El Comportamiento de los Líderes

Tennessee’s Statewide Dual Credit (SDC) initiative was implemented as part of a larger enterprise aimed at establishing and improving early postsecondary experiences in the state. In 2007, and later in 2012, the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation governing early postsecondary opportunities for high school students. Together, Public Chapter 459 (2007) and Public Chapter 967 (2012) developed the Cooperative Innovative High Schools Initiative, creating a consortium

oversight body with the purpose of establishing pilots for “innovative dual credit programs with public postsecondary institutions” and expanding “early-college opportunities” (TDOE, 2016). The consortium is led by the Chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents and the President of the University of Tennessee system, and its members include representatives from the State Board of

Education, the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE), the state’s postsecondary systems6_,

and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. The 2012 legislation also established the Office of Postsecondary Coordination and Alignment within TDOE, tasked with overseeing

implementation efforts.

As the first major initiative to emerge from these public charters, Tennessee’s SDC policy is the product of a collaborative effort between Tennessee secondary and postsecondary educators (TDOE, 2017). Together, educators developed high school courses that “incorporated college-level learning objectives” and content that would align high school courses with college expectations. Trained high school instructors teach these SDC courses on high school campuses.7 _{Each course}

pairs with an aligned challenge exam, a cumulative assessment taken online at the end of the course.8

Students who score at or above a designated cut score on the challenge exam earn three college credit hours that can be applied to any public postsecondary institution in Tennessee, upon enrollment.9 _{In essence, high school exam passers bank transferable college credit that becomes}

transcripted once they officially enroll in a Tennessee public college.

Tennessee’s SDC represents a “structural reform” to the K-12-to-college pipeline by tightly integrating or “fusing” together secondary and postsecondary education and forcing them, in addition to state and local agencies, to “adapt to a new educational paradigm” (Karp, 2015). This reform differs from the most common decentralized approaches where agreements to establish dual

6 _{These include the Tennessee Board of Regents, the University of Tennessee system, and the Tennessee Independent} Colleges and Universities Association.

7 _{Both first-time and experienced SDC high school instructors attend professional development sessions over the} summer, where they participate in sessions articulating the alignment of secondary and postsecondary learning objectives for their course. They also receive supplemental resources provided by the SDC faculty work group (TDOE, 2017). 8 _{The exam is free and students are only allowed one attempt.}

9 _{In reality, in-state private institutions also accepted passing scores for college credit (P. Watson, Tennessee Department} of Education, personal communication, October 9, 2017).

credit or enrollment programs and to honor college credits are determined on a case-by-case basis, specific to student circumstances and institutional preferences. Critics argue the lack of

standardization in these approaches perpetuates the disconnect between high school and college. Structural reform, exemplified by Tennessee’s SDC, is often hailed as the preferred method for streamlining the secondary-postsecondary transition in a meaningful, comprehensive way (Karp, 2015; Hughes et al., 2012; Venezia, Kirst, & Antonio, 2003).

Since the 2013-14 academic year, the Consortium has gradually rolled out SDC courses, encompassing a diverse swath of subject areas. According to TDOE (2017), the courses are chosen based on consideration of several factors including workforce trends, vertical alignment with postsecondary programs, and student interest. All SDC courses go through a pilot stage for three years, at which point the Consortium determines whether the course should be submitted to the State Board of Education for formal approval of full implementation. In this process, some pilot courses are dropped or altered to become a different course.

Table 1 outlines information about the 14 different SDC courses and their accompanying challenge exams that have been implemented from 2013-14 through 2018-19. Both the subjects covered and their respective exam components vary, though the majority of exams are

predominately multiple choice in structure. Four exams require additional assessment components including essay questions (American History, Introduction Sociology, and World History) or a student speech (Speech and Communication). By the 2018-19 year, five courses progressed from pilot to full implementation stage: Introduction to Agricultural Business (in 2016-17), Introduction to Plant Science (in 2016-17), Introduction to Sociology (in 2017-18), Pre-Calculus (in 2018-19), and Statistics (in 2018-19). Two pilot courses, College Algebra and Criminal Justice I, transitioned into other courses – Pre-Calculus and Criminal Justice II, respectively – while Health Information Technology was retired in 2016-17 after only being offered for the 2015-16 year. Note that any

student who earns college credit in a course that subsequently changes or retires still banks college credit for that course (TDOE, 2017; 2019).

