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Reaching the middle: an exploration of guidance support services in pursuit of college readiness for all students

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Reaching the middle: an exploration of guidance support services in pursuit of college readiness for all students

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Content Running head: GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 1

REACHING THE MIDDLE: AN EXPLORATION OF GUIDANCE SUPPORT SERVICES
IN PURSUIT OF COLLEGE READINESS FOR ALL STUDENTS

by

Marianne Hew

A Dissertation Proposal Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

December 2017

Copyright 2017 Marianne Hew
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 2

DEDICATION
Words cannot express the deep gratitude and humility I feel in honoring my family with
this educational achievement. I dedicate this accomplishment to all of you:
In memory of Papa, whose dream of attending USC I had the honor of fulfilling.
To Amma, who instilled in me from very young the value of lifelong learning and
“getting the paper.”
To my parents, who encouraged excellence not just in grades and degrees, but in impact.
To Steve, the most supportive and understanding husband in the world, who took on three
years of Saturday morning ballet, gymnastics, and swimming classes in addition to giving
amazing pep talks and occasional editing services. You are my rock.
And to Carlynne, who learned how to say “dissertation” at age two and wrote her own
with crayons: it will be your turn soon enough, my baby. We can go play now…

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am truly blessed to have such a wonderful network of people, near and far, who have
supported me throughout my education and career. My heartfelt thanks to you all:
To the Hew/Espinas Ohana and friends who understood my absence at family dinners,
worried about my late nights and lack of sleep, and offered lots and lots of baby-sitting—your
support and encouragement made this all possible.
To the staff, students, and parents I have worked with over the years: you motivate me
every day to continue to grow as an educator and make a difference in our schools. To the
guidance counselors who generously shared their experiences for my study—you are a dedicated
group of professionals, and I have learned much from you. To my fellow scholar/colleagues—
Welton, Trudy, Denae, Brooke, Anne, and Ben: I am honored to have shared the doctoral
journey with you. To Dr. Kate Jamentz—fa’afetai tele lava for your support and mentorship.
To my OCL Cohort 1 classmates—it was my privilege to learn from and with you. A
huge virtual hug to the Sunday bunch—Dora, Sandy, and Eric—our online meetings, texts, and
phone calls kept me motivated and sane. We came, we wrote, we conquered!
To my dissertation committee: Dr. Julie Slayton, who guided me through the dissertation
process, and often knew what I was thinking before I did—thank you for accepting nothing short
of excellence and deep thinking. To Dr. Alan Greene and Dr. Jaimie Hoffman—I learned so
much from your questions and feedback. Thank you for sharing your expertise.
This achievement is because of you: you are an amazing network of support and
encouragement, and you have shaped me, everything I have done, everything I will do. It’s been
a great ride…congratulations, we made it!
Mahalo nui loa, M. H.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 3
LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................... 6
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 7
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 8
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 9
Organizational Context and Mission ......................................................................................... 10
Organizational Performance Goal ............................................................................................. 15
Related Literature ...................................................................................................................... 16
Importance of the Study ............................................................................................................ 17
Stakeholders and Organizational Goals .................................................................................... 19
Stakeholder for the Study and Stakeholder Performance Goal ................................................. 20
Purpose of the Project and Research Question.......................................................................... 21
Definitions ................................................................................................................................. 21
Organization of the Study ......................................................................................................... 22
CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ................................................................ 23
The Culture and Context of High-Performing Schools and the Role of Guidance Counselors in
Supporting Students’ College Readiness .................................................................................. 23
High-Performing Schools and Districts .................................................................................... 24
Guidance Counselors in Public High Schools........................................................................... 26
Organizational Factors and Their Impact on Stakeholders ....................................................... 28
Gap Analysis Framework ..................................................................................................... 28
Organizational Factors .......................................................................................................... 28
Conceptual Framework: The Interaction of Stakeholder and the Organizational Context ....... 35
CHAPTER THREE: METHODS ................................................................................................ 40
Participating Stakeholders ......................................................................................................... 40
Interview Sampling Criteria and Rationale........................................................................... 41
Interview Sampling Recruitment Strategy and Rationale ..................................................... 42
Data Collection and Instrumentation......................................................................................... 44
Data Analysis ............................................................................................................................ 45
Credibility and Trustworthiness ................................................................................................ 47
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 5

Ethics ......................................................................................................................................... 50
Limitations and Delimitations ................................................................................................... 52
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 53
CHAPTER FOUR: FINDINGS .................................................................................................... 54
Finding 1: Prioritizing Struggling Students and High School Graduation ............................... 56
Finding 2: Pressure to Serve Highly Academic, College-Going Students ............................... 77
Finding 3: Passion Projects ....................................................................................................... 90
Finding 4: Underserved Hidden and Middle Students ............................................................ 101
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 106
CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS ...................... 108
Summary of Findings .............................................................................................................. 109
Implications and Recommendations for Practice, Policy, and Research ................................ 112
Implications and Recommendations for Practice ............................................................... 112
Implications and Recommendations for Policy .................................................................. 115
Implications and Recommendations for Further Research ................................................. 118
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 119
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 121
APPENDIX A: Interview Protocol ............................................................................................. 128
APPENDIX B: Informed Consent/Information Sheet ................................................................ 131
APPENDIX C: Recruitment Letter ............................................................................................. 133
APPENDIX D: Research Study Participant Preliminary Survey ............................................... 134

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 6

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Student Demographics by School. .................................................................................. 12
Table 2. Organizational Goal. ....................................................................................................... 19
Table 3. Guidance Counselor Participants by School Context and Experience. .......................... 43
Table 4. Guidance Counselor Participants. ................................................................................... 54

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 7

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure A. Conceptual Framework prior to Study. ........................................................................ 36
Figure B. Conceptual Framework after Study. ............................................................................. 37

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 8

ABSTRACT
Research suggests that guidance counselors can be powerful institutional agents of
change by shaping students’ academic paths and postsecondary aspirations, especially for
students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds who may have fewer resources or
access to information about their postsecondary options. This qualitative study explored
guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role in supporting students in the “middle” who were
neither at-risk nor high-achieving, who were likely to graduate from high school but without
strong postsecondary aspirations or plans. The study was based on 10 guidance counselor
interviews in a high school district with participants representing a range of school contexts and
years of experience in counseling and in education. The findings revealed that guidance
counselors were constrained by time and external pressures from the District, school, and parents
to enact their roles in specific ways that did not reach all students.

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 9

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Disparities in student opportunities and access to higher education is a problem that needs
to be addressed for many reasons. Within the last two generations, the number of students
entering postsecondary education has increased to over 20 million students (National Center for
Education Statistics [NCES], 2015). By 2018, two-thirds of jobs in the American workforce will
require some level of postsecondary training or education (Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson,
2011). As more students access postsecondary education opportunities, the role of the high
school in preparing students for college and career is becoming more urgent (McKilip, Rawls, &
Barry, 2011; Perna et al., 2008). The National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] (2013)
reported that 80% of Asian high school completers nationwide entered postsecondary education
immediately following graduation, compared to their White (67%), Hispanic/Latino (65%), and
African American (56%) counterparts. Across all student groups, there were significant
differences between the portion of students entering higher education and those leaving with a
degree, meaning they did not have the requisite skills to persist to a certificate or degree. In
2015, 69% of Asians ages 25 to 39 years old had attained at least an associate’s degree,
compared to their White (54%), Hispanic/Latino (26%), and African American (31%)
counterparts (NCES, 2015). This disparity in higher education and by extension, economic
opportunity, extended from the access and opportunity gaps in the K-12 public school system. If
fewer traditionally underrepresented students graduated from high school, then fewer of them
entered college; fewer still persisted to a degree or certification, and then upon graduation, even
fewer found a career. As the gateway from K-12 mandatory education to voluntary
postsecondary education, high schools played a significant role in addressing the inequities of
student achievement that contribute to the opportunity gap in education and in the workforce.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 10

The problem addressed in this study was the achievement gap in high school outcomes as
it pertains to college readiness. Disparities in educational attainment contributed to disparities in
access to higher paying jobs and social mobility (McKilip et al., 2012; Symonds et al., 2011; US
Census Bureau, 2011). If only some students were supported in reaching higher education or
leave high school armed with the preparation and planning necessary to succeed in higher
education, then only some students were getting access to better economic opportunities and
social mobility. Students who were not prepared for the rigors of college-level work were often
placed into remedial, non-credit bearing courses that impeded their progress toward certification
or a degree, or caused them to discontinue their education (Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; Perna et
al., 2008). Therefore, the opportunity and access gaps began with the educational achievement
gaps from K-12 education (Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; Perna et.al, 2008). High schools had a
responsibility to address these disparities in achievement, access, and opportunity by addressing
the needs of all students and ensuring that they were prepared for post-secondary education and
career. The social and economic impact of these inequities further contributed to the growing
striation between classes in our communities and stifled economic opportunity.
Organizational Context and Mission

The project site was the Orchard Valley High School District,
1
a high school district of
approximately 11,000 students and 600 staff in an affluent suburb in Northern California
(California Department of Education [CDE], 2015). This school district consisted of some of
the highest performing high schools in the state: of the five comprehensive campuses, four
ranked in the top decile of California’s ranking system for public schools, last calculated in

1
Orchard Valley High School District [OVHSD] is a pseudonym for the high school district represented in this
study. The high schools in this district have also been assigned pseudonyms.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 11

2013
2
. The five campuses ranged in size from 1,853 to 2,406 students, and reflected the
socioeconomic, educational, and ethnic diversity of the community. As shown in Table 1, Apple
High School was the largest in the district and had a diverse student population with
Hispanic/Latino (18%), Asian (38%), White (33%), and socioeconomically disadvantaged
students (18%). Apricot High School experienced tremendous growth in recent years and had a
student population that was majority Asian (63%) and White (18%) students, with smaller
populations of Hispanic/Latino (10%) and socioeconomically disadvantaged students (11%). In
recent years, the rising cost of living and population shifts in the community started to change
the student demographics at these two schools in particular, and concurrent with the changing
demographic, graduation rates and college-going rates increased to over 90% (OVHSD, 2014).
Cherry High School had the largest Hispanic/Latino population in the District (45%) and almost
half the student body (47%) identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged (CDE, 2015).
Though Cherry’s graduation rates were usually on par with or above state targets and county
comparisons, it was the lowest performing school in the district, with a graduation rate of 88.5%
(CDE DataQuest, 2015). While 91% of Cherry graduates self-reported they were going on to
postsecondary education immediately after high school, only 51% of the class was 4-year college
eligible by University of California A-G standards (OVHSD, 2015). Blossom and Vineyard
High Schools had heavily Asian student populations and served some of the wealthiest
communities in the area. In addition to being among the top performing schools in the state,
these two schools received numerous local, state, and national accolades for student

2
California’s accountability ranking system, the Academic Performance Index (API), was last published in 2013. A
new state accountability system incorporating new assessments and multiple measures was introduced in 2017.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 12

achievement. Ninety-nine percent of their students graduated from high school and went on to
postsecondary education, most to 4-year colleges and universities (CDE, 2015; OVHSD, 2014).
Table 1.
Student Demographics by School

In 2013, OVHSD’s Board of Trustees adopted a set of Belief Statements that
demonstrated a strong commitment to equity, professional learning, and serving all students
(OVHSD Belief Statements, 2013). These Belief Statements emphasized a commitment to
closing the achievement gap by acknowledging that equity does not mean equality, and that the
work of the schools and District was to ensure that systems were in place at a district, school, and
classroom level to provide support and interventions for students so that all may succeed
(OVHSD Belief Statements, 2013). Staff members across the District referred to this mission
with the shorthand phrase, “All means all.” All five campuses aligned their school goals to the
District Belief Statements, while taking into account the unique circumstances, student
population, and culture of their respective communities. As a result, there was a constant tension
between school and District interests in order to keep the balance between individual school
autonomy and larger district mission (OVHSD Local Control Accountability Plan, 2016).
Racial/Ethnic Group

Hispanic
/ Latino
Asian Filipino
African
American
/ Black
White
not
Hispanic
Two or
More
Races
SED
Total
Students
Apple HS 18% 38% 2% 1% 33% 8% 17% 2,406
Apricot HS 10% 63% 2% 2% 18% 4% 11% 2,168
Blossom HS 3% 80% 1% 0% 12% 4% 5% 1,853
Cherry HS 45% 18% 11% 2% 18% 5% 47% 1,965
Vineyard HS 3% 77% 1% 0% 15% 4% 3% 2,357
Note: Student demographics as a percentage of total student population. Community Day School students and
students enrolled in non-public schools not included. SED = Socieoconomically Disadvantaged. Data adapted from
California Department of Education DataQuest, 2015. http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/dataquest.asp
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 13

While the achievement gap existed to some degree at every school, the gap between
schools was significant and was therefore an area of focus for the Board of Trustees and the
District. While the District’s aggregate cohort graduation rate was 96%, the graduation rate for
student groups ranged from 85% for Hispanic/Latino students, 88% for African American
students, 97% for White and Filipino students, and 99% for Asian students (CDE DataQuest,
2015). Of the students in the class of 2015 who did not attain a high school diploma, 71% were
Hispanic/Latino, 2% were Filipino, 5% were African American, and 79% were
socioeconomically disadvantaged students (CDE DataQuest, 2015). College readiness data
revealed similar disparities among student groups: 32% of Hispanic/Latino students, 64% of
Filipino students, 46% of African American students, 20% Pacific Islander students, and 38% of
socioeconomically disadvantaged students met UC A-G requirements, compared to 89% of
Asian students and 74% of White students (CDE DataQuest, 2015).
While the OVHSD mission and Belief Statements articulated an expectation that all
students were supported to achieve and thrive, the range of programs and interventions in place
did not necessarily reach all students. High-achieving students were supported at each school
through courses and routine guidance services tailored to promote college-going, such as
Secondary School Report and college application processes, Advanced Placement “boot camps,”
and a variety of college-related activities and information sessions (OVHSD, 2015). While these
opportunities were technically open to all students, they were primarily accessed by students who
intended to apply to highly competitive, 4-year colleges and universities and therefore saw
themselves as college-going. Struggling and at-risk students were supported at all schools by
Academic Review processes, whole-school drop-in tutorial periods, and after-school guided
study centers; additionally, Apple, Apricot, and Cherry High Schools offered a range of
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 14

intervention classes for struggling students or those in danger of dropping out (OVHSD Course
Guide, 2015). With the exception of the Academic Review process which was triggered by low
or failing grades or a teacher referral, these programs for struggling or at-risk students required
the students themselves to act upon a referral from a guidance counselor or teacher in order to
access these interventions and supports. While programs and services did exist to support both
the high-achieving, college-going student and the struggling, at-risk student, many of these
offerings depended on the student to take the initiative to access the opportunity.
A student who did not fall into either the high-achieving nor struggling student group was
characterized by OVHSD staff as the “middle student:” one who did not draw attention or solicit
help, and therefore was among the last group to be addressed in terms of needs identified and
met. Deil-Amen and DeLuca (2010) referred to this group as the “underserved third” (p. 27),
which, in their study, referred to students who were not served by either a college-going or
vocational, career technical education track. In OVHSD, these “middle,” “underserved” students
represented all groups but were more likely to be Filipino, Hispanic/Latino, African American,
socioeconomically disadvantaged, or English Learners; had grade point averages in the 2.1 to 3.2
range; and had achieved scores in the “Standard Nearly Met” or “Standard Met” range for the
11
th
grade Smarter Balanced summative assessment (OVHSD internal documents, 2015). Many
of these students fell short of meeting college readiness indicators by one or two courses or grade
marks (OVHSD internal documents, 2015).

