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######### National Evaluation of GEAR UP

**A Summary of the First Two Years**

**2003**

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National Evaluation of GEAR UP

A Summary of the First Two Years

U.S. Department of Education

Office of the Under Secretary

Policy and Program Studies Service

Westat

Rockville, Md.

2003

This report was prepared for the U.S. Department of Education under
Contract No. ED-99-CO-1039 by Westat. Dan Goldenberg served as the
contracting officer's representative. The views expressed herein do not
necessarily represent the positions or policies of the Department of
Education. No official endorsement by the Department of Education of any
product, commodity, service or enterprise mentioned in this publication
is intended or should be inferred.

U.S. Department of Education

Rod Paige

*Secretary*

Office of the Under Secretary

Eugene W. Hickok

*Under Secretary*

Policy and Program Studies Service

Alan L. Ginsburg

*Director*

April 2003

This report is in the public domain. Authorization to reproduce it in
whole or in part is granted. While permission to reprint this
publication is not necessary, the citation should be: U.S. Department of
Education, Office of the Under Secretary, Policy and Program Studies
Service, *National Evaluation of GEAR UP A Summary of the First Two
Years*, Washington, D.C., 2002.

To order copies of this report, write:

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the many individuals whose efforts contributed to
the preparation of this report. First, we would like to thank our
consultant, Lana Muraskin, who summarized and synthesized two years of
site visit reports and wrote the preliminary draft of this report.

We also would like to express our gratitude to members of the Technical
Working Group for valuable reviews of drafts of this report. They
provided insightful comments and constructive recommendations for
improvements. The members of the Technical Working Group include: Ann
Coles, the Education Resources Institute; David Cordray, Institute for
Public Policy Studies, Vanderbilt University; Mary Beth Curtis, Center
for Special Education, Lesley College; John Gargani, I Have a Dream
Foundation; Hector Garza, National Council for Community and Education
Partnerships; Tom Kane, University of\
California-Los Angeles; Hayes Mizell, Program for Student Achievement,
Edna McConnell Clark Foundation; Amaury Nora, University of Houston;
Tracy Proctor, I Have a Dream, Southeast D.C.; Linda Shiller, Vermont
Student Assistance Corporation.

Similarly, we are appreciative of the staffs of our subcontractors,
Branch Associates and Decision Information Resources, and the staff of
Westat who conducted the site visits. They prepared the site visit
reports and encouraged the schools and GEAR UP projects to provide the
study data.

Special thanks go to the GEAR UP projects, their staffs and the schools
participating in the national evaluation. By helping with our many
requests for data and hosting the site visit teams they have made this
project and report possible.

Finally, we would like to thank Kevin Cramer and Dan Goldenberg, project
officers at the U.S. Department of Education, for their interest and
guidance in this study and their comments on early drafts of this
report.

Linda A. LeBlanc

Project Director

Kim Standing

Deputy Project Director

Alexander Ratnofsky

Vice President

Contents

Executive Summary 1

The Federal Grants 1

This Report 2

What We Have Learned 3

Part One: Partnership Grants 5

The Students in GEAR UP and Their Parents 5

Services Students Receive 7

Supplemental Academic Support 7

Guiding Students to College 9

Intensity of Supplemental Services 11

Services Parents Receive 13

Support Schools Receive 14

Administering GEAR UP Partnerships 16

GEAR UP and the School Environment 18

Part Two: State GEAR UP Projects 19

Grants Where All or Most Services Are Administered by State Agencies 19

Grants Where all or Most Services Are Conducted through Subgrants

to Schools or Districts 19

Endnotes 21

List of Figures

Figure 1. Racial and ethnic composition of GEAR UP students 5

Figure 2. Comparison of GEAR UP and national participation rates\
in special programs 6

Executive Summary

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR
UP) is a federal program aimed at equalizing access to higher education
for low-income students. GEAR UP was created in 1998 as part of the
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. As mandated by the
legislation, GEAR UP grantees seek to increase postsecondary access and
completion by promoting the following:

-   Information to students and parents (e.g., appropriate information
    on college preparatory courses, cost of college attendance,
    financial assistance and different programs of study).

-   Individualized academic and social support to students.

-   Parent involvement in education.

-   Educational excellence.

-   School reform.

-   Student participation in rigorous courses.

To further these objectives, GEAR UP grantees are charged with
establishing strong and lasting partnerships among school districts,
colleges and other entities to operate the projects.

In this report we look at the students being served by GEAR UP, the
activities and services provided to these students and their parents,
additional professional development opportunities for teachers and
curriculum development efforts taking place in these schools. We
summarize the growth and changes that occurred at the study sites during
the first two years of their grants.

# The Federal Grants

GEAR UP entered its third year of operation in fall 2001. The first
grants were awarded in August 1999 to two types of recipients: (1)
partnerships of school districts, colleges and other organizations (164
awards) and (2) state agencies (21 awards). In its first year, the
program awarded \$75 million in federal resources to partnership
grantees and \$42 million to state grantees. Additional grantees were
added in 2000 and 2001. There are now 243 partnership grantees and 30
state grantees. A total of about \$295 million was awarded in fiscal
year (FY) 2001 to all GEAR UP grantees. Two-thirds of the federal funds
were awarded to partnership grantees and the remaining one-third to
state grantees.

Partnership grants require recipients to begin providing services to
students no later than seventh grade and to continue services to these
students in participating high schools until graduation. This
requirement means that, in most school districts in the program, middle
schools have been the first schools to participate in GEAR UP. In all
participating schools, at least 50 percent of the students must be
low-income (i.e., eligible for free or reduced-price lunches). Unlike
other federal programs designed to increase college access that enroll
students who meet specified criteria, GEAR UP partnership grantees must
provide assistance to **all** students in designated grade levels in
participating schools (called cohorts).

The whole grade (or grade cohort) approach recognizes that in schools
with high rates of family poverty, all students are at greater risk of
poor academic performance and low rates of college attendance. [^1] The
GEAR UP approach of serving all students also allows services to be
integrated into the school day and regular educational offerings,
providing greater opportunities for academic assistance and education
reform.

The federal resources provided through GEAR UP are relatively modest
given the program's ambitious goals. In the first year of the program,
the 164 partnerships served more than 100,000 students with an average
per student expenditure of about \$650 from federal resources. The
maximum allowable federal allocation per student is \$800. To extend the
available resources, grantees are required to support at least 50
percent of the cost of operating their projects through cash and in-kind
contributions. The remainder of this report will report on the federal
share. In their second year, the same 164 grantees served just over
150,000 students, with an average per student expenditure of about
\$630. The 73 new partnership grantees added in 2000 served about 45,000
students at an average of approximately \$760 per student. [^2] These
resources were used not only to provide student services but also to
provide information and services to parents and to implement reforms
(such as curriculum development, teacher professional development and
other school reform efforts).

State grantees operate under somewhat different rules from partnerships.
A wide range of state agencies may administer state grants alone or in
conjunction with other entities. State GEAR UP grants must offer both a
college awareness and preparation component as well as college
scholarships; at least 50 percent of the grant must be used for
scholarships. Projects may provide services to cohorts of students (like
partnerships), or they may focus on disadvantaged "priority students" in
any grade.[^3] They may also obtain waivers on the use of funds for
scholarships until current GEAR UP participants reach college age.

The average per student funding amount for state grants is lower than
that reported by partnerships. In the second year of their grants, 21
1999-funded state grantees served more than 135,000 students at an
average cost of about \$370 in federal funds per student. State grantees
receiving their first-year award in 2000 served about 29,000 students
for less than \$400 per student.

