study presented an opportunity for the Upward Bound community to clearly demonstrate that effectiveness. It's unfortunate that with the cancellation of the study, the most recently completed evaluation of the Upward Bound program, which concluded that the program is 'ineffective,' remains the definitive evaluation of Upward Bound."