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Organizational Performance Goal

The Orchard Valley High School District’s mission was to ensure “high levels of learning
for all students,” so that all graduates left high school ready for college and career (OVHSD
Belief Statements, 2013). In alignment with that mission, a district-wide initiative was
introduced in 2008 for the purpose of examining guidance practices and establishing more
systemic approaches to academic and socioemotional support for all students. These Guidance
Commitments were developed in collaboration with students, parents, and staff to articulate a
baseline for guidance services and support for all students (OVHSD Guidance Commitments,
2008). These Guidance Commitments established expectations that all students receive guidance
in the development of an individual academic 4-year plan, college and career exploration and
planning, and access to programs and interventions to support their post-secondary goals. By
2012, momentum around the Guidance Commitments had slowed and the agreement of every
student having an academic 4-year plan was not realized. In effort to revitalize the Guidance
Commitments and demonstrate an alignment with the District Beliefs that “all means all,” the
District established a performance goal for college readiness that by 2017, all student groups
would achieve a 5% increase in meeting district college readiness standards. OVHSD defined
“college readiness” by three metrics: students completing coursework for UC/CSU eligibility,
students earning a rating of “college ready” on the state Early Assessment Program results
derived from Smarter Balanced assessments, and students placing into non-remedial English and
Mathematics courses based on community college placement assessments. Districtwide,
OVHSD students outperformed other districts with similar student populations and the state
aggregate, with over 75% of all students meeting college readiness standards. Disaggregated by
student group, however, the disparities in achievement were significant: 89% of Asian students
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 16

and 71% of White students were college-ready, compared to 32% of Hispanic/Latino students
and 42% of socioeconomically disadvantaged students (CDE DataQuest, 2015). This college
readiness goal, with the emphasis on the performance of individual student groups, was
identified as a priority area by the District’s Board of Trustees and leadership, and was included
in the District’s annual accountability plans and corresponding school site plans. Progress
toward achieving this goal was monitored using the metrics described above and corresponding
intermediate benchmarks.
Related Literature

There is an expansive body of literature that suggests that the disparities in student access
and opportunities in higher education are greatly influenced by their high school experience
(Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; McDonough, 1998, 2005; McKilip et al., 2012; Perna et al., 2008;
Wyatt et al., 2011). In the last two generations, the number of students enrolling in
postsecondary education, including 2-, 4-year, and certification programs, nearly doubled to over
20 million students (NCES, 2013). Yet many of these students struggled to persist once in
higher education because they were unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, and were
placed in remedial, non-credit bearing courses that impeded progress toward degree or certificate
attainment (McKilip et al., 2012; Perna et al., 2008; Symonds et al., 2011). As more students
pursued some sort of postsecondary education, the role of high schools, and school counselors in
particular, in facilitating college readiness and college-going among all students became more
pressing (McKilip et. al, 2012; U.S. DOE, 2006; Wyatt et. al, 2011). Studies showed that within
the high school setting, guidance counselors played a crucial role in the pursuit of equity by
influencing academic programs, facilitating access to intervention or support programs, and
supporting students in their academic planning toward postsecondary goals (Bodenhorn et al.,
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 17

2010; Brown & Trusty, 2005; Bruce & Bridgeland, 2012; McDonough, 1998; Young &
Kaffenberger, 2011). The impact of a guidance counselor in shaping students’ postsecondary
aspirations and trajectory was especially significant for students from traditionally
underrepresented groups, who often relied on the counselor to provide college knowledge and
encourage aspirations their families and personal networks could not (Belasco, 2013; Bodenhorn
et al., 2010; Bryan et al., 2011; Kimura-Walsh et al., 2008; Perna et al., 2008). In high-achieving
schools and districts, the organizational culture and accountability structures that focus on the
high-performing majority of students sometimes masked the needs for additional supports for
smaller groups of underperforming students (Elmore, 2006; Fitch & Marshall, 2004; Ray-Taylor
et al., 2006; Savitz-Romer, 2012).
Importance of the Study

It was important to guidance counselors’ roles in relationship to support for “middle”
students and the goal of increasing college readiness rates for OVHSD graduates for a variety of
reasons. There was increasing pressure and support at all levels of community and government
for high schools to prepare students for more than a high school diploma, but for further
education and career preparation (Maruyama, 2011; McCormick & Lucas, 2013; McKilip,
Rawls, & Barry, 2012). In OVHSD, more students were pursuing postsecondary education, yet
college readiness rates remained stagnant for the last 5 years across student groups (OVHSD
Accountability Report, 2015). OVHSD’s “middle” students may not have been reaching college
readiness indicators, but they were entering college at increased rates (OVHSD, 2015). Studies
have shown that students who were underprepared for postsecondary education were more likely
to require remediation, discontinue their education, or not even enroll in higher education
institutions in the first place (Jaaffe, 2014; Long, Conger, & Iaratola, 2012; Shapiro et. al, 2015;
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 18

Sondergeld, et. al, 2013). OVHSD needed to have policies and practices in place that eliminated
barriers and provided opportunities for these students to reach the courses and levels of
performance that supported their college readiness. Research has found that students who
experienced rigorous, rich curriculum in high school were better prepared for the transition to
postsecondary (Deil-Amen & DeLuca, 2010; Lynch, 2015; Symonds et. al, 2011). While
accountability mechanisms and supports existed to serve the high-achieving, college-going
student and the struggling, at-risk student, support for OVHSD’s “middle” student group was not
as systemic or consistent. As a result, OVHSD’s “middle” students may have left high school
with a diploma, but without the knowledge and skills they needed to persevere and succeed in
postsecondary education or career opportunities. In alignment with the District Beliefs and
Guidance Commitments, OVHSD needed to address the disparities in guidance support for
students that contributed to disparities in student outcomes and postsecondary success (OVHSD
Belief Statements, 2013; OVHSD Guidance Commitments, 2008). What happened in high
school had both a direct and an indirect impact on students’ career and economic status, and
guidance counselors had the potential to influence school processes, policies, and student
experiences in ways that could address these students’ needs for both academic and socio-
cognitive readiness (Fitch & Marshall, 2004). While guidance counselors had the potential in
terms of their role, skills, and knowledge to intervene for students and build their college
readiness, they were less inclined to meet with these students due to other demands on their time
and attention. The disparity in educational outcomes resulting from this attention, readiness,
achievement, and opportunity gap amounted to an economic impact to the individuals in terms of
their upward social mobility, and to the nation’s economic productivity and income in the
trillions of dollars (Lynch, 2015; Shapiro & Dundar, 2013; Shapiro et al., 2015).
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 19

Stakeholders and Organizational Goals

Stakeholder groups are an integral part of any organization, and benefit from and
contribute to the organization’s operations. In a public school district, these stakeholder benefits
and contributions may be direct or indirect. Bolman and Deal (2004) asserted that engaging
stakeholders in dialogue and a meaningful feedback loop was essential to achieving an
organization’s performance goal or managing the change process. In OVHSD, stakeholder
groups included students, parents, community members, teachers, guidance counselors, and
administrators. Students and their families were ultimately the customers, and the measurement
of students’ schooling experiences and educational outcomes directly impacted the district’s
performance goal. Teachers contributed to the district’s performance goal by providing the
quality instruction and support for students to achieve the academic standards required for
college readiness. Guidance counselors supported students in making decisions about their
academic trajectory based on their post-secondary plans, and matched students with interventions
when students indicated they were struggling. Administrators created the conditions and policies
for teaching and learning, including the opportunities to intervene, and held students, teachers,
and guidance counselors accountable for fulfilling their respective roles that contributed toward
the District’s achievement of its performance goal.
Table 2.
Organizational Mission, Global Goal, and Stakeholder Performance Goals
Organizational Mission
All students in the Orchard Valley High School District will graduate from high school ready for
college and career.
Organizational Performance Goal
By June 2017, the portion of students meeting college readiness standards will increase by 5%
across all student groups.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 20

Stakeholder for the Study and Stakeholder Performance Goal

All stakeholder groups—teachers, parents, students, administrators, and guidance
counselors—influenced the schooling experiences of students and their educational outcomes.
While a comprehensive analysis of the progress toward the overall organizational goal of 100%
of students meeting the goals in their individual post-secondary plans would include all groups,
this study focused on guidance counselors as the stakeholder group. Guidance counselors had a
broader perspective since they followed students for multiple years, allowing them to build
relationships and bear witness to students’ struggles and achievements as they progressed
through high school (Bodenhorn et al., 2010; Bryan et al., 2011). OVHSD had 21 guidance
counselors assigned to the five comprehensive high schools and educational options center, with
3 to 5 counselors per site. Guidance counselors worked under the supervision of an Assistant
Principal in charge of “Guidance,” which included master scheduling and course offerings,
articulation with feeder middle schools and local colleges, college guidance and the application
process, grades and transcript reporting, mental health services, and intervention programs.
Because they were in the same department, guidance counselors were often tasked with
assignments related to those areas, even if they did not directly pertain to their job (OVHSD
Guidance Counselor Job Description, 1998).
In a system based primarily on a first-come, first-served basis, the challenge for guidance
counselors was to serve all students, not just the ones who came to them. This required them to
identify and seek out the students who did not self-advocate or solicit help, or who otherwise
would not have been identified for Academic Review as an at-risk student. Since other measures
were in place relating to the support of high-achieving students and the support of struggling
students, it was the “middle” student that was most at risk of not being served and supported.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 21

Failure to reach these “middle” students resulted in them not receiving academic planning
support in meeting college readiness standards. Addressing this gap in guidance services was an
important step toward closing the achievement and opportunity gap for students from this target
“middle” student group.
Purpose of the Project and Research Question

The purpose of this project was to examine the root factors that facilitated or impeded
guidance counselors’ ability to support “middle” students in meeting college readiness goals.
While a complete analysis would focus on all stakeholders, for practical purposes this study will
focus on guidance counselors as the stakeholder group.
As such, the research question that guided this project was:
1. What are guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role in relation to supporting
"middle students," who are neither high-achieving nor at-risk, toward college and
career readiness?
Definitions

College readiness: the level of academic and cognitive preparation students need to enter and
succeed in credit-bearing post-secondary coursework without the need for remediation (Common
Core State Standards, 2010; Conley, 2005)
OVHSD District Beliefs: a set of belief statements developed by OVHSD and adopted by the
Board of Trustees in 2013 to guide the mission and work of the district. District and school staff
refer to the Belief Statements often with the shorthand catch-phrase, “all means all.”
UC A-G requirements: the set of required courses in specific content areas students must
complete in order to meet minimum college eligibility standards for the University of California
and California State University systems
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 22

Organization of the Study

This dissertation is organized into five chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of
the problem of disparities in college readiness for traditionally underrepresented students and key
concepts and terminology commonly used to discuss this problem of practice. The role of the
guidance counselor in addressing these gaps in achievement and opportunity are discussed. The
organizational context, mission, goals, and stakeholders, and initial concepts of gap analysis are
introduced. Chapter Two consists of a review of the current literature surrounding the scope of
this study, including the context of high performing schools, the role of guidance counselors, and
the role of motivational and organizational influences in counselors’ work. Chapter Three
discusses the methodology of the study, including selection of participants, data collection, and
analysis. Chapter Four is a discussion of the results and findings. Chapter Five concludes the
dissertation with a discussion of findings, implications, and recommendations for practice,
policy, and further research.

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 23

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

OVHSD’s goal was to close the achievement gap in high school outcomes and support all
students toward college readiness. The underlying philosophy of the District was that preparing
every student for college readiness did not mean that every student expected to go to college, but
that every student left high school prepared to pursue postsecondary education if they chose to
do so whether immediately after graduation or years later. This goal of college readiness for all
students was one way the District communicated its commitment to ensuring equitable access to
guidance services and supports for all students. This study examined the role OVHSD guidance
counselors and organizational elements played in facilitating or impeding progress for “middle”
students in meeting District college readiness indicators. Chapter Two outlines the literature
pertaining to high schools, guidance counselors, and how they support students. The first section
focuses on the context of high-performing schools and their approach to student support, and
then moves into literature about high school guidance counselors and their role in guiding
students in academic and post-secondary plan development. The second section analyzes the
organizational elements within the K-12 school system that may influence their performance in
supporting students’ academic progress and corresponding college readiness.
The Culture and Context of High-Performing Schools and the Role of Guidance
Counselors in Supporting Students’ College Readiness
The focus of this study was OVHSD guidance counselors and what influenced their
approach to the work of supporting “middle” students in meeting District college readiness goals.
OVHSD’s context as a highly competitive, high-performing school district influenced how the
District supported and responded to the needs of its constituents, and how its institutional agents
behaved. In high-performing districts such as OVHSD, the affluence, parent education levels,
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 24

and political influence of the community played a significant role in how the District set its
priorities and allocated its resources. This was consistent with literature about high-performing
schools and how they make decisions about program and resource allocation (Crosnoe, 2009;
Elmore, 2006).
Searches of the literature pertaining to high-performing schools and districts revealed two
distinct types. Some schools and districts were deemed “high-performing” because their
accountability metrics (e.g., test scores, graduation rates) showed significant growth among
traditionally underrepresented student groups or a closing of the achievement gap.Others were
deemed “high-performing” because their student populations consistently performed at the top of
the charts in test scores and other measures of student achievement. Schools and districts in the
latter group tended to have student populations from higher wealth communities, largely White
and Asian, with higher levels of parent education attainment and involvement in the school
(Crosnoe, 2009; Elmore, 2006; Hallinger & Murphy, 1986). OVHSD fell into this latter group.
High-Performing Schools and Districts

In high-achieving districts such as OVHSD, contextual factors such as the affluence or
educational backgrounds of the community greatly influenced the organizational characteristics
of the district and support for student achievement (Crosnoe, 2009; Elmore, 2006). Hallinger
and Murphy (1986) found that in high performing, high wealth schools, messages about high
expectations for all students, specifically expectations about college-going, were more prevalent
than in lower socioeconomic schools. Researchers attributed much of this culture of high
academic achievement and college-going to the socioeconomic and educational status of the
community and the choices families made about schools and resources for their children
(Elmore, 2006; McDonough, 1998). Affluence played into the resources and support for
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 25

students as families relied on outsourced, private tutors and counselors or parental involvement
to provide additional support for students instead of the school (Elmore, 2006; Hallinger &
Murphy, 1986).
In these high-performing, high-wealth schools, the task of addressing equity was often
one of the biggest challenges (Ray-Taylor et al., 2006). Ray-Taylor et al. (2006) posited that
accountability measures did not distinguish between success based on facilitating student growth
and success based on student population and affluence, and therefore allowed for the masking of
inequities or underachievement for student populations with smaller representation. In these
schools that were so accustomed to achieving high marks, taking a closer look at how the needs
of relatively small portions of the student body were not met was a challenging and unpopular
undertaking (Elmore, 2006; Ray-Taylor et al., 2006). A culture of outsourcing student support
and advocacy from highly educated parents can also mask the role of the school in helping
students grow (Elmore, 2006). In his analysis of traditionally underrepresented students in high-
wealth, high achieving schools, Crosnoe (2009) found that low-income, Black, and Latino
students were less likely to take an advanced math or science course and were more likely to
have negative self-images than their counterparts in lower socioeconomic composition schools.
While such high-achieving schools may have had general messages of high expectations for all
students, those messages might not have translated into increased support or resources for
smaller populations of underperforming students (Crosnoe, 2009; McDonough, 1998).