# This Report 

The legislation establishing GEAR UP mandated an evaluation of the
program. This report is an early product of that evaluation. The report
describes the program, as implemented, and sets the stage for later
examination of GEAR UP's impact on high school performance and college
participation. The report suggests hypotheses and issues about GEAR UP
practices and student outcomes that can be pursued in the longitudinal
study described below. We also identify implementation issues that have
arisen as the program has developed that may warrant attention from
program officials. Information on partnership and state grantees is
reported separately.

**The study design.** The evaluation is following a group of GEAR UP
participants who entered the program in seventh grade during the 2000-01
school year. (We refer to this component of the evaluation as the
"longitudinal study.") The students were selected from partnership
projects that began operation in the first year of GEAR UP (1999-2000)
and indicated in late 1999 that they were "fairly well along" in
implementation and that they planned to serve a new cohort of
seventh-graders the following year. Approximately one-third of the first
year partnership grantees were excluded because they planned to serve
only one cohort over the life of their grants. From among the two-thirds
planning to pickup a new cohort of seventh-graders in fall 2000, Westat
selected 20 partnership grantees for the evaluation. Because the focus
of this evaluation is on the effect of various approaches on student
outcomes, Westat made every effort to include projects with applications
that reflected different programmatic approaches and a mix of fiscal
agents (i.e., school districts, colleges and universities).[^4] We then
simultaneously matched one middle school participating in each GEAR UP
project with a middle school in the same or nearby school district with
similar students but without GEAR UP for comparison purposes.

Because the students who are being followed in the national evaluation
are still enrolled in middle school, student outcomes such as enrollment
in college preparatory courses, high school completion and college
attendance will not be known for several more years. Nonetheless, some
information is available now about the first two years of GEAR UP from
all GEAR UP projects and from the projects and schools participating in
the evaluation. This information forms the basis for the current report
and includes the following:

-   **Background information** on participating students and their
    parents. Westat collected data from 18 schools through student and
    parent surveys as well as records of students' and parents' GEAR UP
    participation.

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-   **Descriptive information from site visits** to the 20 partnerships
    conducted during each of the first two years of GEAR UP that
    explored the nature and status of GEAR UP.[^5] During those visits,
    Westat asked project, district, and school personnel about the
    design and approach of the GEAR UP project, the partnerships,
    program administration, the activities that had been undertaken or
    were planned, the project staffing, and role of the project in
    reform at the school. Site visitors asked project directors what
    activities were underway to enable comparable efforts to continue
    after the end of the grant. Site visitors also conducted group
    interviews with students, parents, and teachers. Staff made similar
    visits to seven state grantees as well.

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-   **Information from the 2001 GEAR UP Annual Performance Reports
    (APRs).** The APR provides aggregate data on all GEAR UP projects.
    All GEAR UP grantees submitted their first APR designed specifically
    for the program in May 2001.[^6]

# What We Have Learned

***Student Characteristics:*** In the second year of operation
(2000-01), there were 237 GEAR UP partnerships serving nearly 200,000
students, 90 percent of whom were in the seventh or eighth grade. GEAR
UP students were predominately minority---36 percent were Hispanic, 30
percent African American, 26 percent were white, 5 percent Native
American and Hawaiian and 3 percent Asian.

***School Characteristics and Climate:*** As required by law, all
schools participating in GEAR UP had free or reduced-price lunch
eligibility rates of 50 percent or higher, with a median rate of 67
percent. Several of the 20 middle schools visited as part of the study
were facing serious education problems---poor academic performance, high
staff turnover and low morale. Initially, this led to resistance to GEAR
UP in those schools because it was thought by some that the program
might dilute their school's focus on improving academics and test
scores. However, by the second site visit in spring 2001, school staff
perceptions of GEAR UP had improved markedly, with GEAR UP being seen as
a positive force for academic improvement.

***Administering GEAR UP Partnerships:*** On average between 1999-2000
and 2000-01, GEAR UP partnerships received federal grants of \$713,000
or about \$660 per student. Most of the federal funds are used for
staffing. A typical project has a full-time director and possibly one
other full-time staff member who are centrally located. In addition,
these projects generally have full-time site coordinators and some
part-time assistants at each participating middle school. Many projects
had planned on having fairly elaborate decision-making processes and
involving numerous community partners. In reality, GEAR UP partners rely
heavily on project staff (e.g., project directors and coordinators) to
plan and carry out project operations. Most of the partners have been
education providers. Two other areas where grantees' original designs
have been difficult to implement are involvement of parents and
volunteers. The sites visited as part of the evaluation study indicated
they had a great deal of difficulty in getting parents involved in GEAR
UP activities. A few sites reported success with institutes that
enrolled parents in 9- to 10-week workshops or with extensive outreach
efforts, individual meetings and home visits. Sites also had trouble
recruiting volunteers in the numbers they originally intended and ended
up making more use of paid professional staff to provide services.

***GEAR UP Services:*** Projects can be grouped in two major categories
based on the services they provide. Some projects focus on instructional
or other efforts that affect the regular operation of the school; others
focus on the provision of supplemental services to students. One of the
sites visited is engaged in a major curriculum reform effort with a few
others having components that augment regular instruction. Most of the
other projects focused on providing a variety of supplemental services
to students:

-   **Tutoring** was the most common service offered across sites during
    years one and two. For budgetary reasons, many projects planned on
    using volunteers to provide much of the tutoring but, as discussed
    above, ended up relying much more heavily on paid professional
    staff, often teachers at the school, to provide tutoring services.
    It could be argued that this was actually a fortunate occurrence
    because studies have indicated that effective tutoring requires high
    dosages, experienced tutors and curriculum alignment all of which
    are more likely to occur with paid staff as opposed to volunteers
    working sporadically. Projects significantly reduced planned
    **mentoring** activities, on the other hand, due to the lack of
    volunteers. Projects also had difficulty attracting students to
    tutoring during out-of-school hours due to transportation
    difficulties and competing interests.

-   **College-planning activities**---college fairs, visits to colleges,
    etc.---occurred at almost all projects and tended to be
    well-received by students. Projects also held a number of voluntary
    **special** **events** to help broaden the horizons of students.
    Besides providing general college and career information to
    students, one-third of the sites visited also provided **individual
    guidance** to all students or all students having academic or
    behavioral difficulties.

-   Ambitious **summer programs** were offered by many projects at the
    end of their first year but it proved difficult to attract students
    in the expected numbers. Some projects scaled back their summer
    plans in the second year (summer 2001) in terms of length and
    expected number of participants.

-   **Professional development** activities increased significantly
    between years one and two as teachers became more accepting of GEAR
    UP. Focus groups indicated that teachers were generally satisfied
    with the professional development opportunities that GEAR UP
    provided.

***State Projects:*** Four of the seven states visited as part of the
study administered GEAR UP services directly from the state agency where
the grant was housed. The remaining three states awarded subgrants to
schools or districts in the states to operate GEAR UP projects.

Part One: Partnership Grants

# 

# The Students in GEAR UP and Their Parents

**A profile of participants.** Each GEAR UP partnership is composed of
one or more colleges or universities, one or more school districts, and
at least two other organizations, agencies or businesses. According to
the APRs submitted by all grantees, in the second year of GEAR UP
(2000-01), 237 GEAR UP partnerships were serving almost 200,000
students, with nearly 90 percent of the students enrolled in seventh or
eighth grades. These students were evenly divided by gender and were
predominately members of minority groups. Hispanics were the largest
group served (36 percent), followed by African American students
(30 percent) and white students (26 percent). Native Americans and
Hawaiians were approximately 5 percent of the participants, and Asians
represented 3 percent. (See Figure 1.) Nineteen percent of the students
in participating schools had Individualized Education Plans compared
with a national estimate of 13 percent across all grades reported in
1998-99.[^7] Seventeen percent of the GEAR UP students were classified
as limited English proficient (LEP) compared to 9 percent of students
nationally, in all grades, in 1999-2000.[^8] (See Figure 2.)

