Access & Equity in Linked Learning: A Report on Pathway Access and Academic Outcomes for Traditionally Underserved Students

Abstract

This brief describes the successes and challenges the districts have experienced in fostering access and equity in Linked Learning pathways, examining five groups of students frequently underserved by traditional schools: students with low prior achievement, English learners, African-American students, Latino students, and female students. Throughout the evaluation and in this brief, we focus on data for these “subgroups” of the total student population. We acknowledge that both access and equity are complex constructs that can be defined in many different ways. For the purposes of this brief, we operationalize access and equity as follows: to evaluate access, we examined districts’ choice and recruitment policies and assessed the degree to which pathways were representative of their districts’ high school student populations; to evaluate equity, we compared academic outcomes for Linked Learning student subgroups with those of similar peers in traditional high school settings.

Revised August 2018 to reflect updated graduation data and analysis