Downward Bound

[June 6th, 2007] Imagine a lifeguard who recruits 10 kids for swimming classes. He then denies half of those kids lessons and lets them flail in the deep end of the pool. He calls it an attempt to test the effectiveness of his teaching methods.

Some educators and federal legislators say that's just how the U.S. Department of Education intends to abandon needy high-school students in Portland.

For close to 30 years, a federal program called Upward Bound has paid for Portland State University to offer college-prep services to about 90 low-income high-school students a year from Jefferson, Benson, Marshall, Madison, Grant and Franklin in the Portland Public Schools district. In many cases, these students' parents have not gone to college themselves.

Academically speaking, the teens are the ones at the deep end of the pool. Upward Bound was designed to throw them a lifeline by giving the students extra tutoring and counseling so they finish high school and go to college. The program boasts of having helped 95 percent of its students enroll in post-secondary education.

But a recent decision by the U.S. Department of Education, which funds PSU's program and 800 others serving a total of 60,000 teenagers nationwide, has put the PSU program in the same position as the morally bankrupt lifeguard.

A new condition of federal Upward Bound grants is that selected universities like PSU participate in the program's latest evaluation.

That evaluation calls on PSU for the first time ever to recruit twice as many low-income students as it can serve, then persuade those extra students and their families to forgo the help and agree to be studied in a control group.

"Those students who are randomly assigned to the control group will not be accepted into the Upward Bound program...and will be embargoed from participation in Upward Bound," according to a description of the evaluation.

The idea is that the success of the decades-old, $278 million national program can be measured by comparing the lives of participants to those who were deliberately shut out. For years, though, programs at individual universities have had to report what happens to students who enroll in their programs, which is why PSU already considers its program a hit.

The new approach has education researchers and some federal legislators crying foul. In a May 23 letter to other lawmakers, members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently called the experiment an "unethical bait-and-switch" and a modern-day Tuskegee (for the horrific syphilis experiment that ended in the 1970s after researchers allowed hundreds of poor black men to languish untreated with the sexually transmitted disease).

"We're not against evaluation, we're against abusing vulnerable teenagers," says Susan Trebach, a spokeswoman for the Council for Opportunity in Education, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group that's trying to kill the new measure in Congress.

Robert Gill, who's about to finish his freshman year at Portland's Jefferson High School, just watched his older brother get his bachelor's degree from Temple University in Philadelphia. "He's the first to graduate from our family," Gill said proudly.

Both his older brother and sister participated in Upward Bound at PSU, and Gill is in the program now. He had long looked forward to signing up but worried he wouldn't get the chance when President George Bush proposed eliminating Upward Bound entirely in 2005 and 2006 to shift the money to his No Child Left Behind initiative.

He's happy after his first year in Upward Bound, but critical of the new evaluation that could affect his schoolmates.

"Upward Bound is at the mercy of the government," the 15-year-old Gill says. "Last year, they wanted to shut it down. Why mess up a program that's trying to help people?"

Pacific University in Forest Grove ran its own version of Upward Bound for 20 years, serving 19 students from Roosevelt and Cleveland high schools this year. But Pacific has decided to let its grant run out because of the new rules and other factors, says university spokesman Philip Akers.

Phillip Dirks, the director of PSU's Upward program, says his group has not yet begun recruiting the students who would be subjects of the forthcoming evaluation. That won't happen until later this summer. In the meantime, he's hoping it never actually does. He met with Oregon's congressional delegation in March.

"To offer something like this to people and then deny one group the service, just doesn't sit well with us," Dirks says. "I'm still hoping our legislators will rally and use some persuasion to get it stopped."