![](media/image2.png){width="6.3in" height="4.308333333333334in"}

Source: 2000-01 Annual Performance Reports

Figure 1. Racial and ethnic composition of GEAR UP students.

**The schools and students in the longitudinal study.**[^9] GEAR UP is
aimed at increasing college attendance among low-income students. To
ensure that the program reaches the intended beneficiaries, GEAR UP
requires that 50 percent or more of the students at participating
schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches under the National
School Lunch Program. In fact, many of the schools in GEAR UP have free
or reduced-price lunch eligibility rates well in excess of 50 percent.
The students in the national evaluation attend schools where the rates
at which students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches start at 50
percent and rise to 95 percent, with an average rate of 66 percent.
Nationally, 39 percent of students in 1999-2000 were eligible for free
or reduced-price lunches.[^10]

![](media/image3.png){width="6.3in" height="4.308333333333334in"}

Sources: National Evaluation of GEAR UP student record data; National
Center for Education Statistics; and National Clearinghouse for English
Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs.

Figure 2. Comparison of GEAR UP and national participation rates in
special programs.

Schools that draw from communities with high rates of poverty often have
high mobility rates as well. While some of the schools in the evaluation
indicate relatively stable student populations, especially schools in
rural areas, other schools report annual student turnover rates of 50
percent or greater. It may be the case that many students who start the
seventh grade in a GEAR UP participating school do not finish seventh
grade, or start the eighth grade, in the same school.

**Student attitudes early in seventh grade.** As they begin the seventh
grade, many students in the GEAR UP schools and the matched comparison
schools participating in the national evaluation of GEAR UP have similar
plans regarding attending college. In a survey conducted by Westat prior
to GEAR UP students receiving services, students indicated that
attending college is "very important" to them (84 percent of the GEAR UP
students versus 83 percent in the comparison group). However, fewer
students in GEAR UP schools, compared to those in the comparison
schools, indicated that they "will definitely go to college" (51
percent, GEAR UP; 56 percent, comparison). In addition, fewer students
in both GEAR UP and comparison schools expect to enter college or a
vocational school immediately after high school (44 percent, GEAR UP; 47
percent, comparison). College costs are seen as the main reason for not
continuing with education among this low-income population, as cited by
42 percent of students at GEAR UP schools and 41 percent of students at
comparison schools. Nonetheless, one-half of students in both schools
expect to complete a college degree, and one-quarter anticipate a
graduate or professional degree after high school.

**Parents of the study participants.** More than one-half (58 percent,
GEAR UP; 55 percent, comparison) of the students in this study come from
families with household incomes below \$30,000.[^11] However, despite
their relatively low incomes and lack of college experience, the parents
of students entering seventh grade have high hopes for their children's
education. The survey of parents of seventh-grade students in the
national evaluation of GEAR UP study found that most (87 percent, GEAR
UP; 88 percent, comparison) think their children will get some
postsecondary education, and 76 percent (74 percent, GEAR UP; 78
percent, comparison) think their children will earn at least a
bachelor's degree.

The majority of parents did not attend college themselves. Fifty-four
percent of parents of students at GEAR UP schools and 51 percent of
parents of students at comparison schools of parents did not receive any
postsecondary education. Only 9 percent parents of students at GEAR UP
schools and 12 percent of parents of students at comparison schools
completed a bachelor's degree or higher.

# Services Students Receive

The visits to the projects in the national evaluation provided
descriptive information on the full range of activities and services
undertaken as part of GEAR UP. In each of the projects, the site
visitors documented what was occurring as part of GEAR UP---describing
the student and parent services, teacher professional development
opportunities, curriculum development, other school reforms efforts and
any other activities. This section of the report summarizes what we
learned from the site visits about GEAR UP services and other activities
in the sample of 20 schools.

**Supplemental Academic Support**

Academic support in the form of **tutoring** is the most common service
in GEAR UP. Tutoring can take place both during the regular school day
and during nonschool hours. It ranges from one-on-one or small group
assistance to computer-assisted instruction (CAI) labs that offer
students an opportunity to practice skills. Sometimes academic support
is combined with other activities aimed at engaging students in learning
and in promoting college, such as sports and clubs. The most common
academic support during out-of-school hours is after-school tutoring.
Several of the sampled projects offer Saturday academies that include
tutoring and a few offer tutoring in the morning before the school day
begins. Unfortunately, when tutoring and other services are provided
outside of school hours, projects have difficulty attracting students.
In focus group interviews, students say that their reasons for not
attending activities include transportation problems and competition
from other activities. Students also say that they are just too tired
after school. One or two projects in the evaluation require
out-of-school tutoring prior to standardized testing for students at
risk of poor performance.

Academic support during school hours may focus on a specific course or
on preparation for standardized tests more often than out-of-school
support. A teacher may use a tutor in the classroom to work with
individuals or small groups of students who need more assistance with a
lesson. Whole classes or individual students needing additional help may
use a GEAR UP-supported computer lab where they practice new skills. A
few projects offer tutoring during lunch or study hall periods, when
students can receive more individualized attention with homework or
classwork. Only a couple of projects indicate that students are taken
out of classes for tutoring, and none of the projects indicate "pullout"
from a core course. When pullouts do occur, students are excused from
physical education or elective classes.

Across the projects in this evaluation, most academic support is
provided to students who are having academic problems or who have
performed poorly on standardized tests. Most projects do not have the
staff needed to provide tutoring to all participants, although at least
one project has tried to offer enrichment services to students who do
not need tutoring. Teacher recommendations play a major role in deciding
who receives academic support, both during school hours and
out-of-school.

In their original designs, many of the projects had planned to provide
one-on-one tutoring to most or all students, much of it to be provided
by college students or other volunteers from partner organizations or
the community. The projects experienced considerable difficulty in
finding these volunteers for a variety of reasons---

-   College schedules and middle school schedules conflict.

-   College students do not have transportation to schools or cannot
    commit to sufficient volunteer hours.

-   Many other programs compete for the same college and community
    volunteers.

-   School districts have rules that constrain when tutoring may take
    place (e.g., limiting volunteer tutoring to school hours but not
    allowing pullouts from classes) or slow the process of recruitment
    (e.g., increasingly rigorous background checks).

As a result, many projects are turning to paid tutors. Projects are
hiring regular teachers to work before or after school or on Saturdays,
using project staff as tutors, paying a limited number of college
students who then work part-time (e.g., through college work-study) and
using high-performing high school students who are paid a stipend.

The move away from volunteers to paid tutors may have unplanned
benefits. If studies are correct, volunteer tutors of the type
originally envisioned may not have had much effect on student
performance.[^12] Studies of the determinants of effective tutoring
state that three conditions must be present: training of tutors by
experts, high "dosages" of tutoring and tutoring that follows class
lesson plans. College students who commit to a small number of hours of
GEAR UP tutoring during study halls, lunch periods or after school
rarely receive expert training, have little contact with teachers or
lessons and are unlikely to provide intensive assistance. Paid tutors,
on the other hand, often meet the conditions identified for effective
tutoring. Under GEAR UP, the training received by college and high
school students who provide tutoring ranges from a single two-hour
session to a college course that provides certification, but much of the
training is limited to a few hours. A few projects use student teachers
as tutors. The longitudinal evaluation of GEAR UP will provide an
opportunity to look at the relative effectiveness of different providers
of academic support, including teachers, GEAR UP staff (many of whom
have backgrounds in teaching, counseling or other helping professions),
college students and high school students. The evaluation will also
consider the effects of different environments (e.g., classrooms,
Saturday academies and computer labs) and different approaches (e.g.,
small groups in classrooms, one-on-one homework help and CAI for
standardized testing).