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 26

Guidance Counselors in Public High Schools

There was a paucity of literature on the role and experiences of guidance counselors in
high-achieving districts; therefore, this section discusses the broader literature about high school
guidance counselors and how their roles may be shaped by school or personal context. Studies
have found school counselors had the potential to wield considerable influence over a student’s
educational experience and aspirations through the relationships they were able to form and the
guidance they provided (Bryan et al., 2011; McDonough, 1998, 2005; Perna et al., 2008). Many
who entered the counseling profession did so because they wanted to be able to form such
connections with students and guide them. A number of studies identified counselors’ personal
experiences and passion for social justice as common reasons why individuals became school
guidance counselors and gravitated toward certain school contexts (Bryan et al., 2011; Savitz-
Romer, 2011). Because guidance counselors generally interacted with a broad range of students
across a school, they may have acted as institutional change agents in promoting an equity
agenda within a school’s curriculum, program offerings, and student support services (Belasco,
2013; Fitch & Marshall, 2004; Savitz-Romer, 2011). While systemic effort was needed to create
a college-going school culture, counselors played a large role in shaping the conditions for this
school culture by disseminating college eligibility information, encouraging postsecondary
aspirations, and engaging parents in the postsecondary planning process (Holcomb-McCoy,
2007, 2010; Fitch & Marshall, 2004; McDonough, 1998, 2005). School counselors’
relationships with students and their guidance in developing academic plans toward students’
postsecondary goals were key areas where they could exert influence over a student’s academic
trajectory through and beyond high school (Avery, 2010; Corwin et al., 2004; Lapan et al.,
2014). Particularly for traditionally underrepresented students, school counselors had the
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 27

potential to play a significant role in shaping a student’s postsecondary aspirations. Studies
showed that for students from traditionally underrepresented groups or those who had lower or
no postsecondary aspirations in their early high school years, strong relationships with a
guidance counselor helped change students’ view of their abilities and postsecondary options
(McDonough, 1998, 2005; McKilip et al., 2010; Roderick et al., 2008). In addition to providing a
positive, supportive outlook for students, the guidance counselor helped facilitate a path toward
college readiness by guiding students’ course selection, matching students with interventions or
resources to support their academic progress, or coordinating with classroom teachers (Belasco,
2013; Bodenhorn et al, 2010; Brown & Trusty, 2005; Bryan et al., 2009; Stanton-Salazar, 2001).
School counselors were also responsible for a variety of job duties that required working
with the full range of students and their individual contexts. The role of the school counselor has
evolved over time, from primarily socioemotional and academic counseling to a blend of socio-
emotional, academic, and college counseling, scheduling, testing, and other administrative duties
(Belasco, 2013; Freeman & Coll, 1997; Gysbers & Lapan, 2001). Increased demands for schools
to produce impressive numbers in student outcomes such as test scores and graduation rates, in
part due to state and federal accountability measures, shifted the culture of schools (McClafferty-
Jarsky et al., 2009; Perna et al., 2008; Venezia & Kirst, 2005). As schools and districts were
caught between the various accountability goals for school climate and student achievement,
counselors were tapped to support a range of student needs that extended beyond their initial
professional charge (Belasco, 2013; Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; Lapan, 2001; Venezia & Kirst,
2005). Studies of counselor roles found that counselors spent as much as 60% of their time on
administrative, socioemotional, or school climate duties (Belasco, 2013). While there has been a
shift toward promoting a college-going culture among all students, the amount of time
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 28

counselors were able to devote to college-related counseling had not increased. This disparity
highlighted one of the challenges schools faced in systemically supporting college readiness
goals.
Organizational Factors and Their Impact on Stakeholders

Gap Analysis Framework

The role of guidance counselors in supporting all students is an essential component in
OVHSD’s goal of closing the achievement disparities in college readiness among student groups.
This study used a modified version of Clark and Estes’ (2008) gap analysis framework to clarify
OVHSD’s organizational goals, identify the gap between these goals and actual performance,
and explore the contributing factors that lead to the gaps in performance.
According to Clark and Estes (2008), stakeholder knowledge and motivation, and
organizational elements were critical to individual and organizational goal attainment. While
each of these elements may influence how guidance counselors perceive and enact their roles,
this study focuses on the organization. Organizational elements contribute to performance goal
achievement through systems and processes, policies, and culture (Clark & Estes, 2008; Schein,
2004). Group and organizational culture elements are discussed in this section in terms of
cultural models and settings (Erez & Gati, 2004), as well as systemic elements relating to work
processes, resource allocation, and communication (Clark & Estes, 2008; Gallimore &
Goldenberg, 2001).
Organizational Factors

According to Clark and Estes’ (2008) gap analysis model, organizational factors
impacted performance through the alignment of practices, policies, and values, work processes,
resource allocation, and organizational culture. The alignment of practices and policies to
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 29

organizational values ensured coherence to the mission values and goals (Clark & Estes, 2008;
Schein, 2001). Similarly, work processes and resource allocation (human, fiscal, and material)
needed to be aligned to organizational values so that systems could run efficiently and facilitated
the meeting of performance goals (Clark & Estes, 2008). Organizational culture was defined as
a set of shared beliefs, attitudes, and values that underlies the behaviors of the individuals within
the group (Erez & Gati, 2004; Schein, 2001).
Cultural model influences. Erez and Gati (2004) described cultural models as the
processes for influencing cultural factors within the group or organization. These cultural
models may have originated as “top down,” coming out of the organization’s leadership in an
effort to influence organizational change, or may have emerged as “bottom up,” driven by
individuals within the organization (Erez & Gati, 2004). Cultural models were characterized by
the organizational structures and processes (artifacts), espoused beliefs and ideals shared by
those within the group or organization, or the underlying assumptions that permeated through the
organization’s practices and policies (Schein, 2001). It was through this shared set of beliefs,
values, and ideals that organizational culture influenced the behaviors and motivations of
individuals (Clark & Estes, 2008; Erez & Gati, 2004: Schein, 2001).
Culture of complacency. Research linking school culture to academic achievement
highlighted the way cultural values and expectations influenced individual agents to act or make
decisions (Corwin et al., 2004; McDonough, 1998; Venezia & Kirst, 2005). One cultural model
that impacted school college readiness goals was a culture of complacency among staff who
believed not all students would go to college and therefore did not need to be “college ready.”
This culture of complacency influenced behaviors among staff members and the actions they
took in support of students. For guidance counselors, this cultural belief influenced their
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 30

interactions with students, and the messages they transmitted to their students about academic
preparation and post-secondary plans (Corwin et al., 2004; McDonough, 1998). McDonough
(1998) noted that cultural values, including parental pressure and expectations, influenced how
guidance counselors steered conversations about post-secondary planning toward certain types of
programs and away from others, based on a perception of a student’s postsecondary plans. This
culture of complacency translated into students who were not considered “college-going” or “at-
risk” remaining largely unseen and underserved (Corwin et al., 2004; Deil-Amen & DeLuca,
2010). Deil-Amen and DeLuca (2010) further suggested such cultural influences resulted in an
“underserved third” of the student population who, without guidance and channeling into
appropriate curricular programs, might have been strong enough academically to earn a high
school diploma but did not have the skills necessary to succeed in either a college or career
setting. Such a “college for some” cultural model also affected students’ perceptions of the role
of counselors as a resource and support, and therefore resulted in less access to academic
counseling and post-secondary guidance (Bryan et al., 2011).
Johnson and Rochkind (2010) noted in their study that students reported inadequate
guidance or support from their counselors: a lack of relationship, guidance based on career
inventory and not tailored to the individual, perception that students were “just a face in the
crowd” (p. 7). They further noted that among their participants from schools with diverse
populations, student perception was that guidance counselors chose whom to meet with based on
how likely they seemed to go to college, or how often their parents came in to meet with school
staff (Johnson & Rochkind, 2010). These perceptions derived from a school culture that implied
that not all students were academic or college-bound. Such a school culture also contributed to
organizational barriers that impacted student access to courses, the expectations both implicitly
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 31

and explicitly conveyed to students about their academic potential by teachers and staff, and
resources devoted to post-secondary preparation (Corwin et al., 2004; McClafferty-Jarsky et al.,
2009; McDonough, 1998). These organizational barriers negatively affected even students who
wanted to go to college, such as through guidance staff who cited school procedures or policies
to deny students access to courses needed for college eligibility (Corwin et al., 2004).
McClafferty-Jarsky et al. (2009) found that when staff shifted from a mindset that college
information was not for everyone to a more inclusive one, the impact on school culture was the
emergence of a supportive, college-going culture that resulted in more access to academic
guidance for all students.
The culture of complacency and acceptance that not all students might need to be college
ready stemmed from multiple staff groups. This shared cultural model manifested in messages
directly and indirectly conveyed to students, and undermined school-wide goals for college
readiness and college-going.
Accountability. Organizations and their leaders reinforced values and cultural beliefs
that influenced individual actors through accountability mechanisms such as rewarding certain
outcomes, allocating resources, and issuing directives about how time should be spent (Clark &
Estes, 2008). External accountability demands from local, state, and federal sources, driven
largely by student outcomes, focused attention on the metrics of students attaining a high school
diploma and students going to college (Darling-Hammond, Wilhoit, & Pittenger, 2014;
McDonough, 1998). These accountability mechanisms drove district priorities and decisions
through rewards or threat of sanctions, and were based on numbers and student outcomes, and
not growth or school effectiveness in improving individual student outcomes (Elmore, 2006).
External accountability demands from the community—parents, taxpayers, industry partners—
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 32

also put pressure on districts to prioritize the programs they valued most (Elmore, 2006;
Hallinger & Murphy, 1986). In school structures and organizational policies and practices that
held these accountability measures as the schoolwide goal, guidance counselors received
messages that caused them to prioritize their time and which students to meet with accordingly
(Corwin et al., 2004; Deil-Amen & DeLuca, 2010; McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009; McDonough,
1997).
McDonough (1997) posited that the school culture and climate shaped the college-going
mindset of students, and that the guidance counselor, as a main conduit of college information
and academic guidance, played a large role in this college-going culture. Guidance counselors
had considerable influence over students’ development of a college-going habitus through
individual meetings, and helped shape the school-wide culture (McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009;
McDonough, 1997, 2005; Woods & Domina, 2014). However, this influence also had the
potential to inhibit rather than support students in their progress toward preparing for college or
post-secondary preparation. Guidance counselors could act as gatekeepers to courses or
programs, or may have been less forthcoming with college information for certain students
(Corwin et al., 2004; Woods & Domina, 2014). School or district expectations that focused on
student outcomes such as grades, good attendance, or college admission encouraged guidance
counselors to focus on students who were likely to meet those outcome expectations (Corwin et
al., 2004; Johnson & Rochkind, 2010). Fitch and Marshall (2004), on the other hand, found that
in high-achieving schools, expectations were conveyed through program evaluation and data
collection on counselor interactions with students and other stakeholders. These professional
accountability structures impacted counselor priorities by implementing evaluation policies, data
collection and research practices, and program monitoring with a focus on guidance services.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 33

The result was a system for measuring counselor and guidance program effectiveness not only in
terms of student outcomes, but also in terms of student progress or growth (Fitch & Marshall,
2004; Gyspers & Lapan, 2001; Lapan et al., 2012; Young & Kaffenberger, 2004).
Cultural setting influences. Gallimore and Goldenberg (2001) described cultural
settings as largely dependent on people, places, and tasks. Settings included the decisions that
were made that impact the organization through resources, policies and practices, and human
interactions (Gallimore & Goldenberg, 2001).
Resources. The adequacy of resource allocation was a well-established issue in
counseling, especially with regard to the availability of counselors on school campuses and
counselor caseloads. For schools with limited resources, guidance counselors were few and their
caseloads quite large, making it more difficult for them to serve adequately the diverse range of
needs for their students (Engberg & Gilbert, 2014). Large counselor caseloads could make it
difficult for counselors to reach out proactively to all students and families, thereby reducing
access to pertinent information about academics and college (Engberg & Gilbert, 2014; Johnson
& Rochkind, 2010; Woods & Domina, 2014). Woods and Domina (2014) noted a correlation
between larger counselor caseloads and a decrease in students’ likelihood that they would
continue on a college-going academic plan. Compounding the matter, many counselors were
assigned additional administrative duties, which further detracted from counseling time.
Mixed messages. School systems, through their allocation of resources, policies, and
practices, sometimes sent mixed messages that obfuscated goals or expectations. Several studies
identified a disparity between school goals, policies, and practices that governed course
assignments and access to programs. Deil-Amen and DeLuca (2010) found that many students
in their study were not able to access support programs or certain interventions due to
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 34

participation or screening criteria set by the school; of these students, many were from
underrepresented and underserved backgrounds. Corwin and Tierney (2007) cited a lack of
coordinated efforts and resources as additional examples of mixed messages: a school that
offered few advanced courses and did so in a way that restricted access, or a school that
attempted to host a parent college-information night in a small classroom instead of an adequate
meeting space. Freeman and Coll (1997) suggested that tight fiscal policies, which limited
professional development opportunities for guidance counselors, resulted in counselors with
outdated or inadequate information they needed for their role. When policies, practices, or
resource allocation sent messages that conflict with the school’s goals, it created confusion
among staff, students, and parents about the importance of meeting the school’s goals (Corwin &
Tierney, 2007; McDonough, 1998).
Schools also sent mixed messages through the structures and roles they defined in the
system (Freeman & Coll, 1997). Guidance counselor roles have shifted over the years from a
primary focus on socioemotional counseling to an array of responsibilities including academic
and college counseling, discipline, testing, and other administrative duties (Gysbers & Lapan,
2001; Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; Woods & Domina, 2014). This evolution of roles has created
ambiguity for counselors about expected outcomes for their work. Woods and Domina (2014)
asserted that because of their large caseloads and conflicting roles (academic advisor and
disciplinarian), counselors were not able to adequately meet the needs of underrepresented
students. For guidance counselors, these mixed messages inhibited their ability to meet
performance goals as they may not have had the resources (tools, time) they needed to serve their
students well.

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 35

Conceptual Framework: The Interaction of Stakeholder and the Organizational Context
A conceptual framework represents the structure for the study as it reflects the
relationships between the key influences, concepts, and variables as they relate to the problem of
practice (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Ravitch & Riggan, 2017). The conceptual framework was
derived from two main sources of research: the literature discussed above pertaining to the
organizational culture and context of high-performing schools and the role of guidance
counselors, and Clark and Estes’ (2008) gap analysis work on evaluating organizational change.
Clark and Estes (2008) posited that issues related to the performance of stakeholders toward
achieving an organizational goal could be attributed to one or more of three main influences:
knowledge, motivation, or organization. This study sought to understand the perceptions
guidance counselors had of their role in supporting “middle” students toward college readiness,
and how organizational elements in the District might have contributed to or impeded their
performance in meeting this goal. While the stakeholder—guidance counselors—and
organizational influences were each identified and examined separately above, they do not exist
in isolation; the conceptual framework brought them into the school and stakeholder context and
highlights the interrelationships between these influences (Maxwell, 2013; Ravitch & Riggan,
2017).
Figure A represents conceptual framework for this study prior to entering the field, and
focused on organizational and stakeholder influences (knowledge and motivation) that
contributed to performance gaps in supporting “middle” students toward the District’s goal of
college readiness.

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 36

Figure A. Conceptual Framework prior to Study.
It drew from general literature related to high-performing schools, guidance counselors, and
literature related to the knowledge, motivation, and organizational elements that might contribute
to or impede progress toward achieving the stakeholder and organizational goals. It focused on
the District’s organizational elements and stakeholders’ knowledge and motivation, and how
these influences facilitated or impeded guidance counselors’ ability to support OVHSD’s
“middle” students in meeting college readiness goals. I asserted that these organizational
elements—how the District dealt with external and internal accountability demands, allocated
resources, and cultivated school and District culture—interacted with each other to impact
guidance counselors through the working conditions and messages they received (Bryan et al.,
2011; Lapan, 2001; McDonough, 2005; Venezia & Kirst, 2005). I further argued that the high-
achieving, affluent context of the district and community contributed to a culture of outsourcing
student support and in turn discouraged scrutiny of how the system could better support the
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 37

needs of a smaller, struggling population (Crosnoe, 2009; Elmore, 2006; Ray-Taylor et al.,
2009). In addition, I suggested that external and internal accountability structures from the
community and from state and federal organizations directed attention, programs, and resources
toward the high-achieving, college-bound student and the struggling, at-risk student through
rewards and the threat of sanctions (Deil-Amen & DeLuca, 2010; Holland, 2015a; Royster et al.,
2015; Venezia & Kirst, 2015). These accountability demands sent messages to guidance
counselors about District priorities that influenced their goal orientation toward supporting these
two divergent groups, with little attention paid to students who did not fit in either group
(Corwin et al., 2004; Holland, 2015a; McDonough, 1998; Venezia & Kirst, 2015).
Figure B is the revised conceptual framework after completion of the study. The
relationship between the guidance counselors and District remain the same: the guidance
counselor operated within the context of the school and District, and therefore was shaped by the
District.