Tennessee’s comprehensive SDC policy offers important opportunities to learn about the influence of dual credit course-taking on a suite of secondary and postsecondary outcomes. More recently, Hemelt, Schwartz, and Dynarski (2019) have worked with Tennessee’s Office of Research and Policy and the Office of Postsecondary Coordination and Alignment to design an experiment that would evaluate key outcomes. As the first randomized, controlled trial employed in dual credit research, the authors evaluate the effect of a school-level implementation of dual credit College Algebra on student high school and college outcomes. Out of the 14 dual credit courses listed in Table 1, College Algebra is the only course implemented as an experiment where treatment high schools offer a dual credit version of the course and control high schools offer a regular, high school version. This experiment lasted for two years (2013-14 and 2014-15), and the partnership aspect of this work has allowed interim findings to shape the rollout of other dual credit courses.

Hemelt et al. find that participation in an SDC College Algebra altered students’ later high school math course-taking, shifting students away from remedial math and boosting enrollment in AP courses. However, they fail to find a statistically significant effect of participating in College Algebra on overall college enrollment rates within a year of expected high school graduation. Still, they find some suggestive evidence that participation did incline students to enroll in Tennessee public four-year colleges and away from Tennessee public two-year institutions. Finally, they are unable to find conclusive evidence that dual credit College Algebra exposure affected students’ first- year college math performance in terms of GPA, credits earned, or number of math courses taken.

This RD paper complements and expands upon the work of Hemelt et al. (2019) by exploring how passing a dual credit challenge exam – in a broader set of courses – affects student postsecondary enrollment and early performance. College Algebra course pass rates are quite low,

with only 27 percent of the 4,105 exam takers obtaining a minimum of 75 percent on their challenge exams.10 _{Within the experimental setup, this affords little power to detect effects of passing on}

postsecondary outcomes. In contrast, this analysis pools together challenge exam records across a range of dual credit courses to isolate the effect of securing transferable college credit as distinct from participating in a dual credit course.

Students earn bankable college credit by passing a course-specific challenge exam, scoring at or above a designated score. Successful passers may have different postsecondary experiences relative to those who also took the course, but who failed to earn the corresponding credit nest egg as well. For both groups, exposure to rigorous course content may have enhanced participants’ preparedness and expectations for college study. Yet, in the context of Tennessee’s SDC policy, exam passers may disproportionately benefit from a financial or momentum standpoint by earning college credits before setting foot on a college campus.

The purpose of this research is to understand the potential premium (or penalty) that dual credit exam passers receive in terms of early-stage college outcomes. Proponents of dual credit expansion often cite its ability to confer college credits to high schoolers as a major benefit and strategy for improving student performance along a spectrum of enrollment and performance outcomes. Yet, there is little evidence to back up these assertions to date. This paper aims to contribute to the literature by providing causal estimates for how dual credit, through the

mechanism of college credit accumulation, influences students’ educational outcomes. Tennessee’s SDC initiative provides a compelling context for conducting this research. Specifically, my research questions are:

10 _{Challenge exam pass rates by year, separately, are 16.4 percent in 2013-14 (out of 2,027 students) and 37.5 percent in} 2014-15 (out of 2,078 students).

(1) Does passing an SDC challenge exam (and therefore banking college credit) increase the likelihood a student will enroll in college within a year of expected high school

graduation?

(2) Does passing a challenge exam affect the type of college or institution a student matriculates at within a year of graduating?

(3) How does passing a challenge exam and earning college credits before college affect early student performance as measured by credit accumulation, remedial credits earned, and first-year GPA?

(4) Does passing a challenge exam increase the likelihood a student will persist to their second year of college?

(5) How does banking three college credits in high school affect student performance (e.g., credits accumulation, GPA) into students’ second year of college?