**Guiding Students to College**

The projects in the longitudinal study provide a variety of support
services aimed at encouraging students to plan for college. Depending on
the project, these services include career and college fairs at schools
and colleges, mentoring, college visits, career and school guidance and
special events. **Career and college fairs** take place in almost all
projects. They occur most often at the middle schools and involve
posters and information tables; visits and presentations from college
officials, college students and business representatives (some of whom
are project partners); special games; and other college-related
activities. They may occur on a single day or may involve activities
spread over a week or a month. Sometimes, GEAR UP operates these fairs
independently, but more commonly they are jointly sponsored by GEAR UP
and other programs (like School-to-Work). Fairs are generally schoolwide
(or gradewide) events and, in that sense, are capable of affecting all
the students in the GEAR UP cohorts (or grades) within a school.

All of the projects in the longitudinal study held at least one
**college visit** in the 2000-01 school year, and some organized
multiple visits that year. Students who participated in the focus groups
report that they enjoy the college visits a great deal and that they are
considering college more seriously as a result of the visits. Several
project staffs indicated that GEAR UP is responsible for starting
college visits for seventh-grade students; before GEAR UP, such visits
were not held or only eighth-graders were likely to visit colleges. In
the first year of GEAR UP, when implementation was not complete in many
projects, it was typical for all students in a grade to go on a single
college visit, usually to a partner college for a half or a full school
day. In the second year, there was more diversity in visits. In some
projects, all students went on one visit, but selected, smaller groups
of students went on additional college visits. Typically, these students
are selected on a first-come, first-served basis, but sometimes
participation is based on recommendations from teachers or others. We
will have specific information about student participation in these
activities and will know more about their effects on student behavior
and attitudes in upcoming reports.

About one-third of the sampled projects operate either an **after-school
or a Saturday program** that combines tutoring or other academic
assistance with career exploration, interest clubs or recreational
activities. These programs are most commonly called clubs, after-school
academies, or Saturday academies. After-school programs are typically
held several times a week, and Saturday programs are held from once a
month to every Saturday. Most are staffed by GEAR UP staff, paid
teachers or social service professionals, although one is staffed by
paid college students. Some of the programs are extensions of offerings
available prior to GEAR UP (under 21st-Century Schools, Title I or other
auspices). Typically, these programs are voluntary and sites reported
generally low participation on a regular basis.

As with tutoring, most of the GEAR UP projects in the longitudinal study
planned to provide volunteer one-on-one **mentoring** to all
participants, and, as with tutoring, the inability to find volunteers
has led to reconsideration of that plan. Some projects have largely
given up on providing one-on-one mentoring to students, or they provide
mentors to only a small percentage of students who request them or are
referred by teachers or others. Other projects have redefined mentoring
to mean periodic meetings of a college student or adult volunteer with a
group of middle school students. Some project directors contend that
tutoring has the effect of mentoring as well. One project is using
teachers as mentors, with each teacher meeting with at least two
students. This appears to be the only project in the study providing
mentoring to a relatively large number of GEAR UP participants, but
still, fewer than one-half of the students in the cohort are
participating. If mentoring is defined as a caring, long-term (a year or
more), one-on-one relationship between a student and an adult, it is not
clear at this point that any of the projects in the longitudinal study
offers, or will be able to offer, this service to more than a handful of
students. If the sample size is large enough, the longitudinal study
will offer an opportunity to observe whether the small percentage of
participants who receive long-term mentoring show different outcomes
from comparable students who do not receive this service.

All GEAR UP projects in the longitudinal study provide college and
career information to students, but almost one-third of the projects in
the longitudinal study provide systematic **individual student
guidance** to some or all students. In these projects, counseling is a
major focus of service, with individual plans developed for all students
or for all students having academic or behavioral difficulties. These
plans are called student or career action plans, individual development
plans or individual portfolios. In most of the projects that provide
this service, students meet individually with GEAR UP counselors to
develop the plans and may attend subsequent individual or small group
sessions at least once a year. In one program, teachers receive special
training and serve as facilitators in individual guidance meetings with
students and parents. Projects reported that student plans are likely to
include a list of the courses the student will need to prepare for
college, the results of career interest discussions or inventories,
course grades, scores on standardized tests and other data. In these
projects, the GEAR UP counseling sessions may be the only one-on-one
counseling the students receive, as most of the schools report that
regular counselors do not have time for this level of one-on-one
assistance, especially for seventh-graders.

**Special events.** In addition to college trips and career fairs, many
of the GEAR UP projects hold a variety of special events that are seen
as opportunities to expand the horizons of program participants. Staff
members of the projects and teachers speak about the limited experience
most of the students have had, indicating that many have never traveled
outside their neighborhoods or communities. Special events take the form
of trips to performances, museums and places of employment to name a
few. These special event trips are always voluntary. Only relatively
small percentages of students in grade cohorts are likely to participate
in any single event. A few projects have taken small numbers of students
on trips to distant cities (including the nation's capital). These
exceptional trips are usually a reward for special activity or behavior
(e.g., participating in an essay contest). In one project, two
eighth-grade students were selected to travel to Japan during the summer
as part of a cultural exchange program. Projects appear to vary
substantially in the numbers of special events they provide.

**Summer programs.** Academic assistance and college preparation are
merged in many of the GEAR UP summer offerings. In their first year, the
GEAR UP partnership projects had plans for ambitious summer offerings.
Projects that had only begun to offer student services in the second
half of that year held summer programs that were considerably more
intensive than their school year services. While some offered primarily
remedial education, others provided enrichment programs that combined
instruction in core subjects with trips, hands-on activities, cultural
events and recreation. Services were offered at colleges, middle schools
and community agencies and were planned for three or more weeks. Even
though "slots" were limited, projects reported that most of the summer
programs only attracted a limited number of students. One session that
aimed for 125 students attracted 25 to 30. A program in a school with
several hundred students enrolled 20 in its first summer program.
Transportation was a major problem in some projects, but even projects
in which students could participate at a neighborhood school or
community center did not attract as many students as planned*.* Notable
exceptions included a 10-day residential program at a university and a
one-week marine science institute operated by an existing partnership of
colleges and universities. In both of these summer programs, GEAR UP
students joined others attending programs that were not run by GEAR UP.
Also successful in attracting students was a one-month summer camp
operated in conjunction with a summer school (mandatory for some
students).

In spring 2001, when the second year site visits were conducted, the
plans for summer 2001 called for less remedial instruction and fewer
weeks of service. All but two of the projects were planning a summer
program, but most programs were to be fewer than four weeks in length,
focus on academics and offer field trips and other events. Enrichment
activities were to be offered, especially in science and technology. All
summer programs were to be voluntary, and projects had scaled back their
expectations about the numbers of students who might attend based on the
prior year's experience. Most expected relatively small numbers of
students---one-quarter to one-third of a grade cohort. A few projects
had established eligibility criteria as well and were planning to enroll
only students who had demonstrated good behavior during the school year
or whose parents actively enrolled them in the session. Most projects
planned to enroll students on a first-come, first-served basis, if
oversubscribed. A few projects were planning parent activities in
conjunction with the summer offerings for students, such as instruction
in how to help students with their homework.

# Intensity of Supplemental Services

Much of the GEAR UP intervention is supplemental. Therefore, how much
service or contact with the project typical participants are likely to
receive is an issue. The most intensive services, such as summer camps,
are voluntary and used by only small number of participants. Even
without considering who uses which services, we know that GEAR UP
resources are limited. For those GEAR UP projects in the longitudinal
study, the typical grant expends about \$650 of their federal resources
per student. [^13] This does not include the matching funds they are
required to secure.

