Evidence of Failure: How High School Counselors and Administrators Make Sense of Promise Scholarship Merit Requirements

Background Promise scholarship programs designed to increase college access and success are proliferating across the country. However, little research has investigated how such programs are implemented or how differences in program design, such as the inclusion of merit requirements, could affect the success of these initiatives. Project/Research Design This study is part of a randomized control trial examining outcomes of the Degree Project (TDP), a $12,000 promise scholarship for students in a Midwestern urban school district. TDP was designed with GPA and attendance merit requirements in order to understand the impact of a targeted scholarship design. Purpose We set out to understand how school staff tasked with implementing the Degree Project scholarship made sense of the program, its merit requirements, and data on students meeting those requirements and how this sensemaking may have affected the attitudes and actions of staff in ways that could alter the impact of the program on students. Data collection/Analysis Over the first two program years, we conducted interviews in over 90% of treatment schools (year 1 N = 17; year 2 N = 15). Using theories of sensemaking and attribution, we analyzed how staff used data from the merit requirements as evidence to frame the program as a success or failure. Findings We find that some school staff used data on the number of students still on track for the scholarship as evidence that TDP was succeeding or—more often—failing. Moreover, they mainly attributed this success or failure to characteristics of the students themselves and rarely to their own work practice. Staff who saw the program as failing were in schools that already had lower academic achievement, and there is evidence that they took fewer actions to support student access to TDP than did staff in higher-performing schools. Conclusions These findings raise concerns that staff sensemaking around TDP may be reinforcing low expectations of students and deficit discourses of youth from low-wealth communities of color, as well as stratification of access to college-related support. Additionally, it raises important implementation and equity concerns about both promise programs’ use of merit requirements and data use in schools in general.