Figure B. Conceptual Framework after Study.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 38

The updated conceptual framework includes the addition of the external entity, the community,
state, and federal organizations that acted as directors in the accountability relationship for the
District. As I conducted the study and analyzed the data, the role of the external entity in exerting
pressure on the District to the school and then to the guidance counselors emerged as a constant
factor influencing guidance counselors’ decisions about which students to serve and how.
OVHSD’s context as a high-performing, high-wealth school district influenced how the District
supported and responded to the needs of its stakeholders and how it sets priorities (Elmore, 2006;
Hallinger & Murphy, 1986; Ray-Taylor et al., 2009). Consistent with the literature (Dahir &
Stone, 2009; Elmore, 2005; Engberg & Gilbert, 2014; Perna et al., 2008), the District responded
to the direction of the external entity in terms of accountability mechanisms and resource
allocation. The organizational influencer of accountability is represented differently in Figure B
to reflect the emphasis on the external entity’s role in exerting external pressure on the District,
which in turn makes its way to the guidance counselor, while the District also applied pressure
through internal accountability mechanisms to influence the choices and behaviors of the
guidance counselors. Likewise, the influencer of resources is also extended from the external
entity through the District to the guidance counselor to reflect the reality that external directors,
through grants, funding, and demand, drove the availability and allocation of resources that
guidance counselors had at their disposal to support students. Finally, Figure B includes
revisions to the student component to reflect that guidance counselors did not see all students as
equal in terms of priority or time allocated. Struggling students were the highest priority,
followed then by high-achieving students, who are represented by a much larger box to reflect
the size differential in terms of the number of students and amount of time guidance counselors
perceived and reported they spent their time on. An additional group, “passion projects,” is
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 39

included to reflect that some guidance counselors took time beyond their struggling and high-
achieving students to devote to these special causes that were meaningful for them. Lastly, the
“middle” student group is at the bottom of the pile, literally and figuratively, with a transparent
arrow that suggests the guidance counselors’ time and attention sometimes did not reach far
enough to serve their needs.
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 40

CHAPTER THREE: METHODS

The purpose of this study was to understand guidance counselors’ perceptions of their
role in supporting “middle” students to meet college readiness goals, and how organizational
factors in the District influenced their perceptions or performance. The site of the study was the
Orchard Valley High School District, located in an affluent suburb in Northern California. In
this highly competitive, high-achieving district, the “middle” student was characterized as the
student who was not on track to meet District college readiness standards or high-achieving and
was not at-risk of dropping out, who made up approximately 15% of the student body. This
qualitative study focused on the roles and processes of guidance counselors and school
conditions that influenced how guidance counselors approach their work in alignment of the
stakeholder and organizational goals. This chapter describes the research design, rationale, and
strategies for increasing credibility and trustworthiness used throughout my study as I sought to
understand guidance counselors’ perceptions of their work and answer my research question.
Participating Stakeholders

The stakeholder group for this study was school guidance counselors. Of the 21 OVHSD
counselors, there was a range of experience from 1 year to 26 years of service. Though the racial
and ethnic composition of this group did not reflect the diversity of the student population, it was
similar to that of the rest of the OVHSD staff: 1 African American (5%), 3 Hispanic/Latinos
(14%), 4 Asians (19%), and 13 Whites (61%). Researchers found that factors such as years of
experience and guidance counselors’ own backgrounds could influence their role concept,
motivation, and job performance (Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009;
McDonough, 1998, 2005; Woods & Domina, 2014; Venezia & Kirst, 2005). Guidance
counselors’ experiences working with diverse student populations, or in different school
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 41

environments, could also influence how guidance counselors perceive or approach their work
(McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009; McDonough, 1998, 2005). In this qualitative study, it was
important to include perspectives and individuals who were positioned to offer insight that
helped answer my research question (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The criteria discussed below
were selected for the purpose of creating a sample group that spanned the range of experience,
knowledge, and demographic factors that might have influenced guidance counselors’ ability to
support students was essential to maximize the perspectives and information gathered during the
study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Interview Sampling Criteria and Rationale

Criterion 1: Years of experience. Years of work experience had a direct correlation to
the declarative and procedural knowledge a guidance counselor had for supporting students with
diverse needs (Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009). Researchers noted
that conceptual knowledge developed over time enhanced guidance counselor work
performance, as counselors developed strategies for supporting students, reading transcripts,
collecting and analyzing data (Perna et al., 2008; Savitz-Romer, 2011)
Criterion 2: Counselor background. A guidance counselor’s own context, including
race or ethnicity and educational experiences can contribute to motivational influences including
passion for the work and goal orientation (McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009; Woods & Domina,
2014). An individual’s background might also have influenced how he or she perceived or
interpreted cultural messages and individuals’ actions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Because
OVHSD’s guidance staff was not very diverse, purposefully including participants from different
racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or educational backgrounds maximized the variation of
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 42

perspectives that could have provided insights about guidance counselor experiences in pursuit
of my research questions.
Criterion 3: Performance band representation. Though all five OVHSD schools were
high performing compared to state averages, there were differences in the student populations at
each of the schools that warranted deliberate representation in the course of this study. Given
that the three highest performing schools in the district had very small populations of
traditionally underrepresented students in the target “middle,” or not-quite-college-ready group,
it was important to examine how counselors in these schools addressed the needs of these small
populations compared to the two schools with significantly larger cohorts of students in this
group. To that end, guidance counselors were grouped into three performance bands based on
their school context: high, middle, and low, with three schools included in the “high” band and
one each in the “middle” and “low” band. In addition to the familiarity with their own school
culture, processes, and resources, which differed by site, a diverse representation among school
sites for the counselor sample yielded insights in how the school context contributed to
motivational influences including passion for the work and goal orientation (McClafferty-Jarsky
et al., 2009; Woods & Domina, 2014).
Interview Sampling Recruitment Strategy and Rationale
This study used qualitative, open-ended, semi-structured interviews with individual
guidance counselors. All OVHSD guidance counselors were informed of the study and invited
to volunteer for potential selection as participants. Initial outreach to this group was sent via
email, with an announcement the next day at a regularly held District Guidance Team meeting
after professional development and official business had concluded. I provided an overview of
the study and its purpose, and emphasized that participation in the study was voluntary and not
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 43

tied to job status or evaluation. I also appealed to guidance counselors’ desire to improve their
practice and the guidance system by highlighting participation in the study as an opportunity to
provide insight into the role and context of guidance counselors in meeting the needs of the
“middle” student, in alignment with the District’s Belief Statements and Guidance
Commitments. The original sampling plan was to use maximum variation sampling, which
entails the purposeful selection of participants representing a range of experience and other
demographic considerations in a balanced and more objective manner (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). Out of 21 OVHSD guidance counselors, 7 volunteered initially, and I recruited 3
additional counselors through follow-up individual conversations to ensure a diverse sample that
adequately represented the groups described above. The 10 counselors represented a little more
than one-third of the total stakeholder group in the district, and represented the range of
experience, background, and context of the OVHSD guidance counselor group (Merriam &
Tisdell, 2016; Patton, 2002).
Table 3.
Guidance Counselor Participants by School Context and Experience

School Context Performance Band
Criteria Low Middle High
# participants 3 3 4
Years as Guidance Counselor*

1-5 years 1 1

6-10 years

2

11-15 years 2 1

16-20 years 1 2
Years in District*

1-5 years 2 1

6-10 years

1

11-15 years 1 1

16-20 years 1 3
*Years of experience as self-reported on participant survey.
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The 10 guidance counselor participants spanned across school contexts and years of experience
as guidance counselors and in the District. The median years of counseling experience for the
participant group was 12 years, which was higher than the median years for the total guidance
counselor group at 9 years. Forty percent (n=4) of the guidance counselors had experience
working in education before becoming guidance counselors. Half (50%, or n=5) of the
participants described their racial and ethnic background as “White,” while the other half
described themselves as “Asian,” “Hispanic/Latino,” “Black,” or “Multi-Race.” Most counselors
also answered an optional question asking them to select a description that best captured their
high school student self: two indicated they were “struggling/at-risk,” and five indicated they
were “high-achieving” as high school students.
Data Collection and Instrumentation
This qualitative study utilized individual interviews, centered on guidance counselors’
perceptions of their role in relation to supporting “middle” students to meet District college
readiness goals.
Semi-structured interviews with individual guidance counselors were the primary
investigative tool. These interviews allowed for deeper probing into the interrelationships
between organizational elements (i.e., accountability, resources, culture) and the perceptions and
motivations of guidance counselors as depicted in the conceptual framework for this study. The
interviews were conducted in person in a location of the interviewee’s choosing. Some
counselors chose to meet in their offices with the door closed, while others opted for a local café
or asked to meet in my office with the door closed. Interviews lasted between 40 minutes to 1
hour and 15 minutes, and were recorded with permission from the interviewees. Participants
were assured that the recordings would submitted to a third-party for transcription, used for my
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 45

recollection and analysis only, and stored in a secure location with coded identifiers and limited
access.
Interview questions were designed to elicit guidance counselors’ perceptions of their
roles, how they approached supporting different types of students, and how they thought about
their work and their priorities. Additional questions aimed to understand the role of the school
and District in influencing the choices and behaviors of guidance counselors with respect to the
students they chose to serve and how. The week before I entered the field, guidance counselors
initiated a request that their collective bargaining unit propose capping the caseload for guidance
counselors, essentially lowering the student to counselor ratio and increasing the number of full
time equivalent (FTE) counselors on staff. Due to concerns that the action might influence the
participants’ responses during the interview process, an additional question was added directly
asking guidance counselors to comment on their thoughts on the caseload development and how
that might have influenced their interview responses.
Data Analysis
Data analysis began during data collection as I interviewed each participant and took
notes. I used a note-taking guide that included the interview questions, my research questions,
my conceptual framework, and a few “reminder” questions to help me reflect on whether I was
hearing what the interviewees were saying while keeping my biases and frame of reference in
check. I wrote analytic memos after each interview, documenting my thoughts, observations,
concerns, and initial conclusions about the interview in relation to my conceptual framework and
research questions, and considered further reflection questions to prompt me to uncover any
potential biases or reactions I might have held during the interview process. After I left the field,
interviews were transcribed by a third-party vendor and coded. Before coding, I read through
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each of the 10 transcripts multiple times and listened to the recording with my notes from the
interview, so that I could make corrections to the transcriptions, note emphasis and body
language, and fully understand each interviewee in the context of their responses. In the first
phase of analysis, I used open coding, identifying in vivo codes such as “I want to help,”
“resources,” “D-F-I,” “high fliers,” and “middle-of-the-road kids.” I “talked to the text” and used
Corbin and Strauss’ (2014) analytic tools such as making comparisons, looking at language,
considering the emotions and what aroused them, asking “so what” and “what if,” and
considering the structure and order of the narrative. Using these analytic tools allowed me to
step back from the interview in order to look for new ways to understand the data, slow down
and start to note questions and themes to consider (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). I then began
looking for empirical codes and applying a priori codes from the conceptual framework, such as
“triage,” “feel pressure,” “reactive,” “the District, “middle students,” and “internal
accountability.” The next phase of analysis was moving from empirical and a priori codes into
analytic/axial codes. Codes such as “priorities,” “pressure from parents,” “school processes,”
and “school climate/culture” emerged from this round of analysis as I started to see trends in the
data. In the third phase of data analysis I identified pattern codes and themes that emerged in
relation to the conceptual framework and study questions. At this point I began to group codes
and themes into a codebook so that I could see the data for all 10 participants in relation to the
emerging patterns and themes. I was able to identify data from participants as they related to
each theme, which I used to form the findings for the study. From there I turned back to writing
analytic memos for each participant interview in response to my research question, using the data
I had analyzed to support my assertions. Cross-referencing the data by theme and the analytic
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 47

memos with supporting data in response to the research question helped me identify the four
main findings for the study.
Credibility and Trustworthiness

Merriam and Tisdell (2016) stressed the importance of credibility and validity as
paramount to the study’s overall success and applicability to the “real world” (pp. 238-240). In a
qualitative study, validity can be addressed in part through the research design in terms of the
development of interview and observation protocols, data collection, and data analysis (Maxwell,
2013; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This study relied on qualitative interviews as the primary
investigative tool. According to Merriam and Tisdell (2016), within the realm of qualitative
research the relationship between research findings and reality, and the inevitable influence that
stems from the researcher’s experience and perspective, were important considerations in
designing a study that was both valid and credible. I practiced reflexivity by designing an
interview protocol with questions that were straightforward and not leading, and I considered
researcher influence in interactions with the participants as I took notes and after each interview
as I wrote analytic memos (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The data collected from
the multiple interviews enabled me to triangulate findings and identify patterns that informed the
analysis phase of the study (Creswell, 2014; Maxwell, 2013; Merriam, 1995; Merriam & Tisdell,
2016; Rubin & Rubin, 2012).
As the researcher conducting this study within my organization and interviewing
participants I worked with regularly, I had the benefit of firsthand knowledge of guidance
counselors’ work, which was both an asset and a liability in the research process (Glesne, 2011;
Maxwell, 2013; Patton, 2002). In my informational materials and interactions with participants,
I took care to clearly delineate the roles and relationships of the researcher and participants to
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 48

preempt confusion or concerns about influence and researcher bias (Glesne, 2011; Maxwell,
2013). My familiarity with the successes and challenges guidance counselors experience and
their school contexts allowed me to probe more deeply into their motivations and the
organizational influences that impacted their work while maintaining empathic neutrality, but
also presented as a liability by coloring my interpretation of participants’ responses based on my
own assumptions, experiences, or expectations (Patton, 2002). One particular example was in
response to a question about a time when the school or District imposed on their time and
priorities, and most guidance counselors cited an initiative that came from my office. In that
case, I was careful to regulate my facial expressions and delivery of related questions in order to
help the counselors feel comfortable sharing their perceptions and frustrations with that process,
even though they knew it was connected to my office. Rubin and Rubin (2012) cautioned that in
qualitative interviewing, the researcher had a responsibility to keep an open mind and regularly
reflect on potential biases in order to gain the widest range of insights possible without missing
key information because it was not expected. In that vein, I was deliberate in asking questions in
an even and objective manner, and sought to understand respondents’ perspectives without
judgment or reaction. I took care to be open and straightforward with study participants by
inviting them to ask questions about my study, and by not making promises I could not keep with
regard to assuring their confidentiality. Once my findings were in draft form, I practiced
reflexivity again by reading through the findings with the lens of people in the District, and
asked a colleague to do the same to ensure that I had captured guidance counselors’ responses
accurately and had taken enough steps to protect their confidentiality. Given the development of
the guidance counselors requesting caseload caps from their bargaining unit, I also took care to
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 49

reiterate to participants the caution that they should not expect that their participation in this
study would influence organizational policies or practices.
As a novice qualitative researcher, I understand the need to check my own assumptions
and biases that come with my positionality and my own experiences in education as a student,
teacher, administrator, and parent, and how those experiences shape my perspective and potential
interpretations in the research process (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). My
experiences as a student, specifically as a student of color, and as one of few non-White
educators in schools where the majority of students are either Hispanic/Latino or Asian may also
have influenced my perspectives and interpretations of the educational setting, processes, and the
people in these contexts that I observed and interacted with (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). I also
needed to be mindful of how my role in the District, and the purview that comes with it,
influenced how I perceived certain processes, policies, or organizational culture components that
I may or may not have had a stake in. In these situations, I reminded myself and my
interviewees that I was in my “researcher and data collector” role and not my “Coordinator” role
to minimize concerns about bias or undue influence (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Throughout the study, I employed validity checks such as reflexivity, member checking, and
kept an audit trail of my research decisions throughout the process (Glesne, 2011; Merriam &
Tisdell, 2016). After each interview and each cycle of data analysis, I wrote analytic memos to
record my reflections, questions, and reactions. These analytic memos were helpful in tracking
my potential biases and assumptions that may have interfered with my ability to notice or
misinterpret insights or trends in the data. During the data analysis phase, I also engaged in peer
review by meeting with my advisor to discuss what I was seeing in the data and possible
interpretations. This was especially important as a way to check my thinking for biases based on
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 50

my prior knowledge of the participants and their school contexts. Using these strategies not only
ensured transparency to the research process, but also helped build trust and credibility
throughout this research process with study participants and stakeholders within the larger
organization.
Prior to conducting interviews, I sought and was granted permission from respondents to
audio record the conversation. While I offered to furnish a copy of the transcript to the
respondents so they may have the option of checking that I captured their responses accurately,
none were interested. This respondent validation, or member checking, would have provided
another validity check within my study (Creswell, 2014; Maxwell, 2013; Weiss, 1994).
Ethics