The combination of the following factors suggests that the amount of
GEAR UP contact that a "typical" student experiences is likely to be
modest. These factors are:

-   The overall per participant dollar figure.

-   The limited types of "all participant" services such as fairs and
    some college visits.

-   The "targeting" of tutoring, which is the most common and intensive
    service.

-   The voluntary nature of other more intensive services such as the
    summer programs.

Studies of supplemental programs repeatedly have shown that program
effectiveness is directly related to the amount of service students
receive.[^14] For this reason, the longitudinal study of GEAR UP is
paying close attention to who receives each type of service (especially
when participation is voluntary) as well as how much service each
participant receives.

The data also suggest that considerable variety is likely in the
per-student contact hours both within and across projects. The variation
in intensity of services is both intentional on the part of some
projects and an unintentional result of individual projects' designs in
other cases. From the case studies, it appears that the most common
supplemental services offered to **all** students are relatively
low-intensity ones, such as week-long career fairs or one‑day college
visits (although activities related to college visits may extend over
longer periods). Most projects offer one career fair a year and one or
two college visits for all participants. Tutoring, while far more
intensive, is used by a subset of students with academic need. Project
staff have indicated that the number of students participating in
tutoring varies across projects from one-quarter to three-quarters.

Almost one-third of the projects provide one-on-one guidance services to
students with academic need. However, guidance counselors reported that
contact hours per participant are relatively small ranging from less
than one hour to about four or five hours a year, with sessions lasting
from 30 minutes to one hour. Additionally, the guidance hours received
under GEAR UP are not duplicative of counseling services already
provided by schools because counselors reported insufficient time to
meet with each seventh-grade student each year. In programs in which
GEAR UP offers a course (such as a science or career class), the hours
per enrollee are high but the percentage of a cohort enrolled in the
course is often low. Projects report that only one-quarter of a cohort
or less may be enrolled in these courses (such as a MESA or AVID
class).[^15] The same holds true for the summer programs. The summer
programs are intensive, including full-day and even residential projects
that last one to four weeks, but only one-quarter of the cohort or less
may enroll.

Only the projects that have a widespread effect on instruction, through
reform of core curricula or extensive in-service to improve instruction,
are likely to provide a service (i.e., instruction) that affects an
entire cohort at a relatively intense level. As we will discuss in more
detail later, one of the 20 projects in the longitudinal study is
currently offering a new curriculum in a core academic subject that
affects instruction for **all** students in a cohort. A few additional
projects are embarked on reforms that may have an effect on curricula
for all or may affect all students through policy changes in the future
(e.g., by leading a district to mandate eighth-grade algebra for all
students or by encouraging students to explore career choices and use
instructional software programs).

The GEAR UP program was specifically designed with enough flexibility to
permit a project to develop models of service that fit the needs of
their school and its students within the cohort structure. The varying
intensities of services and differences in the services provided an
opportunity to understand how projects served a cohort of students. Most
GEAR UP projects planned their offerings so that some services were not
intended to be provided to all students, especially remedial services.
Further, resource limitations meant that participation in many widely
reported GEAR UP services was limited, voluntary or both. Students and
their parents elect to participate in services such as tutoring during
nonschool hours, afterschool or Saturday programs, mentoring, optional
college visits, special events, and the summer programs. Many of these
services could not by offered to all students even if student and parent
interest was there because projects do not have the capacity to provide
them (i.e., the staff resources and funds). There is only one project
among the 20 that, as a matter of policy, spends resources **solely**
for those supplemental services that can be provided equally to all
students and purchases only materials that can be used equally by all
students. A second project provides enrichment services to all students
who do not receive tutoring. In short, the design of services and the
resource levels mean that most GEAR UP projects cannot provide the same
services and service levels to everyone. These projects typically
evaluate the students to determine their individual needs and how best
to serve them.

**Services Parents Receive**

**Involving parents in GEAR UP.** In addition to students, GEAR UP is
charged with providing information on postsecondary education to parents
as well as promoting parent involvement in education. The legislation
calls for close contact with, and activities designed for, parents.
Through the visits to the projects included in the longitudinal study, a
preliminary picture emerged about the relationship between the GEAR UP
projects and parents, as well as the status of parent services. With
some notable exceptions, the projects are experiencing difficulty in
engaging parents in activities.

Staff members in more than one-half of the projects in the longitudinal
study indicate that attracting parents to meetings and events is quite
difficult. In addition to sending out newsletters and bulletins,
projects have tried the following parent initiatives without much
success in attracting large numbers of parents:

-   Parent and child workshops on college awareness or helping children
    study.

-   Parent components in Saturday programs.

-   Parent meetings or "nights."

-   GED classes.

-   Parent auxiliaries (boards, alliances, committees).

Some project staff members have become frustrated with the lack of
parent responsiveness, a viewpoint echoed by teachers in the same
project schools, who attributed poor attendance to parents' lack of
concern with their children's education. Parents, in contrast, saw
themselves as involved in, and concerned about, their children's
education.

About one-third of the projects we visited, reported that they are
successfully reaching parents. Two types of approaches seem to work in
those projects.

-   Four of the projects enroll parents in **parent institutes**. In
    three of these projects, the institutes are operated by a contractor
    under a state GEAR UP grant. The fourth is operated as part of a
    citywide effort to empower parents. Typically, the institutes are 9-
    or 10-week workshops that provide parents with information and
    assistance to help their children prepare for college. Those
    operated by the contractor rely on the contractor to recruit
    parents. Instruction is offered in English and Spanish, and child
    care is provided. Parents "graduate" if they attend a certain
    percentage of sessions. All four projects involved in institutes
    report large enrollments and plans to hold more workshops next year.

-   Two projects hold **individual parent and child counseling
    sessions** at school for all or most of a cohort, and staff in an
    additional two projects make large numbers of home visits (100 or
    more during the school year). In one case, the individual meetings
    with parents and their children are "facilitated" by specially
    trained teachers with 90 percent of parents attending. In the other
    projects, the parent sessions are operated by GEAR UP staff
    (including specialized community liaisons). Although clearly not
    mandatory for parents, all of the projects make strong efforts to
    impress upon parents how important these sessions are for their
    children's future.

Both of these types of approaches require considerable effort (i.e.,
staff resources) to organize, recruit parents, schedule and run. The
activities themselves give parents personal attention, provide
inducements to come (real or perceived) or make it easy to participate.
This is particularly true of the home visits. They also require parents
to commit in advance to attending, and if they fail to attend, their
absence is quite visible.

**Support Schools Receive**

**School reform.** The most important distinction to emerge from the
site visits about the services that GEAR UP provides is between
instructional or other school reform efforts that are part of the
regular curriculum and operation of the school and all other GEAR UP
services. Each school selects its own approach to serving an entire
cohort of students. To address the comprehensive list of objectives for
GEAR UP, projects in the evaluation developed plans that included a
broad array of services designed to meet the requirements of the
legislation and the application guidelines. Most projects in the
national evaluation provide varying amounts of direct assistance to
students and have limited involvement in curriculum or instruction at
the schools. In most of these projects, students receive varying amounts
of services.

The school reform projects are interesting because they represent a
distinct group of GEAR UP grants. Among the 20 projects visited in the
first and second years of the GEAR UP program, a few are fully or
partially involved in curricular or other school reform activities
likely to engage all students or have a visible impact on the schools
that the GEAR UP participants attend.

