Community colleges have been seen as a gateway into higher education and social mobility. Matriculation of students into higher education has been critical to guiding and directing the rest of their experience as a student. Not many scholars have examined the experiences of students with assessment and placement during matriculation at community college. There remains a dearth of literature regarding the experiences of Latinx community college students in particular. This dissertation presents an in-depth examination of the experiences of Latinx students with assessment and placement at a California community college. This study was conducted when standardized placement testing was the most common way of assessing students’ mathematics skills.Further, this research was undertaken before introducing changes to assessment and placement due to AB 705’s multiple measures policy implementation in the fall of 2019. Latinx student experiences with standardized placement testing were shaped by institutional barriers to course enrollment, determined mathematics proficiency that was not reflective of their perceived breadth of skills, and a varying reliance on unsound placement tests. Findings and implications apply to states that continue to use standardized placement testing and those that have moved to use multiple measures.

While significant efforts have been made to address educational disparities for students of color, there is a critical need to understand how institutional practices, policies, and power hierarchies create and perpetuate exclusion in rural contexts. California’s San Joaquin Valley relies heavily on Mexican (Indigenous and mestizo) and Central American (im)migrant farm labor. These workers are largely excluded from labor rights and protections. Despite this, there is limited research exploring the intersection of global agriculture, regional educational disparities, and racial domination in California’s marginalized (im)migrant farm-working communities. This qualitative inquiry examined how spaces are racially coded and intersect with the regional political economy to exacerbate educational inequality in rural unincorporated farm-working communities. This work was grounded in Critical Place Inquiry (CPI) and employed Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and Resistance Theory. I documented testimonios, through pláticas, with 20 (im)migrant Mexican mothers to unpack the contemporary implications of the historical racialization of farm work on post-secondary education access and how this context mediated these mothers’ resistance to subordination. Data analysis revealed insights into each mother’s strategic resistance in navigating school-sponsored spaces to challenge institutional unaccountability and deficit narratives of assimilation, while rearticulating their agency within existing power structures. They did so by engaging critically with the contexts they navigated, challenging problem displacement, and transferring this knowledge to their children. The findings highlight the need to address equity and opportunity in K-12 educational settings through a context-informed racial justice lens, including targeting school leadership, centering farm-working parents in decision-making processes, investing in promising practices such as dual enrollment and online learning to bridge the persistent opportunity gaps, and using school-community partnerships as political sites for material transformation. Keywords: Rural education, testimonios pláticas, parent empowerment, coloniality of power, k-16 access and equity, farmworking families, unincorporated central California

Students of color who attend low resource schools face more obstacles because of the systemic barriers toward students of color and toward students who attend low resource schools. This qualitative study aims to explore how academically high achieving students of color overcome obstacles and how these students perceive in-school support. This population was chosen because they provide a unique perspective on the obstacles students with similar demographic backgrounds must overcome to achieve academic success. These participants are considered success stories; however, this does not diminish the obstacles they overcame, especially if the obstacles are systemic. Learning how these students perceive in-school support is informative of how schools can support students of color who attend low resource schools in ways that they feel supported and cared for. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted (via Zoom, due to the COVID pandemic) to learn about the participants’ lived experiences and insights into how they overcome their obstacles. They also shared their experiences with in-school support such as teachers, counselors, and college preparatory programs. Phenomenological variant ecological systems theory (PVEST; Spencer et al., 1997) was used to understand the participants’ lived experiences and how they perceived in-school support. This framework provided a way to understand how participants made sense of their experiences with in-school support and used that as the foundation for how they utilize in-school support with future obstacles. Four themes emerged from the findings during the data analysis: systemic discriminations, the academic resilience narrative, types of in-school support participants utilized, and meaning-making of in-school support. These findings showed that the education system needs to remove systemic barriers that hinder students’ academic success, and the narrative of academic resilience is still extant in the education system. Most of the barriers listed by the participants can be remedied within the education system to create a more inclusive and supportive education system for students regardless of race or socioeconomic status.

Keywords: students of color, in-school support, phenomenological variant ecological systems theory, academic resilience  

In California, dual enrollment refers to any high school student who enrolls in two systems at the same time, most commonly a community college and a high school—this student is thus concurrently enrolled in both high school and college. Students may receive credit from both systems for select courses. California Assembly Bill 288 (AB 288) established the College and Career Access Pathways (CCAP) Act, which enabled high school and community college partnerships for the purpose of dual enrollment. AB 288 attempts to provide early college access and credit, particularly for students least likely to attend college and those most under-resourced for college success. AB 288 sought to shift dual enrollment away from its historical focus on early college access for students deemed “highly gifted” and instead use the practice as a high school completion and college success strategy.

California, through policies like AB 288, has demonstrated significant interest in increasing and scaling effective practices that address disproportionate access and outcomes for historically minoritized communities. However, an examination of the literature reveals both a gap in research and service for programs and interventions meant to support community college participation for underrepresented student populations; those enrolled at continuation high schools among them. In light of the revised mandate to leverage dual enrollment practices as a high school completion, college preparation, and college connection strategy for underrepresented students, these gaps are particularly salient.

Using an equity centered framework, this study explores these disparities and provides a deeper understanding of dual enrollment in a large, urban, single-district high school-community college partnership in San Francisco. I investigate rates of access to dual enrollment, college transitions among those who participate in dual enrollment, types of dual enrollment course offerings and success outcomes, and enrollment intensity for students taking dual enrollment courses within this San Francisco partnership. I explore all of these for students from different demographic backgrounds and by high school types (including continuation and alternative schools). Together this provides a useful snapshot of a large local dual enrollment system, deepens the understanding of AB 288’s implementation, and reveals implications for dual enrollment practitioners across California community college and high school district partnerships.