As a qualitative researcher, I understand the importance of protecting the human subjects
in my study by adhering to the three pillars of qualitative research: respect for persons,
beneficence, and justice (Belmont Report, 1979). I submitted my study to the University of
Southern California’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), was approved, and followed the
prescribed guidelines and protocols to ensure the safety and privacy of the participants of this
study. Informed consent is an important step in these protocols to ensure that all participants
understand their rights and the precautions taken to protect their confidentiality (Glesne, 2011;
Merriam & Tisdell, 2009; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). I provided all prospective participants
information about the study including that their participation was voluntary, confidential, and
non-binding. Each participant, prior to commencing activities associated with the study, signed
consent forms which outlined the purpose of the study, their role, and their right to decline to
answer a specific question or to withdraw from the study at any time. I also made sure they
understood that their participation in the study, and the information they shared during that
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 51

process, would not be used in any evaluative way. I used informed consent to empower research
participants so they were aware of their rights, and reminded them of these rights throughout the
study (Glesne, 2011). These strategies were aimed at building trust and credibility with the
participants in my study, as well as the larger organization in which we all worked, by ensuring
that my intentions and actions were transparent and clearly communicated throughout the
process to all stakeholders (Merriam & Tisdell, 2012; Patton, 2002; Rubin & Rubin, 2012).
Another area of ethical consideration was the potential for perceptions of power
dynamics and influence that come with research relationships and the situation of conducting this
study within my own organization (Glesne, 2011; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Given my role as a
central office administrator with broad oversight of all Teaching and Learning programs, it was
possible that guidance counselors, who were the stakeholder group in my study and therefore the
target respondents, would have hesitated to speak freely if they thought I had influence over their
job status. My job title and role may also have caused some to question the ethicality of
conducting research within my own organization and whether I am exploiting relationships with
staff or my position and influence (Glesne, 2011). To address these concerns, I made it clear in
my study information sheet, informed consent forms, and introduction to the interview that my
purpose in conducting this research was to study the issue in order to improve our systems. I took
care to delineate my “investigator and data collector” role from my “Coordinator” role in
interactions related to the study. Being explicit about which role I was assuming helped mitigate
concerns or confusion about my dual roles and the potential for interference or exploitation
(Glesne, 2011; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). I emphasized that I had no influence or authority over
their job status, nor did I provide any sort of incentives for their participation (Merriam &
Tisdell, 2009). However, after the study was completed, I did write a personalized thank you
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 52

note and enclosed a small gift as a token of my appreciation for sharing their time and thoughts.
This method of expressing my appreciation, not linked to participation in the study or to certain
responses within the study, decreased the likelihood that individuals felt coerced to participate or
respond in certain ways (Glesne, 2011, Maxwell, 2013; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). It was also an
opportunity to remind respondents once again how their participation contributed to the work of
improving our systems for students.
Limitations and Delimitations

There were three main limitations of this study: respondents, timing, and researcher role.
A reliance on the interview responses of guidance counselor participants was a limitation
because interviewees might have provided information that was untruthful or inaccurate.
Another limitation was the timing of the study, which fell at a busy time of year for guidance
counselors and may have had an effect on which, and how many, guidance counselors
volunteered to participate in the study. This was particularly true given the timing of the
caseload discussion, which emerged after 9 of the 10 guidance counselors had volunteered for
the study but only days before the first interview was conducted. The third limitation was that
given my position in the district and interaction with District guidance counselors and programs,
my role as primary researcher may have influenced how study participants chose to respond to
interview questions.
There were a number of delimitations that need to be addressed. First was that as a
novice researcher, I may have developed an interview protocol that was insufficient in gleaning
the information I needed to answer my research questions, or missed an opportunity to ask a
probing or follow-up question. As I conducted multiple rounds of analysis and read, re-read, and
re-listened to the transcripts, I found myself wishing I had asked a different or additional follow-
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 53

up or probing question. As a novice researcher, I may have also failed to recognize a salient
piece of data in the analysis phase, or may not have interpreted it in a way that accurately
captured the respondents’ intent.
Conclusion

This qualitative study sought to understand guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role
in supporting “middle” students toward meeting district college readiness goals, and how District
organizational elements influenced the way guidance counselors approached this work. This
chapter described the study design, participants, and methodology for conducting the study. The
processes used for data collection and analysis were also presented in the context of the
participants and study site. A detailed explanation of steps taken to assure credibility and
trustworthiness is included, along with a discussion of the limitations and delimitations of the
study. The methodologies discussed in this chapter were chosen to support the study’s purpose
in understanding the perceptions of guidance counselors in relation to supporting “middle”
students. The next chapter discusses the results and findings for the study.

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CHAPTER FOUR: FINDINGS

The purpose of this study was to examine guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role
in supporting “middle students,” who were neither struggling nor highly academic, in pursuit of
their academic and post-secondary goals. Given the District’s stated goal that “All students will
be prepared for college and career” and core value of “all means all,” it was important to gain
insight into how guidance counselors saw themselves in relation to the organizational goal. As
such, the research question for the study was, “What are guidance counselors’ perceptions of
their role in relation to supporting ‘middle students,’ who are neither at-risk nor high-achieving,
toward college and career readiness?”
The study took place in the Orchard Valley High School District, a school district with a
reputation for strong academics and high college-going rates. The 5 comprehensive high
schools were divided into three performance bands for the study in order to ensure a sample with
representation from a broad cross-section. Of the 21 guidance counselors in OVHSD, 10
counselors participated in the study, representing a range of school contexts (performance
bands), years of experience as counselors and in the District, and personal backgrounds.
Table 4.
Guidance Counselor Participants
Guidance Counselor Years of Counseling Experience
Bella 1-5 years
Dana 11-15 years
Jill 16-20 years
Joan 6-10 years
Karen 11-15 years
Lia 6-10 years
Mark 16-20 years
Sophia 1-5 years
Trevor 11-15 years
Trina 16-20 years

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The 10 guidance counselor participants spanned across school contexts and years of experience
as guidance counselors and in the District. Semi-structured interviews lasting 40 minutes to 1
hour and 15 minutes were conducted with the 10 guidance counselor participants in venues of
their choosing.
The interviews revealed that guidance counselors described their job duties as diverse and
varied. They saw their role first as high school academic counselors, supporting students toward
successful completion of high school, with preparing students for their postsecondary endeavors
as a secondary purpose. Consistent with literature (Corwin et al., 2004; Elmore, 2005; Engberg
& Gilbert, 2014; Perna et al., 2008), these priorities were reinforced by organizational structures
and accountability mechanisms at the school and district level that communicated expectations to
guidance counselors about how they should enact their role, including the types of tasks they
carried out and which students they interacted with and supported. Because of these
expectations set by the school and District, OVHSD guidance counselors prioritized their time
first with struggling and at-risk students and second with students and families who took the
initiative to set up meetings with them, usually high performing students seeking guidance with
academic and postsecondary planning. The guidance counselors acknowledged that how they
supported both the struggling students and high performing students was in response to the
external pressures brought by local, state, and federal accountability measures including their
school’s reputation in the community and public reporting of school and district performance by
the state.
The OVHSD guidance counselors stated they did not have enough time to devote to the
students in their caseload. The number of individual student and family meetings per week
reported by guidance counselors ranged from “20-35” to “40-60,” with caveats that certain times
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of year, such as in the Fall during college applications season and in the Spring during course
selection season, those figures varied. Beyond supporting their struggling students toward high
school graduation and attending to the demands of their highly academic, college-going students,
guidance counselors divided their time between attending to students who fit the profile they
individually felt most passionate about working with, and students they were required to meet
with in response to school or District directives. While some of the students in this third group
might have first appeared in their offices through referrals or self-initiated meetings as the two
aforementioned groups, the guidance counselors indicated it was their personal experiences and
affinity to the students’ situations that drove them to continue to follow up with these students.
In addition to the academic and college counseling they provided to students, guidance
counselors reported that they were expected to manage other logistical tasks including student
schedules, summer and night school registration, letters of recommendation, and paperwork for
students who were enrolling in concurrent enrollment courses at local community colleges or
requesting courses for credit from outside institutions. This left little time for them to attend to
other students in their caseload who had not come across their radar by either school processes or
student initiative. The guidance counselors acknowledged that this group of students, whom
they referred to as their “hidden” or “middle” students, was underserved and that they did not
know much about them.
Finding 1: Prioritizing Struggling Students and High School Graduation