-   **One project in the evaluation is undertaking a major curriculum
    reform effort.** This joint effort by the schools, district,
    community college and universities has resulted in new math and
    language arts curricula for seventh and eighth grades as well as
    changes to school schedules and texts. Teachers participated in
    drafting the reforms and received extensive paid training. Resource
    teachers are present in the schools to demonstrate the curriculum
    and work with the teachers on implementation. Respondents report
    that the new curricula are more rigorous, are supplemented with
    additional help for students who are having difficulty, and offer
    more challenging courses for advanced students. The project has also
    implemented other services more typical of GEAR UP projects as a
    whole such as a college and career awareness component during
    homeroom, weekend classes for seventh-graders who will take algebra
    in eighth grade, after-school mentoring clubs, college visits and a
    summer college residential program.

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-   **A few of the other projects in the evaluation have components that
    augment the instructional programs in the schools they serve but are
    not large-scale school reforms.** One project has used GEAR UP to
    expand a previously purchased program called NovaNET, adding
    resource persons in computer labs and teacher training.[^16] Another
    project has introduced two new courses, a science course and a study
    skills and career awareness course based on AVID.[^17] These
    courses, however, are appended to the school day, and relatively few
    students participate. In one project, the director played an
    important role in reform, helping to draft the school's improvement
    plan, but the GEAR UP services themselves remain supplemental. Two
    projects have provided resources for teacher training to improve
    instructional abilities in core subjects, and one has installed a
    computer-assisted instruction (CAI) lab in each school where
    students can practice English, math and science lessons. One project
    has created school teams that can decide how to spend school-level
    grant funds of more than \$20,000 each year. Some of the funds were
    used to purchase instructional assistance such as career information
    software and for teacher training by a writing specialist. In these
    projects, as in the rest of the projects visited, the greater focus
    of resources is on serving students directly by supplementing their
    education with tutoring or other services.

One hypothesis is that where GEAR UP has an impact on the quality and
rigor of instruction, it is more likely to have an impact on student
academic performance and, hence, preparation for college. If this is
true, then being able to affect the content and delivery of instruction
seems preferable to providing supplementary services both from the
standpoint of intensity of intervention as well as from the standpoint
of making reforms of lasting value. If identifying the individual needs
of students provides the greatest benefit on academic performance, then
providing supplemental services, an underlying premise of GEAR UP, is
warranted. The national evaluation will provide an opportunity to look
at these hypotheses, but there are some limits to what the study can
measure. As noted above, there are few projects in the group focusing on
school reform efforts. Furthermore, although several projects may be
moving toward greater involvement in instruction in the participating
middle schools, the cohort in the longitudinal component of the national
evaluation will be leaving middle school by the end of the 2001-02
school year. Thus, these students may not experience the full impact of
those reforms. Nonetheless, the study can examine the early impact of
those GEAR UP projects that seek to influence middle school instruction
on short-term student outcomes (such as performance in algebra or other
core courses) compared with projects that focus on other services.

**Professional Development Opportunities.** Most GEAR UP-supported
professional development activities appeared to be relatively limited
and short term for the 20 projects we visited. Aside from the one
project that has introduced major curriculum development and a few
others that have introduced new courses or instructional and career
software, most teacher in-service education is not linked to specific
GEAR UP curricula or other school reforms. Instead, projects have held
one or more workshops each on a wide range of topics such as using math
manipulatives, teaching writing, managing classrooms or raising teacher
expectations about student performance. Projects may also encourage
teachers to become more professionally engaged by supporting
teacher-selected in-service training workshops, classes at colleges or
attendance at professional meetings. One project provides partial
subsidies for classes at a partner university. Some projects purchase
software for career information or tutoring and provide teachers with
the training to guide or manage their use. Although it is difficult to
generalize, projects with strong involvement of college or university
education departments appear more able to offer teacher in-service
training directly (employing professors). Other projects employ
specialists or subsidize teachers to pursue their own professional
development activities. Two projects had not undertaken any professional
development activities as of the spring 2001 site visits, but both had
extensive plans for the 2001-02 school year.

Among the 20 projects, the amount of professional development supported
by GEAR UP rose dramatically from the first to the second year of the
program. In the first year, many project staffs reported that teachers
in participating schools were skeptical of GEAR UP and viewed it as
competing with classroom instruction for the students' time. As a
result, many projects did not implement professional development because
staffs feared that teachers would view the efforts as criticism of their
practices. Much of that concern with teacher support appears to have
abated by the end of the second year, and projects now seem to be
working with teachers to select in-service training, decide on project
instructional purchases (e.g., computers, classroom materials,
textbooks, videos and software---career, tutoring or instructional), and
provide the training to use them. In addition, a few projects have
introduced mini-grant programs in which teachers can propose individual
or team instructional improvements or student activities, and GEAR UP
provides the resources to implement them. In focus groups, teachers
report satisfaction with the professional development opportunities that
GEAR UP provides. They also indicate that GEAR UP staff members have
been receptive to their recommendations for classroom assistance,
in-service education, special events and instructional purchases.

What remains to be seen is whether the mix of professional development
activities implemented by GEAR UP will have an impact on the students in
the longitudinal study of the program. First, there is a certain ad hoc
quality to the selection of in-service offerings and considerable
diversity across projects. Furthermore, in many projects, GEAR UP
professional development is voluntary on the part of teachers, is
supplemental to other in-service offerings and is probably not
meaningful to examine apart from the full range of available teacher
education and training. In addition, as we have already noted, the
cohorts in the study may experience little of the impact of professional
development now underway as they will be leaving middle school at the
end of the 2001-02 school year. Probably the most important issue the
longitudinal study can examine is the relative impact of GEAR UP's
support for teacher training to implement major reforms in a few
projects (core curriculum reform and introduction to NovaNET, AVID or
MESA courses).

# Administering GEAR UP Partnerships

GEAR UP is designed to be a community-wide educational effort. GEAR UP
seeks to draw on the interests and expertise of a wide range of
institutional actors with different perspectives on the schools and
their needs. As a demonstration effort with required matching funds,
GEAR UP has also been designed with a view toward the future,
recognizing that after five years, the federal funds will end and will
need to be replaced with other resources. For both of these reasons, the
partnership grants are designed to engage school districts, colleges and
universities, businesses, community and religious organizations and
others. Also implicit in GEAR UP is the assumption that a partnership is
preferable to unilateral action by schools and that there is an
intrinsic benefit in cooperation among agencies with different
competencies, approaches and views of accountability to achieve academic
goals.

**The Partnership.** GEAR UP requires the involvement of organizations,
businesses or entities other than school districts and colleges or
universities; however, educational partners dominate most GEAR UP
projects in the longitudinal study. Although some projects began with
ambitious plans to engage noneducation partners in services, by the
second year of the program only a few projects had identified important
roles for community agencies, religious organizations, businesses or
other types of noneducation partners. In a few projects, noneducation
partners that had no clear role or could not provide resources had been
dropped and new partners added. New partners are likely to be associated
with education. New partners include additional colleges and
organizations linked to particular educational programs or services the
project uses (such as an occupational skills training or a software
program). In addition, a few projects also engage social welfare
agencies already actively involved in participating schools (such as
Communities in Schools, Inc.).

**Decision-makers.** Many projects began with plans for elaborate formal
decision making among all partners. They anticipated frequent partner
meetings, sometimes augmented by subcommittees that would meet and make
recommendations to the partnerships. By the second year, the number of
formal all-partner meetings appears to have diminished to only a few per
year in most of the projects.

Subcommittees are rarely formal entities. Key partners, including
colleges and school districts, are relying more heavily on GEAR UP staff
(project directors or site coordinators) to decide on, and carry out,
project operations. As projects have developed and grown, more of those
staff positions have been shifted from central locations to individual
participating schools. This change in location has led to more
interaction with school staffs, enabling principals and teachers to play
a greater role in deciding on, and providing, services. Principals are
also playing an important role in selecting GEAR UP school-site staff.
As already noted, more of the tutoring services are being delivered by
teachers rather than college students or other volunteers. In addition,
school-level administrators and teachers are working directly with GEAR
UP school-level staff to decide what services to provide and which
students will receive them. Principals or other school personnel are
also participating in project steering committees along with district
officials. All of these changes mean that schools are playing an
increasingly important role in project design and operations. For some
projects this change also means that district officials are becoming
less involved in project operations.

