Leave No Collegian Behind, Negotiated Access to College: Micropolitics, Expectations, and College-Going Cultures

Addressing disparities in access to higher education for students from historically marginalized backgrounds has long been the focus of policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels. Recent policy mandates have called into question the role and function of public secondary schools in mitigating disparities in college access. Of note, the overall culture of these school sites has been cited as the critical lever that must be turned in order to address longstanding disparities in college access. Research supports this line of reasoning and suggests school culture plays an instrumental role in fostering students’ socio-emotional development, aspirational goals, and academic achievement outcomes. Despite these reported benefits, however, few educational researchers have explored the process by which school actors create and sustain school cultures that bolster these myriad outcomes, thereby leaving unaddressed the process by which this change takes place. To address this gap in the literature, the author of this study investigated the manner in which school administrators, counselors, and educators in two large public comprehensive secondary schools negotiated college expectations in order to create and sustain college-going cultures and how/whether these perceived expectations affected students’ college aspirations and behaviors in the college-going process, broadly defined. The author employed a fully mixed concurrent equal status multisite multiple embedded case study design and data from student and teacher surveys, focus group interviews, documents, observations, and field notes in an effort to respond to the study’s principal research questions. Using an ecological systems theory and a micropolitical framework that both privileged the salience of processes and the effects of institutional contexts, the author found that school actors struggled to negotiate and agree upon a standard of college expectations, which resulted in the inequitable structuration of opportunities present within schools and largely adversely impacted students with regards to their college aspirations and behaviors in the college-going process. Implications from this study point to the need for policymakers, educational practitioners, and educational researchers to focus more intently on the policy implementation process and the micropolitical ways in which school actors negotiate expectations, power, and finite resources