Guidance counselors prioritized first students identified as struggling or at-risk to meet
school and District expectations for maintaining high graduation rates. In order to manage the
volume of students in this priority group, guidance counselors allocated their time and attention
based on a hierarchy of need. The focus on maintaining high graduation rates was consistent
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with research that external pressures, primarily in the form of state and federal accountability
measures, placed high levels of importance on graduation rates and drove schools and districts to
focus on students who might negatively impact this metric (Corwin et al., 2004; Elmore, 2005;
McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009; Perna et al., 2008; Venezia & Kirst, 2005). Though OVHSD
graduation rates were consistently high, ranging from 88% to 99% across the five schools (CDE
DataQuest, 2017), the majority of guidance counselors (n=7) reported that their work supporting
a relatively small group of at-risk and struggling students required them to prioritize some
students over others. Even then, many expressed concern that they did not adequately serve their
students’ needs. Counselors reported that they “just didn’t have enough time” or “struggl[ed]
every 6 weeks to get through the list” of students in need of intervention and support, or that “it
just never gets done.” Districtwide, OVHSD had 57 non-graduates (2.2%) in the Class of 2016
(CDE DataQuest, 2017); however, the guidance counselors pointed out that the number of
students for whom they intervened throughout their 4 years of high school was far greater. They
described several ways struggling or at-risk students were identified for them to work with
through systemic school processes including progress grade checks, teacher referral, and the
Student Assistance Team (SAT) referral process. Three main themes, discussed below, emerged
from this finding with regard to how guidance counselors went about prioritizing their time and
support of their struggling and at-risk students.
Theme 1: Guidance Counselors Recognized that Supporting Students Toward High School
Graduation Was Their Priority.
For students identified by the school’s systemic processes as struggling or at-risk, the
focus for guidance counselors was supporting their students to pass classes and maintain
progress toward high school graduation. More than half of the guidance counselors (n=6) stated
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their priority was their struggling and at-risk students, and saw their role as one of matching
school and district intervention programs and resources to their students’ academic,
socioemotional, or behavioral needs. For example, Trevor described this difference how he
prioritized and supported these students:
Our goal is to help kids graduate. Those always kind of take the priority of making sure
we get kids to graduate, because we’re high school guidance counselors. We’re not
college advisors. It is a balance between making sure we have time for all those students,
but I think our main goal, we’re high school guidance counselors. Our goal is to help
kids graduate and make sure they’re doing everything, coming to class, turning in all their
stuff, doing all those little things just to get them to graduation. Then that’s obviously I
think our first priority, and then the college stuff.
Trevor’s first declaration that “our goal is to help kids graduate” reflected his priorities for
working with students on high school graduation. He characterized his role as “mak[ing] sure
we get kids to graduate,” implying a pressure coming from external sources caused him to focus
on this singular goal “because we’re high school guidance counselors.” Because of this focus,
Trevor saw his work existing within the high school setting to support students, but not
expanding beyond it. He distinguished between “high school guidance counselors” and “college
advisors,” and indicated that a high school counselor’s goal for students lies within high school
performance: “mak[ing] sure they’re doing everything, coming to class, turning in all their
stuff…” Trevor saw his role as facilitating the behavior and performance of his students within
high school, which he considered a challenging prospect, “just to get them to graduation.” He
also implied that while he knew that his role facilitating high school graduation for his students
required a focus on “doing all those little things” such as making sure students were following
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through on attendance and assignments, he did not have the time, bandwidth, or need to consider
students’ postsecondary goals as part of the scope of his work. Trevor further reinforced this
division of focus on high school versus college when he acknowledged in a dismissive manner
that he had to balance “making time for those students” (the college-bound students) with his
stated priority for “help[ing] students to graduate.” By referring to postsecondary planning
conversations as nebulous “college stuff” to be considered only after the focus on high school
graduation, Trevor made it clear he saw his role supporting students as operating within the
realm of high school with graduation as the end goal. Trevor’s view of his priorities concerning
students’ graduation status was consistent with research findings that schools with higher
populations of working class, poor, or struggling students placed significantly more emphasis on
high school graduation than on college readiness (Bryan et al., 2009; McDonough, 1998). As a
guidance counselor working at a lower performing school with larger populations of
socioeconomically disadvantaged and struggling students, Trevor was focused on supporting
students to pass their classes and graduate. His response indicated that while he recognized that
there might have been some expectation that he provide students with postsecondary guidance,
he did not consider it a priority for his struggling or at-risk students, nor did he see it as part of
the conversation about graduating from high school.
The six guidance counselors reported that their priority was to support struggling and at-
risk students; however, they realized that in devoting their efforts toward this group of students,
other students would therefore not be served. While this sentiment was true across school
contexts and guidance counselor years of experience, the counselors from the more diverse
schools with higher populations of traditionally underrepresented students and lower graduation
rates (though still near 90%) indicated a greater tension between the attention they paid to the
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struggling students and other students. As Jill described, “usually we don’t know a lot of the
kids who are doing real well because our time is usually spent working with the other section of
kids, the struggling students.” She acknowledged that students who were not flagged due to their
poor academic performance would not receive her attention. Karen expressed a similar struggle
with how she attended to students in her caseload:
I guess, the first way that we usually process students who are not a self-referral or an
emotional issue is through the D-F-I list. That’s when we first realize that we need to
intervene with the student, so it’s usually through those lists…I mean [I] have a lot of
contacts with students through the D-F-I list…then I usually get to know them really well
and often my non grad seniors, when you’re potentially non grad so the kids I work with
very intensely, and then the other [students], it’s difficult....
Karen’s description of how struggling students come to her attention started with the distinction
that she did not consider “self-referral” or “emotional issue” students as part of her “struggling
students” group to monitor. She explained that her struggling students usually first come to her
attention through the “D-F-I list,” a report of the students who have received grades of D, F, or
Incomplete (I) for each grading period. As a standard practice across all five campuses, the
school generated this report each grading period and provided it to guidance counselors for them
to follow up with students who needed support or intervention. While Districtwide, the
percentage of students who earned a grade of D, F, or I at one or more grading periods was 35%
(unduplicated), by school context the percentage ranged from 18% to 60% (OVHSD Local
Control Accountability Plan, 2017). Guidance counselors at the schools with higher percentages
of students earning D, F, or I grades therefore had longer lists of students to attend to and
therefore would spend more of their time on this type of academic counseling. This reality for
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schools with higher populations of struggling students was consistent with the research that
guidance counselors at lower performing school contexts spend more time in academic and
intervention counseling and less time with other activities such as college and career guidance
(Corwin et al., 2014; Engberg & Gilbert, 2014; McDonough, 1998). As both Jill and Karen
indicated, they “get to know them (the struggling students) real well” since they spent
considerable time with them. Trevor, Karen, and Jill, all guidance counselors at two of the
lower performing schools in the district, perceived their work in helping struggling and at-risk
students graduate as their highest priority. For them, this meant working “very intensely” with
these students and developing relationships with them; however, they conceded that doing so
also meant they were not attending to other students in their caseload.
Theme 2: Though They Were Clear that the Priority was Graduation, Guidance
Counselors Felt They Could Not Adequately Serve All the Struggling Students in Their
Caseload and Therefore Needed to Make Decisions about Whom to Support.
While the guidance counselors recognized that high school graduation was the priority
for how they supported students, all expressed sentiments that there were many other students
who were also struggling and in need of their support. Sophia started by acknowledging, “As of
right now, we’re here primarily academically. We’re their guidance counselor. We want to
make sure that they have the credits to graduate.” Sophia understood the priority the school and
District expected her to deliver was supporting students toward high school graduation, so her
first responsibility was to ensure students were progressing toward graduation, or to facilitate
credit recovery opportunities for those who were not. Within that work, however, Sophia
recognized there were multiple tasks that needed her attention:
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There’s a lot of things going on. I’m doing my best to give everything 100% of my best,
but I’ve learned that I have to triage and say, “All these things are priorities, but what is
the most important right now?” It’s getting the seniors to graduate, and then signing the
kids up for summer school and then talking [to parents] and scheduling parent meetings
and all these other things.
Sophia’s statement that “[t]here’s a lot of things going on” suggests that she saw several layers of
work within the job of supporting students academically. She used the word “triage” to describe
the decisions she had to make within her work since “all these things are priorities” and she is
“doing her best to give everything 100% of [her] best.” She then identified four additional,
discreet tasks that she considered part of the work of academically supporting students: “getting
the seniors to graduate, and then signing the kids up for summer school and talking [to parents]
and scheduling parent meetings.” The order in which she listed these tasks showed a hierarchy
she had established for her work: time-sensitive needs such as supporting seniors who were only
a few months away from graduation was first, followed by summer school registration (which
was occurring at the time of the interview). Sophia’s ordering of student groups as seniors first
and then “kids for summer school” as a matter of time urgency also implied an age hierarchy—
the older students, for whom recovering credit in summer school was most urgent—were higher
on her list than freshmen or sophomores. Parents she needed to contact as a follow-up to a
student meeting and those with whom she needed to schedule meetings were also lower in her
list of priorities. Although Sophia recognized that all the tasks she named were important and
she wanted to give each “100% of [her] best,” the reality was that establishing a hierarchy of
whom she would attend to first meant that her best efforts were more likely to be spent on
students and tasks at the top of her list.
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The majority of guidance counselors (n=7) expressed struggles similar to those Sophia
described in needing to establish a hierarchy for attending to the students within her priority
group. While this sentiment was consistent across school contexts, guidance counselors from the
two lower performing schools indicated greater numbers, longer D-F-I lists, and therefore less
time to devote to each student, let alone other tasks or student needs. Dana raised this challenge
when she showed her “44 pages” of students with one or more failing grades at the progress
grade-reporting period, and described her approach to tackling the latest list of students to meet
with:
…you cannot really prioritize because there’s no prioritizing…But, seniors, non-grads,
and then emotional [needs], those are number one. And summer school, because they
will need summer school most likely right at the big group [registration]. Making sure to
take care of the group. Every opportunity to make up any failed classes. I cannot think
of another way to describe prioritizing. We only talk about triage. What’s the most
important? Okay, I’m going to do seniors and then freshman I guess.
Dana expressed frustration that she was not able to attend to all the students in her caseload and
needed to prioritize her time, but felt “there’s no prioritizing” she could justify because every
student’s needs were important. Like many of her colleagues, she identified her ranking order or
priority based on urgency: “seniors, non-grads, and then emotional needs” were “number one”
for her as they had the least amount of time left for her to intervene (seniors and non-grads) or
the most time-sensitive (emotional issues that could require referrals to mental health
professionals). Most of the priority groups Dana identified—seniors, non-grads, and students
needing summer school or making up failed classes—were identified as high priority based on
the time of year and upcoming deadlines in the last month of school. She dismissed the word
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“prioritizing,” instead referring to her decision-making methodology as “triage,” reflecting her
perspective that she could not possibly address each case with enough urgency and attention and
therefore needed to be strategic about how best to allocate her time and energy for maximum
benefit to students. As she made decisions about “what’s the most important,” she “triaged” her
caseload based on deadlines and urgency, and acknowledged that freshmen would be last.
Dana’s “triage” comment reflected a frustration with the multiple roles that guidance counselors
aimed to fulfill—academic counselor, mental health counselor, summer school registration
facilitator, paperwork chaser. Researchers found that where counselors faced role ambiguity and
juggled multiple role expectations, they were not as able to provide efficient or adequate
guidance and college knowledge support to their students (Bryan et al., 2004; Engberg & Gilbert,
2014; Freeman & Coll, 1997; Perna et al., 2008). Further, Corwin et al. (2014) suggested that
when guidance counselors’ roles are split between competing interests, it was most often
younger students and those who were neither at-risk nor self-advocates who were not served,
thus perpetuating the information gap that exists for students from younger or traditionally
underrepresented groups.
Of the seven counselors, those at higher performing schools (n=3) indicated their
struggling students mighty have been smaller in number, yet they faced the same challenge of
having to prioritize some students over others. Similar to her colleagues at lower performing
schools, Trina expressed concern that she could not adequately serve all her students, which for
her included not only initial meetings but follow-up conversations:
I feel like it’s that follow-up thing that’s hard. Even with my D-F kids, I just feel like
every 6 weeks I’m struggling to get to all the kids on the D-F [list]. Realistically, I can’t,
so it’s like I have to prioritize who I’m gonna get to. So obviously my juniors, I’ll take
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juniors before sophomores and seniors before juniors, you know what I mean? I have to
pick and choose. I hate that part, because I feel like I want to be able to…devote my
time, my attention. But I would say the majority of my day, I feel like I’m behind and I
feel like “Oh, I gotta do this” or “Okay, I’m gonna check in with this kid and then I gotta
do this.” And then it just never gets done.
Like her colleagues in other school contexts, Trina felt she was behind. She stated, “it’s the
follow-up thing that’s hard” for her to have adequate time for her students, “even with her D-F
kids,” implying that she struggled to support even the small group of students who were her
highest priority. She indicated the cycle of grade reporting created additional time pressure in
that “every 6 weeks I’m struggling to get to all the kids on the D-F [list].” She claimed it was not
realistic for her to meet with them all and therefore “I have to prioritize who I’m gonna get to.”
Similar to her guidance counselor colleagues at other schools, she described a hierarchy for
meeting with students based primarily on their grade level, starting with the oldest students first.
She expressed frustration that she “had to pick and choose” because she wanted to be able to
“devote her time, her attention” to her students according to what she believed each student
needed. To Trina, part of being able to “devote her time” was following up with her students,
but she explained that even when she planned to “check in with this kid,” other tasks take over
and “it just never gets done.”
Across school contexts, the guidance counselors maintained they had more students to
support within the priority group of students struggling or at-risk of not graduating than they
were able to serve. They described the choices they made in establishing a hierarchy of the level
of support they were able to distribute to each group of students, with grade level as the primary
driver. Both the sentiment that they had more students in their priority group than they could
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manage and the strategy for prioritizing them was consistent across school context and counselor
years of experience. Also consistent across the guidance counselors was their frustration and
regret that they were not able to meet adequately the needs of these struggling and at-risk
students identified as most needing their support. Lia expressed such feelings of regret that she
was not able to help even though she wanted to:
The prioritizing was hard because you want, I think at least my natural, I like to help. If
you ask me to help you, I will usually say yes. That is my Achilles’ heel. That’s why I
got into the job. That’s what I feel good about doing. You have these kids who are like I
tried to put an appointment in but I put it in 2 weeks ago and I haven’t seen you. You
feel horrible. You shouldn’t have to wait 2 weeks, but I don’t [have time]…”
For Lia, having to prioritize some students over others, and not being able to get to others
entirely, went against her natural inclinations to help others. She referred to this desire to help as
her “Achilles’ heel,” implying that she saw her desire to help her students as a shortcoming or
vulnerability and not as a strength that would aid her as a guidance counselor. Prioritizing
certain students over others kept Lia from doing “what [she] feel[s] good about doing.” Her
comment that she would “feel horrible” when a student had to wait over 2 weeks to meet with
her suggested she felt responsible and helpless about the situation. It was acknowledgement that
a wait time of 2 weeks was unacceptable and implied a message to her students that she did not
have a sense of urgency about supporting their academic success.
While some guidance counselors like Lia expressed frustration in terms of feelings of
regret for the student or resignation that they could not do more, others indicated stronger
feelings of anxiety or worry over the students they were not able to reach. Dana described such
fears about missing students and the pressure it brought:
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There’s all sorts of safety nets. There’s always a fear we’re going to miss somebody…I
cannot believe we have to do all this. I just feel like we’re set up to make an error.
We’re set up. It’s like there’s a lot of little details like that. We may miss a kid who had
a D in something and not recognize it until end of 11th or something. It builds a lot of
pressure. Their future…
Dana referred to “all sorts of safety nets” used to identify students in need of support, such as the
D-F-I list, Student Assistance Team process, and teacher referrals, and indicated that these
“safety nets” exist not only to identify students initially, but to catch students who might have
gone undetected in earlier rounds of “triage.” Her description of the “fear we’re going to miss
somebody” highlighted the tremendous responsibility she felt toward her struggling and at-risk
students and seeing them through to graduation. Her comment that she “cannot believe we have
to do all this” implied that the expectations for her job were more than supporting students
toward graduation, and were greater than she believed she could reasonably manage. Coupled
with her earlier statement that she had to “triage” her struggling students and could not meet with
everyone on her list, her comment suggested that she did make choices about which students she
saw and which tasks she addressed. Dana’s comment that she felt “set up to make an error”
highlighted the predicament she and other guidance counselors experienced often: they were
forced to prioritize or “triage” students due to the large volume of struggling students identified
for support, and then later were held accountable if students were missed and credit or grade
deficiencies were not addressed. Dana repeated feeling “the pressure” and then connected it to
“their [the students’] future,” indicating her belief that it was not just the immediate goal of high
school she felt responsible for. For Dana, the pressure of being accountable for students whom
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she may have missed came from not only the expectations of the school, but also her sense of
stewardship in supporting her students’ future.
Theme 3: Connecting Students to Other Resources—Programs and Other Staff
Members—was Another Way of Serving their Struggling Students. School Context Played
a Role in the Availability of Resources for Guidance Counselors to Connect Their Students.
In addition to prioritizing students they needed to meet with, guidance counselors
described connecting students to other resources, including school-based and off-site programs,
as well as other staff members, as another strategy for supporting their struggling students. All
10 guidance counselors reported that they referred students to other colleagues when students
required more specialized support, such as from mental health professionals on campus or the
College and Career Center Advisor. School context made a difference: In lower performing
schools with higher populations of struggling or at-risk students, schools had more resources
allocated to supporting struggling or at-risk programs, so guidance counselors could connect
students to resources other than themselves. In higher performing school contexts, there were
fewer resources to support struggling students, so guidance counselors had to do more support
the student themselves. Half of the counselors (n=5) expressed mixed feelings about referring
students elsewhere: While they understood that other staff members had more expertise and they
would therefore have time to devote to other students, they were also reluctant to give up the
opportunity to work with the students and build relationships themselves. Sophia described this
pull between referring out as a strategy to have more students served and wanting to be there for
her students:
If a student comes in and they’re struggling, it’s like, “Yes, I can help you, but at the
same time, I also have to refer you to our Student Advocate because that’s their role on
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campus.” We have a College and Career Advisor here that does all of those things, but I
wish that I could, I’m their guidance counselor. I should still be there to support them,
whether it’s academically, socially, emotionally, personally. I still let the students know
that they can come and see me, but if I said yes to every single student that had questions
about college and careers or they were dealing with mental health or whatever, I just
would not have any time in the day…I wish I could do more of the personal check-ins,
just to see what they want to do in life and where they want to go and if they have any
questions about anything, but it’s tough.
Although she knew the expectations from the organization were for her to first support students
to graduation, Sophia still wanted to provide support in other areas as well when possible. While
she acknowledged others on campus whose roles were to provide support in the areas of mental
health or college guidance, she emphasized, “I’m their guidance counselor,” indicating she
wanted her students to see her as their primary support. Sophia saw her role as a guidance
counselor as one of providing support to her students in all areas, “whether it’s academically,
socially, emotionally, personally.” She noted that she had the capabilities to counsel students
with mental health issues or questions about college, but admitted that she needed to refer
students to these other specialized staff members or else she “would not have any time in the
day.” In referring students to others so they could be served in a timely manner appropriate to
their needs, however, Sophia recognized that she also relinquished her ability to “do more of the
personal check-ins, just to see what they want to do in life) and build relationships with her
students.
While all 10 counselors saw their ability to connect their students to other staff members
and resources as part of their purpose in supporting students, those who were most explicit about
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their role in supporting students to reach high school graduation (n=6) saw this strategy as
another way to provide more support for struggling students. As Sophia remarked, “I know that
we have the resources that can help that student flourish, whether it’s academically, socially,
emotionally.” Like Sophia, the counselors saw their role facilitating students’ access to these
resources as one in which they needed to be able to not only know what options were available to
students, but also which of the available options were best suited for the individual student, given
their academic or socioemotional needs.
For the guidance counselors (30%, or n=3) who were engaging their struggling students
in conversations about postsecondary goals in addition to progress toward high school
graduation, these options for students ranged from courses offered at the high school to District
enrichment programs to community college courses. Researchers identified the ability and
availability of guidance counselors to refer students and facilitate their participation in such
programs as key to their accessibility, particularly for students from traditionally
underrepresented groups (Bryan et al., 2009; McKilip, Rawls, & Barry, 2012; Perna et al., 2008).
Half of the guidance counselors (n=5) noted that part of their role as facilitator of resources
required them to have knowledge of the vast array of options for students, particularly in the
realm of credit and grade recovery or remedial programs serving the struggling or at-risk
students who were trying to repair progress toward graduation or become college eligible.
Sophia expressed that while she appreciated that there were so many resources for students, she
felt great responsibility for knowing them all so she could appropriately refer her struggling
students:
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We have a lot of resources here for the students to take advantage of. I feel like as a
counselor, it was my duty knowing all of those things and giving those resources to that
student or making them aware or knowledgeable of them.
Sophia spoke positively about the array of resources available for students as a boon for students,
but indicated that it was their responsibility to make use of them. She considered it her “duty” to
know what resources were available and for what type of student and need, signifying her
investment in the role she played in facilitating their access to these options. Because of her
investment, she viewed the accessing of these resources as an unspoken deal between her and her
students: She offered the resources, and expected them “to take advantage of” them. She further
reinforced this concept in her description of “giving those resources” to her students once she
made them “aware or knowledgeable of them.” Sophia went on to say,
There’s a lot of different needs here. There’s just so many ways that we have to address
them, but it’s tough because you also have the students who are failing and you have the
students who, there’s just a wide array of things here that we have to be well-rounded in
order to address those needs of the population.
Consistent with the literature, Sophia was able to fulfill her role facilitating access to resources
that would support her students’ needs, whether it was to recover credit toward high school
graduation or perhaps toward college eligibility. She saw it as her responsibility to be
knowledgeable about the resources and then to make opportunities available to her students.