As for other sources of influence on project design and operations, most
of the projects point to the central importance of the original federal
grants application in deciding how to organize their projects and in
determining what services to offer. The persons who drafted the
application tended to be college, university or school district
officials or grant writers who relied heavily upon the announcement to
design project governance and services. Not only do the goals of the
projects reiterate the announcement, but the initial plans to engage
many noneducation partners and offer a wide array of services (rather
than engaging a few partners and limiting the services) also are
probably largely attributable to the announcement. What projects have
found, however, is that some parts of the original announcement have
proven difficult to implement. In particular, the concept of a
broad-based decision-making partnership, the emphasis on mentoring, the
requirement for parental involvement and reaching all the students in a
cohort have all proven problematic.

**Apportioning GEAR UP Resources.** The vast majority of GEAR UP
resources are used to provide staffing for the projects. Most of the
projects in the longitudinal study report that they spend three-quarters
or more of their federal resources on salaries and benefits of project
staff and contractors who manage and provide services. Reflecting the
average \$713,000 size of GEAR UP partnership grants, most GEAR UP
projects have relatively small professional staffs that are engaged in
design and administrative tasks as well as direct provision of services.
Typically, GEAR UP staffs in the second year of the grant include:

-   A full-time project director or other day-to-day administrator who
    rarely provides direct services to students.

-   Possibly a second full-time administrative or curriculum
    professional who combines administrative and service
    responsibilities.

-   A full-time site coordinator or resource teacher at each
    participating middle school (who administers and usually provides
    some mix of classes, tutoring, counseling, workshops, lab
    supervision and parent services).

-   Possibly other part-time school-level staff (e.g., teachers who
    tutor after school or who participate in the summer program and
    college-student volunteers or paid assistants).

Several projects engage consultants, almost all of whom are part-time
contractors, to develop curricula, provide teacher in-service training,
conduct evaluations or provide other services. In addition, principals
and teachers provide "match" staffing contributions to the projects.
There are unusual staffing arrangements at some projects, however. For
example, in one single-school project, the principal is also the project
director; there is a GEAR UP counselor-consultant; and six teachers are
paid for eight hours a week each to provide an additional period of GEAR
UP initiated instruction each day. As already noted, over time many
projects have moved greater shares of staff to the school level than
originally anticipated.

A few projects are far more heavily staffed. For example, a one-school
project reports a full-time project director, a full-time site
coordinator (co-director), a full-time coordinator of Saturday
activities, three full-time case managers providing guidance services to
at-risk students, and six part-time staff for the Saturday program. In
another project, two participating middle schools have 11 professional
GEAR UP staff, including two substitute teachers so that regular
teachers can be freed up for curriculum planning and in-service
training. In addition to a full-time project director, one project has
three full-time professional positions at each of three participating
middle schools. The evaluation will be in a position to assess if larger
numbers of professional staff per school have a substantial effect on
the intensity of student involvement with GEAR UP and hence student
outcomes.

# GEAR UP and the School Environment

Any new program faces implementation challenges, and GEAR UP has been no
exception. In the first year of GEAR UP site visits, it was apparent
that some of the schools in the longitudinal study had serious
educational problems. They were characterized by poor academic
performance, high staff turnover and low teacher morale. Some were in
danger of state takeover or other corrective action because of poor
student performance over many years. Some had been selected for GEAR UP
specifically because the project held the promise of additional
resources for school improvement, but the risks of placing new projects
in such troubled environments were great. Initially, GEAR UP staff in
many projects told us that there was considerable teacher resistance to
GEAR UP. In particular, teachers saw GEAR UP as having the potential to
take time away from academics just when schools were under pressure to
raise student performance on standardized tests. GEAR UP staff members
were concerned that the projects would have great difficulty gaining
acceptance in the schools, some of which had not volunteered for GEAR UP
participation.

From the second year visits, site visitors report that the status of
GEAR UP in the schools appears to have improved markedly. In a few
cases, GEAR UP staff members are directly involved in efforts at school
improvement, helping to draft plans for schools in danger of state
takeover or supporting major reforms (such as NovaNET or new curricula).
More commonly, GEAR UP resources provide substantial amounts of tutoring
to students in preparation for state assessment tests. Several schools
have new principals who are more inclined to pursue reforms than their
predecessors and view GEAR UP as an opportunity to upgrade educational
offerings and professional development opportunities. In a few projects,
GEAR UP is part of a district or citywide effort at educational
improvement, parent empowerment or other reform. If those we spoke with
are indicative of teachers as a whole, concerns about the program,
especially the concern that it will take time away from academics, have
greatly declined. Some teachers felt that GEAR UP is creating a more
positive climate in the school.

Part Two: State GEAR UP Projects

About one-third of the GEAR UP resources are spread across 30 state
projects with the average award being about \$2.4 million for 2001-02.
During the second year of GEAR UP (2000-01), there were 28 GEAR UP state
grantees serving more than 165,000 students, with nearly one-half (47
percent) of the students being in seventh or eighth grades. According to
the Annual Performance Reports submitted by these grantees, students
were evenly divided by gender and were predominately members of minority
groups. Whites were the largest group served (40 percent), followed by
African American students (22 percent) and Hispanic students (20
percent). Approximately 7 percent of the students were Asian. American
Indians and Alaska Natives were about 7 percent, and 4 percent were
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. Twenty-one percent of the
students were identified as LEP.[^18] This is higher than nationally
reported numbers, which indicated that in 1999-2000 roughly 9 percent of
all public school students were LEP.[^19]

As noted earlier, the state projects have fewer design constraints than
partnerships and greater latitude with respect to determining
participants and deciding what to offer. Because the designs of the
state projects are all quite different, and, hence, "typical" student
assistance varies a great deal, the national evaluation of GEAR UP is
not including these projects and their student participants in the
longitudinal study. Nonetheless, the national evaluation staff has twice
visited a random sample of seven state projects drawn from the 21 states
that were awarded grants in the first grant cycle. Based on these seven
states, we have identified two distinct approaches to GEAR UP project
administration---projects administered directly by state agencies and
projects administered primarily through subgrants designed much like
partnership grants. This section of the report briefly describes the key
features of both types of state project. It then provides some general
observations about the common features of the seven state grants.

# Grants Where All or Most Services Are Administered by State Agencies

Four of the seven grantees visited administer the GEAR UP services
directly from the state agency where the grant is housed. In one state,
the governor's office is the lead agency, in partnership with the state
commission on higher education and other nongovernmental organizations.
The project serves one high-poverty, low-performance middle school in
each of nine school districts or about 2,000 students in the first year.
There are 11 full-time equivalent GEAR UP counselors at the nine
schools, providing tutoring, career awareness and some instruction
during school hours using state-designated curricula. Scholarship funds
have been placed in a trust for use in later years. In another state,
the GEAR UP project is administered by the state agency that provides
college financial assistance through 16 regional entities that recruit
and enroll seventh- and eighth-grade students throughout the state in
the 21st-Century Scholars Program. The program guarantees that any
low-income eighth-grade student, who graduates from high school with a
2.0 GPA, does not use drugs or alcohol or commit a crime, enrolls in a
state institution and applies on time for financial aid will receive
free college tuition. The state is using GEAR UP scholarship funds to
expand summer school scholarships before the freshman year and the
summer after the first year of college and to introduce mentor
scholarships that enable college juniors and seniors to mentor freshmen
and sophomores.

