Ms. Vela, the first in her family to go out of state to school, said she was not concerned about the academic challenges of college — she has been taking college courses since her sophomore year. By the time she graduates in the spring, she will have accumulated 30 college credit hours. Some of her classmates have double that.
Ms. Vela’s achievement is part of an initiative involving dual-credit courses that allows students to merge high school with college-level education to an unprecedented extent. Hidalgo’s school — once ranked among the worst performing in the state — is now one of the most successful.
An exceptional level of collaboration between local leaders in public and higher education has permeated Hidalgo for the last five years and is taking hold elsewhere in the Rio Grande Valley, which boasts some of the United States’ poorest counties, providing students with new opportunities.
In the 1980s, when Texas’ education-accountability systems were put into place, Hidalgo’s high school was ranked in the bottom 10 percent of the state’s schools in academic performance. The student population is 99 percent Hispanic, 89 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and 70 percent are considered “at risk” by the standards of the Texas Education Agency.
Today, Hidalgo students graduate at higher rates than the state average, and 98 percent — compared with 81 percent statewide — complete a recommended or distinguished curriculum as defined by the state.
At most high schools in Texas, students are permitted to enroll in dual-credit courses only after they have entered their junior year. Even then, they can enroll in only up to two at a time.
But such limits do not exist at schools in the Early College High School Initiative, a national program started in 2002 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s idea was to finance small schools that, in partnership with local colleges, would provide an early introduction to the concept and rigor of higher education to up to 400 low-income high school students, 100 per grade.
In Texas, there are currently 49 such schools, financed jointly by the Communities Foundation of Texas and the Texas Education Agency.
But Hidalgo has taken that notion even further.
Daniel P. King was the Hidalgo Independent School District superintendent in 2005 when the local early college effort began. Mr. King liked the idea but thought it could be improved.
“Early college high schools were already outside the box,” he said. “We wanted to go outside their box.”
Many of the early college high schools were on college campuses, which was limiting. Hidalgo’s public high school serves more than 800 students, and Mr. King was not interested in reaching only half of them. Instead, he proposed leveraging two grants to convert his entire school to the early college model. He created the first “early college district” in the country, according to Joel Vargas, a vice president at Jobs for the Future, the Boston-based organization that coordinates the nationwide initiative.
Hidalgo’s first partner was the University of Texas-Pan American, a four-year university in Edinburg, 15 miles to the north. Later, Hidalgo joined with South Texas College, a community college in nearby McAllen, and Texas State Technical College.
Robert Nelson, president of U.T.-Pan American, said a side effect of the collaboration had been a need to increase the rigor of his school’s college courses to account for students’ increased preparedness.
Similarly, middle schools have increased their standards to prepare students for early college high school. At Jaime Escalante Middle School in nearby Pharr, Maria Valencia, a sixth grader, recently chose St. Edward’s University in Austin as her top college pick. Her next project is preparing to take the PSATs.
The middle school is in the 32,000-student Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District, where Mr. King now serves as superintendent. He is trying to replicate the success of the Hidalgo model in a district 10 times the size, and he is quick to leverage any sources he can to reach as many students as possible.
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