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Like Sophia, Bella expressed similar sentiments about the resources she was able to
connect her students with:
I do a lot of the interventions and I’m pretty familiar with the interventions and how I can
better support them and make sure they have what they need. And I want to make sure I
can give them everything that I can to make them feel supported.
While Bella’s focus was on interventions for her students, she saw her role in two parts: doing
them herself and connecting them with other resources. She described how she “do[es] a lot of
the interventions” and supported the students by meeting with them. Research found that
interventions delivered by guidance counselors was largely in the realm of motivation, study
skills, self-advocacy skill building, and academic planning that helped a student realize the
relevance of their coursework (Brown & Trusty, 2005; Perna et al., 2008). When not
administering the interventions herself, Bella stated that she was “pretty familiar with the
interventions [classes]” and was able to “make sure they have what they need,” indicating she
was confident in her ability to connect students to the resources available on her campus. For
Bella, referring students to an intervention class or other resource was another way she could
“make them feel supported,” even if she was not the one actually supporting them.
For the guidance counselors, school context and student population had a significant
impact on the types of support they were able to provide for their struggling students. Both Bella
and Sophia, guidance counselors at schools with larger populations of struggling students, saw
their ability to connect their students to resources and interventions as another way to provide
services to help their students without providing the support themselves. They mentioned “a lot
of resources” and intervention programs to which they referred their struggling students, thereby
bringing in other staff into the web of support for the student depending on the students’
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individual needs. As their colleague, Karen pointed out, the availability of such resources and
interventions at these schools meant that “multiple people [were] helping one student.” While the
guidance counselors at the lower performing schools had long lists of struggling students to
report, they had resources available within the school to refer students so they were not the sole
provider of support and interventions. Due to funding provided for targeted student populations
such as low-income students or English Learners, these lower performing schools had additional
programs such as intervention or literacy support classes to which the guidance counselors could
refer their struggling students (OVHSD Local Control Accountability Plan, 2017). Unlike their
colleagues at other schools, the guidance counselors at these schools were able to tap these
additional resources, thereby leveraging a school-level support network for their struggling
students.
Guidance counselors at the high-performing schools, however, had a different set of
challenges: While they had fewer students on their list of struggling students, they also had fewer
resources available at the school. Lia explained that because her high-performing school had
fewer students struggling with the basic academic courses required for graduation, there were
few options on campus for the occasional student who did have that need:
I think that one of the advantages for having more of those students is you have classes
on your campus that can serve them better…We did not have Academic Literacy. We
didn’t have Algebra 1 Fundamentals. We didn’t have a lot of support at the school for
kids who were like a lower average kid...Kids who just weren’t quite there yet. There
wasn’t a demand that was heavy enough to support offering something like that. It’s like
well, where do you put these kids?
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Lia saw schools that had “more of those students” who struggled academically as an advantage,
because those campuses were then able to “have classes on [their] campus that can serve them
better.” She pointed out that at her high-performing school, because they did not have enough
students with high academic needs, the school did not have Academic Literacy, a fundamental
reading course, or Algebra 1 Fundamentals, a supplementary instruction period that students took
parallel to Algebra 1. For her students who struggled with literacy skills or basic Algebra, they
did not have access to such supports as did comparable students on other campuses. Lia stated
an observation that her school “didn’t have a lot of support” for students who were “a lower
average kid…kids who just weren’t there yet.” She noted that the school did not have “demand
that was heavy enough” to offer lower level academic or support classes, indicating her belief
that even though her students had this need, her perception was that the school did not see her
students’ needs as “heavy enough.” Lia had few options for these students and struggled to
support them. She went on to describe her concerns with one of the options available to
struggling students on her school campus:
Sometimes the tutorials are full of kids who have As in the class. The kid who has the C
or the D or the F, there’s not a place for them. Adjusting maybe the priority during
tutorial is for...I don’t know if you want to say it’s for kids who have Ds and Fs because
then none of the kids with Ds and Fs will show up because (no one will show up)…
Lia identified the tutorial period as one of the primary ways struggling students at her school
could get academic support; however, she raised the concern that it was “not a place for them
(the student with a C, D, or F).” Because teachers managed students during tutorial period on a
first-come, first-served basis and were often “full of kids of have A’s in the class,” Lia believed
that struggling students were not able to access teachers’ support during this period if they had to
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compete with highly successful students for the teacher’s time and attention. Even “adjusting the
priority,” as she put it, would not help because if tutorial periods were identified as serving
struggling students only, students would not attend because students would not want to identify
themselves to their peers, and perhaps to their teachers, as struggling. This dilemma was
consistent with research that school culture and peer groups influenced students’ tendencies to
actively seek help or guidance from adults on campus (Corwin et al., 2014; Holland, 2015b;
McDonough, 1998). Further research found that when students did not see themselves as part of
the peer group, they became isolated and marginalized (Crosnoe, 2009). This example illustrated
Lia’s concern that tutorial, one of the few school-based resources available for students to get
additional academic support, was not as accessible for struggling students because of the way
teachers responded to students during this time.
Like Lia, Joan worked at a higher performing school and found fewer resources available
to help her struggling students. In the absence of more support from the school and District, she
had to be creative or refer students to costly, outside programs:
To be honest, our district I think could do more to help. That’s why I’m really happy
about the Algebra Two that we’re trying this year in the night school program…our
summer school focuses on remediation where I really struggle to have to tell students,
“Okay, you need to take Chemistry. Well, you can go for $1,000 to take it at a private
high school.” I always tell a student, “If you want it, you can make it happen. It’s just
going to take a lot of extra work and a lot of creative piecing of multiple different
resources to make it happen.”
Joan spoke positively of a pilot Algebra 2 class in the District’s night school program, which
targeted students who were enrolled in Algebra 2 concurrently but struggling, and sought to
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proactively build their skills so they would be able to successfully complete the course the first
time. She saw the pilot class as an example of how the District could do more to support
students at her school, who perhaps were struggling but not credit deficient. Joan lamented that
summer school, as the primary vehicle for students to recover credit, “focuses on remediation”
and therefore covered only the basic courses required for high school graduation, and only after
students had already failed. For her struggling students in college-prep Chemistry, for example,
Joan described her only option as telling the student to spend “$1,000 to take it at a private high
school.” Joan commented that she “really struggled” with suggesting such costly outside
resources, as they required students to pay and therefore were not accessible to all students. She
noted that she often had to work with students to do “a lot of creative piecing of multiple
different resources” in order to support her struggling students. At her higher performing school,
Joan had fewer programmatic or school-based resources to support her students, so she looked to
District or outside opportunities to fill in the gaps that she could not provide in-house. This type
of “creative piecing together” meant more time and effort on her part to know what resources
were available to her students, and to help them navigate how to access them.
OVHSD guidance counselors saw their role first as high school counselors, then as
college counselors, and therefore focused on supporting struggling and at-risk students in
meeting graduation requirements. They recognized that external accountability systems that
placed high value on graduation rates contributed to the pressure they felt to support their
struggling and at-risk students through to high school graduation. Three themes emerged from
this finding that shed light on how guidance counselors perceived their role in relation to their
struggling and at-risk students and how they enacted their role. The first theme was that
guidance counselors prioritized their struggling and at-risk students above other students. The
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second theme was that even in prioritizing their struggling students, guidance counselors
recognized that they would not be able to serve all the students who were identified as
“struggling” based on the systems set up by the school. The third theme was that guidance
counselors referred students to other resources both on and off-campus, including other staff
members, as another way of serving their needs. Within this third theme, the role of school
context arose as a factor that influenced how guidance counselors used other resources to support
their students. Guidance counselors at lower performing schools which had more struggling
students had more resources to draw upon for them to outsource their support; guidance
counselors at higher performing schools had fewer resources to which they could refer their
students, which forced them to be more creative in finding ways to support their students.
Finding 2: Pressure to Serve Highly Academic, College-Going Students