## Grants Where all or Most Services Are Conducted through Subgrants to Schools or Districts

The remaining three projects from the sample have awarded grants (i.e.,
subgrants of federal funds) to schools or districts within the state to
operate GEAR UP projects. For example, in one state, the regents for
higher education award small six‑month planning grants and 12‑month
implementation grants of \$15,000 each to 30 high-poverty school
districts each year to meet locally identified needs---for tutoring,
mentoring, homework hotlines, reading programs, entrance exam
preparation, summer school or professional development. Not all funds
are awarded to districts, however. The project has also provided
workshops on interpreting state assessment test results, supported
summer math academies at colleges and developed instructional videos,
parent guides and television and radio commercials. GEAR UP scholarship
funds are augmenting the state scholarships by filling the "unmet need"
gap and will be spent as students now in GEAR UP enter college. In
another state, the state education agency (SEA) has made subgrants to
partnerships of one to three middle schools, a high school and a
college. These subgrants provide GEAR UP services in 21 middle schools
with high rates of NSLP eligibility and low student mobility. State
officials chose schools with low mobility rates because they believed it
would be impossible for GEAR UP to have effects in schools with high
student turnover rates. School-level activities are not fully
implemented yet but have included career days, college visits, special
events, Saturday programs and limited professional development. In
addition, the SEA has undertaken statewide activities that include
technical assistance to participating schools, a statewide student
conference and parent workshops. Last year the state obtained a
scholarship waiver. It plans to award the first scholarships in fall
2001 for in-state tuition and room and board after other state
scholarship sources are exhausted.[^20]

**Common Features.** Most of the seven state grants visited:

-   Provide (or will provide) student services similar to those provided
    by the partnerships.

-   Use a "cohort" approach (only one focuses primarily on low income
    students within participating schools).

-   Try to engage parents in their children's education.

-   Provide some professional development opportunities for teachers.

Given the greater design flexibility in state grants, it appears that
most state grantees have, nonetheless, chosen a course of action much
like the partnership grantees. With one or two exceptions, however, it
has taken these seven states longer to decide on and implement services
than it has taken the partnerships. The projects with subgranting
arrangements were not all fully operational in spring 2001. Further, the
per student resources are lower in the state projects than in the
partnerships.

Finally, most of the scholarship funds awarded to states are not being
spent at this time. Although the majority of the seven projects are
administered by higher education agencies, almost all of the seven
states have obtained waivers allowing them to spend all or a large share
of their scholarship funds when students who are now in ninth grade
(2001-02 school year) or lower reach college age---four or five years
from now.

Due to the variation in approaches taken by the state grantees, the
decision was made to visit a new set of seven states during spring 2002.

Endnotes

[^1]: See, for example, C. Howley, M. Strange, and R. Bickel. (2000).
    *Research about school size and school performance in improvished
    communities.* Washington, D.C.: Office of Educational Research and
    Improvement, U.S. Department of Education.\
    T.R. Guskey. (1997). *The relationship between socioeconomic
    characteristics and school-level performance assessment results.*
    Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational
    Research Association (Chicago, Ill., March 1997).\
    C. R. Howley and R. Bickel. (2000). *When it comes to schooling . .
    . small works: school size, poverty, and student achievement.*
    Randolph, Vt.: Rural School and Community Trust.

[^2]: Sufficient information to calculate per student funding amounts
    for the 1999 and new 2000 grantees was reported by 218 grantees (92
    percent) in their 2001 Annual Performance Reports (APRs).

[^3]: Priority students are defined as students in preschool through
    twelfth grade who are eligible to be counted under Section 1124(c)
    of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Title I), for
    free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Act or
    for assistance under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF),
    authorized by Title I of the Personal Responsibility and Work
    Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1966.

[^4]: A random sample of these projects was selected stratifying by
    approach, by fiscal agent and by whether or not the project was
    located in a state with a state GEAR UP grant. Only projects
    planning to serve a new seventh-grade cohort in fall 2000 were
    included in the final selection so that baseline measures of student
    attitudes and aspirations could be obtained. Consequently, the
    sample is not statistically representative of all GEAR UP grantees.

[^5]: Of the 20 sites visited, three projects are not participating in
    the longitudinal study. Reasons for withdrawing include delays in
    obtaining district approval to conduct research and difficulty
    obtaining parental permission to survey students as well as access
    student records.

[^6]: The grant funding cycle for FY 2001 was Sept. 1, 2000, through
    Aug. 31, 2001. Grantees were required to submit their APRs for FY
    2001 by May 1, 2001.

[^7]: National Center for Education Statistics. (June 2000). *Statistics
    in brief. Overview of public elementary and secondary schools and
    districts: School year 1998-99.* Washington, D.C.: Office of
    Educational Research and Improvement.

[^8]: Percent of students identified as limited English proficient
    reported by the National Clearinghouse for English Language
    Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs.

[^9]: Only 14 projects participating in the longitudinal study submitted
    complete student background and participation data in time to be
    included in this report. The projects that withdrew from the
    longitudinal study were visited in 2001 and are included in the site
    visit information in this report.

[^10]: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education
    Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public elementary-secondary
    school universe survey," 1999-2000, and "Local education agency
    universe survey," 1999-2000.

[^11]: By comparison, children from families with incomes at or below
    130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals
    (breakfasts, lunches and snacks) under the National School Lunch
    Program. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of
    the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price meals. For the
    period July 1, 2000, through June 30, 2001, 130 percent of the
    poverty level was \$22,165 for a family of four; 185 percent was
    \$31,543 (*Federal Register*, Vol. 65, No. 65).

[^12]: See, for example, M. Invernizzi and M. Ouellette. (2001).
    *Improving children's reading ability through volunteer reading
    tutoring programs. Issue Brief.* Washington, D.C.: Center for Best
    Practices, National Governors Association.

[^13]: The \$650 is for all services, not just student services. It
    covers services for parents and teachers as well as curriculum
    reform efforts plus overall project operations.

[^14]: See, for example, B.A. Wasik. (1997). *Volunteer tutoring
    programs. A review of research on acheivement outcomes. Report No.
    14.* Baltimore, Md.: Center for Research on Education of Students
    Placed At Risk. Funded by: Office of Educational Research and
    Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. See also R. H. Fenske, C.
    A. Geranios, J. E. Keller, and D. E. Moore. (1997). *Early
    intervention programs. Opening the door to higher education.*
    Washington, D.C.: ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education. (ED 412
    863).

[^15]: MESA stands for the Math, Engineering and Science Achievement.
    This is a "hands-on" program that has been developed by several
    university engineering departments. AVID stands for Advancement Via
    Individual Determination. This program is designed to help
    underachieving students with high academic potential prepare for
    entrance into a four-year college.

[^16]: NovaNET is a software program that links educators with
    technology and teaching methods. It helps students study for courses
    and standardized tests. Students are also provided laptops under
    this program.

[^17]: In AVID, college and middle or high school partners jointly
    develop the curriculum for an academic class. This class is designed
    to provide low-income students and first-generation college students
    with academic assistance. AVID provides information about college
    preparatory courses and financial aid, tutoring and other
    encouragement to enroll in college preparatory courses and apply for
    college. The structure for AVID includes a regularly scheduled
    academic elective, a rigorous curriculum, structured tutorials,
    parent training and a site team composed of the AVID coordinator,
    the principal, core academic teachers and students.

[^18]: Information on the number of Limited English Proficient (LEP)
    students was reported by 16 of the 28 states.

[^19]: Reported by the National Clearinghouse for English Language
    Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs.

[^20]: Projects that are serving priority students and those that were
    grantees under the National Early Intervention Scholarship and
    Partnership (NEISP) program served 12th-grade students during
    2000-01. Those students who enrolled in college were eligible for
    GEAR UP scholarships in fall 2001.