When guidance counselors were not supporting their struggling students, they felt
overwhelmed by the pressure to meet with students and their families who initiated meetings
with them for academic and college guidance. The guidance counselors experienced this
pressure in different ways depending on how they perceived their role in relation to the students
and families’ meeting requests. This impacted the choices they made about how and when they
worked with these students and families.
While the schools and District had processes in place for identifying struggling or at-risk
students, the guidance counselors all indicated that the same was not true for other students, with
the exception of new students who enrolled in the middle of the school year. All 10 guidance
counselors reported that when they were not dealing with their struggling students, they felt
pressure to spend a substantial portion of their time with students and parents who initiated
contact with them for college guidance. Given that 90% of OVHSD graduates reported they
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immediately matriculated into a college or university and 60% in a four-year college or
university (OVHSD Local Control Accountability Plan, 2016), the number of students and
parents requesting college guidance meetings was significant. Researchers have found that the
student’s demographic context plays a role in how the student accesses guidance resources:
students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to have the social capital and
system knowledge to initiate a meeting with a guidance counselor (Bryan et al., 2009; Engberg
& Gilbert, 2014; Holland, 2015b; Perna et al., 2008). The guidance counselors indicated similar
trends with their students, noting it was the “high fliers,” “the ones who already know where they
want to go [to college],” and “intense parents” who were most likely to request meetings. They
described these students and parents as highly motivated and “intense,” and pointed to the
competitive, academic culture in the school and larger community as both the evidence and
cause of the “frenzy” of student and parent meeting requests. The counselors reported they often
had more requests for meetings than they could fulfill and therefore “always felt behind” or that
their work was “never done.”
In addition to the time pressures guidance counselors experienced in addressing the
requests from students and parents for their time, the counselors also noted they experienced
pressure in terms of expectations for the guidance services and information they were able to
provide. Counselors experienced and managed the pressure of these expectations in different
ways depending on their perceptions of their role as guidance counselors. How they saw and
enacted their roles shaped the type of guidance they provided, and influenced their relationships
with students and parents (Bryan et al., 2009; Holland, 2015b).
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Theme 1: The Guidance Counselors Felt Overwhelmed by Pressure to Meet with Highly
Academic, College-Going Students and Their Parents Because They Did Not Have a Way
to Manage the Demand for Meetings.
The majority of guidance counselors (70%, or n=7) described the time they were not
spending with their struggling students as taken up by a near-constant stream of student and
parent meeting requests which they struggled to manage. They reported feeling tremendous
pressure to meet with students and parents whom they described as the “upper echelon” or
“highly academic” students who wanted to meet with them largely for academic and college
guidance. This pressure came in the form of students and parents “calling and calling,”
“emailing at all hours of the night,” or “just showing up expecting to be seen right away.” A
guidance counselor from one of the highest performing schools described the barrage of requests
as a “fire hose to the face every single day” that she could neither avoid nor control. As Lia
explained, “they find you if they have questions. I didn’t call kids in unless they were on the D-
F list. Otherwise, they just requested to see me and that alone was more work than I had time to
do in a day.” Lia’s statement showed the contrast in how she worked with her different
populations: She initiated contact with her struggling students based on the “D-F list,” but for
other students, the student or parent would “find [her]” and request a meeting. Her comment that
their requests to see her amounted to “more work than [she] had time to do in a day,” indicated a
volume of requests that Lia felt was more than she could manage without having to prioritize or
make choices.
Lia’s sentiment that she could not possibly meet with all the students and parents who
requested meetings was one shared by the other guidance counselors across experience levels
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and school contexts. Karen, who worked at a lower performing school, expressed a similar
experience of not being able to meet with all the students who requested meetings:
I think just the amount of time to see some of these students in a day, you want to see as
many as you can, and then you have so much requests to come in weekly, so...We have
some that want to come see us more often than the others. It’s just my day is full.
Similar to Lia, Karen recognized that she had a higher volume of requests than she could manage
in a day. She stated that she “want[s] to see as many as [she] can,” but that the requests “come in
weekly” and her “day is full.” Unlike the D-F-I lists that came with every 6-week grading period,
both Lia’s and Karen’s descriptions suggested that requests from students and families for
college guidance meetings came in no particular time frame or frequency. Karen also noted that
“[w]e have some that want to come see us more often than the others,” indicating there was no
procedure in place for regulating how often or when students requested meetings with their
counselor. In her study of high school counselors and their support of students in different
school contexts, Holland (2015b) found that students and parents from more advantaged
backgrounds believed they were entitled to, and therefore demanded, more personalized attention
from their guidance counselors. Similarly, other research found that in the absence of systemic
procedures for counselors to allocate their time, guidance counselors met more frequently with
the same group of students who kept returning for more guidance, rather than meet with other
students who were not on their radar (Brown & Trusty, 2005; Bryan et al., 2009; Holland,
2015b). Karen’s experience that “some want to come in more often than the others” suggested
that consistent with the research, students were able to request meetings with her as they desired,
and without any other systems in place, the expectation was that she would meet with them. Her
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comment implied that in turning her attention to some students multiple times because they
requested it, she would have less time to distribute her attention to other students.
The seven guidance counselors expressed frustration that they were pulled in multiple
directions and therefore did not feel they had enough time to devote to the students and families
who requested meetings with them. They cited competing interests for their time such as the
expectation that they first address their struggling students, other routine tasks assigned by the
school, and the students and families who came to them for academic or college guidance. As
Bella explained, there were multiple demands she needed to address:
I have the incoming families who have a lot of questions, who either email me, call me,
will just show up here. They want to start having meetings already. And then I have
current families who also have ... Also want to meet with you, and yet we are doing ...
Still doing schedule changes, but then I’m still having at-risk meetings, or academic
reviews with my average students at the same time. So just trying to juggle all that.
Bella pointed out that the requests from students and parents to meet did not come in isolation,
and that she had to weigh those requests for her time with her obligations to do “schedule
changes,” “at-risk meetings,” and “academic reviews with [her] average students” as well. She
noted that the “incoming families who have a lot of questions,” whose students were not yet
enrolled in the school, “want to start having meetings already,” implying that it she considered it
an extra burden on her part to meet with these families before the students were even enrolled in
the school and on her caseload. She saw the incoming and current families who wanted to meet
with her as separate from the struggling students she supported with “at-risk meetings” and
“academic reviews for [her] average students.” Though she acknowledged that these families
who were presumably more academic and socioeconomically advantaged were proactively
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reaching out to meet with her, she saw them as a group to “juggle” when she was not attending to
other groups or tasks.
Guidance counselors also cited parent meetings, especially parents who dropped in
unannounced expecting to be seen, as adding considerably to the time pressures they experienced
because they did not want to turn away people who had taken time out of their day to come to the
school. This challenge was cited by counselors (50%, or n=5) at three of the schools, spanning
across school contexts. To address their predicament, the guidance counselor team at one school
proposed to their administration for next school year to experiment with strategies for limiting
parent meetings in order to devote more time to students, while another school was considering a
similar approach. Trevor explained,
“…some of the schools have to fight off parents. “I’m not your guidance counselor. I’m
your son or daughter’s guidance counselor.” We’re seeing that increase and just the level
of time we’re spending with parents increasing…we want to have specific days for drop-
in parents. This is the time you can drop in. You can’t just drop in, because right now
the hard thing is we have parents who just drop in. They expect to be met with.
Unfortunately, I have stuff to do. We have calendars we’re trying to hold them to, but we
have talked about having an hour every Tuesday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Friday
for parents to drop in. They can make appointments at that time. It’s a standing
appointment for parents. That’s all we’re doing during that hour, so like a half an hour
meeting. We’re trying to create a culture, too, of you can’t just drop in all the time and
expect to be met with, even though we have in the past, like, “Hey, it’s great you came in,
now you’re going to have to come back Tuesday or Friday.” You wouldn’t call your
dentist and be like, “Hey.”
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Trevor cited parents who “just drop in” and “expect to be met with” as problematic because he
“[had] stuff to do” yet felt obligated to serve them. He referred to other, higher performing
schools in the District that “have to fight off parents,” and stated his school was noticing “the
level of time we’re spending with parents increasing,” implying the parents who were
increasingly dropping in were those seeking academic or college guidance information.
Trevor’s use of the dentist appointment analogy suggested he wanted parents to plan for a
guidance appointment the way he planned for a dentist appointment, confirming a date, time, and
purpose of the meeting in advance. He pointed out that this was a change from the way his
school used to receive parents who dropped in, from “we have in the past, like, ‘Hey, it’s great
you came in’” to now “trying to create a culture…you can’t just drop in all the time and expect
to be met with.” This shift in the way the guidance counselors at Trevor’s school wanted to
receive and respond to parents reflected changes in the clientele: as the community and student
population demographics of this diverse, lower performing school changed, the school began to
shift toward becoming more academic and college-focused. In the past, guidance counselors at
Trevor’s school complained that parents were not coming to the school or requesting meetings to
support their students; they had now shifted to guidance counselors looking for ways to regulate
how much time they needed to spend with parents.
The guidance counselors maintained there was a higher volume of requests from their
highly academic students and parents than they could address without having to make choices to
set aside other tasks or people, or say no altogether. They suggested the constant pressure to
meet with these students and their families, who called, emailed, or “just showed up expecting to
be seen,” was difficult for them to manage in conjunction with the other tasks they needed to
accomplish. However, the guidance counselors implied that in these situations, they felt torn
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between saying no and helping the student or parent who took the time and initiative to come to
them. The counselors’ explanations of the way student and parent meetings landed on their
calendars indicated there were no parameters or systems in place to guide how the counselors
spent their time in relation to serving these college guidance requests.
Theme 2: Guidance Counselors’ Perceptions of Their Role Influenced the Way They
Approached Their Work with Highly Academic, College-Going Students and Their
Families.
In addition to the time constraints they felt when trying to serve all the students and
parents who wanted to meet with them, the guidance counselors also experienced pressure for
the kind of guidance services they would provide. Among the guidance counselors, there were
three general perspectives emerged in how they reported the pressure they felt in working with
the college-going “high fliers” who requested meetings with them. The first group (50%, or
n=5) described themselves as consultants who saw these highly academic students and their
families as an easy group to work with because “they’ve done their homework” and “know what
they want.” This group of guidance counselors spanned school contexts and were among the
more veteran guidance counselors, with an average of 14 years of guidance experience and 19
years in education. The second group of guidance counselors (50%, or n=5) saw themselves as
educators responsible to imparting “college knowledge” to their students and families, and cited
the need to be “up on [their] game” and knowledgeable about colleges and eligibility
requirements as the larger reason for their anxiety. These counselors, who tended to be newer
with an average of 6 years of guidance experience and 5 years in the District, believed they
needed to have an answer when the student and family came in with their questions.
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For the first group of counselors, supporting the college-going students and families was
challenging in terms of the time demands and sheer volume of requests, but was also rewarding.
They considered these their “easiest students,” and saw their role as meeting with these students
and families in order to provide feedback or additional information. They noted that these were
students and families who already had developed their academic plans and identified their
postsecondary goals, so their role was to consult and advise. The guidance counselors in this
group reported the least amount of stress around meeting with these students and their families.
According to Joan, a typical interaction she had with high-performing students was
the student that walks in and says, ‘Okay, here’s my 4-year plan. I printed it from online.
Can you just look at this for me? How does this look?’ That’s obviously the student that
is easiest for me, that is self-driven, knows what questions to ask.
Joan’s anecdote illustrated the relationship between high-performing student and guidance
counselor as one in which the student initiates the interaction. She describes the “easiest”
student as one who “is self-driven” in researching options, developing the academic plan,
identifying postsecondary goals, and “knows what questions to ask” the guidance counselor.
Joan remarked these students are “easiest for [her]” since they did not require a lot of research or
preparation on her part, and did not necessitate heavy goal-setting conversations.
Similar to Joan, Mark described his role as consultant as providing both resources and
other perspectives to guide his students and families:
“…they’ll (the student and parent) sometimes check back in with me each year and we’ll
make some modifications, but it’s really just a resource for them…they’re doing it on
their own and part of it is because we talk about the balance and ways to balance out the
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amount of hours and the course work over the four years, so that way they can see it
visually.”
Mark enacted his role as consultant to his students and families first by recognizing that it was
their call to determine how often they would meet with him and for what purpose. He
mentioned that students and parents “sometimes check back in” with him and bring their already-
developed academic plan to him for feedback and modifications. Mark saw the academic plan
as “just a resource” for the student and family, and he expected that they have ownership of the
development and maintenance of the tool “on their own.” Consistent with the research in Bryan
et al. (2009), at Mark’s high-performing, high-income school, students and parents had the
knowledge and social capital to initiate the academic planning process and reach out to the
guidance counselor as a resource. As a consultant, he considered his role as one of questioning,
providing context and information “so they can see it visually,” helping them make
modifications and consider how they can strike a balance with the workload and other
commitments across four years of high school. Building on what the student and family
researched and developed on their own, Mark asked questions about their goals, introduced a
variety of information, context, and potential benefits of a balanced workload, and guided them
to make or revise their academic planning decisions. Like Joan, Mark saw his role as working
beside his students and families to guide them and provide feedback for the decisions they made.
While the first group of guidance counselors considered the highly academic students and
families easy to help, the five guidance counselors in the second group thought otherwise. They
described these students and families as more difficult for them to work with because they came
in with their own research or advice from private college counselors, or had preconceived goals
that did not match the student’s interests or academic status. The guidance counselors in this
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group saw their role as educators responsible for providing the knowledge and expertise to their
students and families, and expressed apprehension that they might not be adequately prepared to
answer the questions the students and families raised. Bella, a newer counselor, described the
pressure she felt to have answers for the families that met with her:
I think for me what was harder was working with our high academic families and
students because they had a lot more of the very specific questions because...I’m like I
have no idea, I’ve never heard that before. Or they try and take classes for college or
other places and are they approved, are they not approved. So for me they those were
more challenging…Now in particular a lot of parents do their research. You have to
make sure that the information you’re giving is...it’s correct because they do do research
and it’s important to make sure that the reputation of the school is good.
Bella found the “high academic families and students” more challenging because she believed
she needed to have answers to their questions. She noted “a lot of parents do their research” and
have “very specific questions,” so she needed to be knowledgeable and prepared in order to
“make sure that the information you’re giving is…correct.” Her description of having to respond
with “I have no idea, I’ve never heard that before” and her statement that it was “important to
make sure that the reputation of the school is good” suggested that students and families might
have less confidence in her abilities as a guidance counselor and in the reputation of the school.
In studies on guidance counselor relationships with their students, researchers found that
students’ and their families’ perceptions of a guidance counselor’s trustworthiness were largely
based on the counselor’s ability to convey college knowledge (Bryan et al., 2009; Holland,
2015b; Perna et al., 2008). As a guidance counselor at one of the District’s lower performing
schools, Bella was sensitive to criticisms from highly academic students and families who
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sometimes expressed concerns that the school was not doing enough to serve their needs. She
indicated this dynamic was “challenging” and “harder” than working with her struggling students
because it required her to have a vast knowledge of colleges, admissions and eligibility criteria,
and other areas depending on what the student and family chose to research. As a guidance
counselor, Bella saw her role as a resource her students and families could trust. If she did not
have answers or the correct information for them, she worried that it could damage the
accountability relationships between herself, her department, her school, and students and their
families.
Like Bella, Lia also felt pressure to provide responsive and accurate guidance to students
and families. She cited the challenge of what she deemed the “high flier” students and parents
who came in with information they found on their own:
If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it to the best that I can. It was hard to find that
balance because the parents are really intense. They’re driving. They’re emailing you at
all hours of the night. They’re checking everything that you’re saying so you better be on
point, because they’re going to say oh, well I looked this up, spend 30 hours doing my
own research and I found that blah, blah, blah...You’re like oh, okay. I need to up my
game. It was just a different pace and a different environment than what I was used to,
but at the same time, I was like oh, these are the kids that go to Harvard. Huh, okay. It’s
just like a different planet in some ways.
Lia cited the parents who are “really intense” as a challenge for her, both in terms of the
demands for her time “emailing you at all hours of the night” and their willingness to “spend 30
hours doing [their] own research” and “checking everything you’re saying.” She acknowledged
she felt that she had to “up [her] game” when working with these families in order to respond to
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their questions and requests for information. She drew conclusion that “these are the kids that go
to Harvard,” suggesting that at this high-performing school, it was common for students and
families to research and check up on their guidance counselor and to contact her frequently.
Lia’s comment that the school was “like a different planet in some ways” indicated that while
she recognized that these “high flier” characteristics were “intense,” she accepted that she was
expected to respond and serve them to the best of her ability. For Lia, “do[ing] the best she can”
to serve these highly academic, college-going students and their families meant making sure she
had the information they were looking for, and she struggled to “find that balance” between
wanting to be prepared for them and the other demands for her time. Both Lia and Bella
considered their role as providing information to their students and families, and felt challenged
by what they perceived to be the student or family “checking up” or questioning them. As a
result, they saw themselves as working separately from the students and families, called upon
only for specific information, and not part of a team of support for the student.
The guidance counselors (n=7) indicated the highly academic, college-going student
population was the group they most struggled to serve. Unlike the struggling or at-risk students,
the “high fliers” and their parents had wide range of questions, came with their own information
or conceptions of the college landscape, and contacted their guidance counselor often and with
no predictability. The pressure of near-constant requests for meetings and students and parents
“just show[ing] up expecting to be seen” was a particularly difficult challenge for the guidance
counselors to manage. They felt obligated to serve this vocal, politically prominent population
whose postsecondary outcomes and opinions about the schools were important to the schools and
District. The external accountability related to the high-achieving, college-going student
population that impacted guidance counselors emanated from two main pressure points. First,
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recent shifts in local, state, and national accountability systems to place more emphasis on
college and career readiness mattered deeply to the schools and District, and drove schools to
monitor and improve each year college-going and Advanced Placement exam metrics (California
School Dashboard Technical Guide, 2017). In response to these accountability measures,
schools relied on their guidance counselors to monitor students’ progress toward college
eligibility completion and support students who wanted to take advanced coursework. Second,
the highly competitive community with an active “backyard fence,” where parents were known
to hire “$25,000-a-year private college counselors” for their children and compare notes about
their experiences, created a challenging environment for guidance counselors. The counselors
recognized they were expected to cater to this population and their requests, while they also felt
they were being tested and evaluated against other resources. The respective roles guidance
counselors perceived for themselves in relation to this highly academic, college-going population
further influenced how they approached their meetings with these students and parents and
shaped the relationships they formed.
Finding 3: Passion Projects

In addition to addressing the needs of their struggling or at-risk students and their highly
academic, college-going students, guidance counselors sought out students they wanted to
support based on their individual passions and their experiences in education.
For a majority of the guidance counselors (60%, or n=6) their experiences in or around
education as a student or adult influenced the type of counseling they felt most called to do and
the type of student with whom they felt most affinity. One counselor referred to these as her
“little projects.” These counselors found opportunities to pursue fulfillment of their own
objectives with students they had identified as needing their support and guidance. These
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objectives generally aligned to school and District values, therefore making it easy for the
guidance counselors to justify to themselves or to others, if necessary, why they were spending
the additional time and energy in these specific ways.
Two of the guidance counselors in this group indicated their experiences as adults
working with youth drew them toward certain types of students they wanted to support through
their guidance role. One counselor with a background in social and family services was deeply
committed to helping the socioeconomically disadvantaged students who were a small portion of
the school population. She worked with homeless students at the school to find community
resources and programs by “calling or reaching out to organizations…or tracking down resources
like where is housing available.” She saw her role as a liaison between the student and family,
the school, and the broader community to build a “web of support” for the student. This
counselor believed students’ circumstances outside of school impacted their ability to learn and
achieve, and she wanted to support them. She described the situation of one student who
typified the students she sought to support:
I have a student whose home situation is really common. Not uncommon. They don’t
have Internet at home and she has siblings to care for. Really common scenario, so she
doesn’t have time after school and it even happens that she cannot finish an online
assignment and then turn it in the next day so she might have to come in and find time
during the day to print. That’s one issue. No access to Internet. No working laptop or
computer at home. Which means that’s a huge equity issue…
The counselor described her student’s home situation as “really common,” indicating that “they
don’t have Internet at home and she has siblings to care for.” She listed two characteristics—a
lack of Internet service at home and caretaking duties—of this student’s situation that she
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believed reflected a home situation that presented a challenge for the student’s ability to learn
and achieve. She repeated several times that this student’s situation was “really common” for the
student population she was most interested in supporting, referring to both the technology access
and the caretaking responsibilities. She then elaborated that the student “doesn’t have time after
school” and “cannot finish an online assignment” due to her home situation and lack of
technology access. The counselor further emphasized the lack of technology by explaining that
the student “might have to come in [to the office] and find time during the day to print,” had “no
access to Internet,” and “no working laptop or computer at home.” The counselor believed this
student’s lack of technology access at home had a negative impact on her academic success. Her
declaration that it was a “huge equity issue” highlighted why she focused on students like this
one. She saw her students who did not have technology at home as disadvantaged in this school
in the middle of an affluent, high-tech community, where the assumption was that students had
access to technology and could be expected to complete assignments online. This counselor was
compelled by the equity issue around lack of technology access and its impact on students’
academic success to seek out these students to support.
Another counselor, Joan, described years of classroom teaching and experiences left her
feeling “overwhelmed by the personal stories students would share.” She cited her realization
that “there could be far more impact upon students’ success than just having great lesson plans”
as one of the reasons that compelled her to become a guidance counselor. She also described her
view that as a guidance counselor, she had the opportunity to influence students’ “mindset, a
believing that students could be successful, believing they could make it to a college, believing
that they are smart.” Driven by these beliefs, Joan sought to support students in navigating
competing definitions of “success:”
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I would say definitely with this being course registration time, it’s a definite struggle of
working with parents, students, and teachers to get them all thinking the same way, or
how do you gather information and use it in a way that’s going to lead to most success?
What I’ve really been struggling with in my conversations is really defining what does it
mean where students are going to be most successful because that changes depending on
who you’re working with…There’s some where how do you determine success is where
am I going to get my A grade? Others where is it success, where am I going to learn the
most? Then working a lot with parents’ success is getting them into a UC college.
Joan’s experiences as a classroom teacher led her to see her role as helping students build a
growth mindset and belief that they could find success. For Joan, this involved “working with
parents, students, and teachers to get them all thinking the same way” to support the students’
growth mindset, of “use [information] in a way that’s going to lead to most success.” Given the
highly competitive school environment and her experiences in the classroom, Joan believed
supporting her students in defining success for themselves was a way for her to personalize the
high school experience and influence students’ development of a growth mindset. She
commented that the definition of success “changes depending on who you’re working with,” and
that students, their parents, and their teachers were often not in agreement, implying that she felt
this lack of clarity was not in the best interest of the student. Rather than address the logistics of
“where am I going to get my A grade” or “getting into a UC college,” Joan saw the larger
conversation about defining success and instilling a growth mindset as a more important
outcome for her work with the student and family, and went out of her way to pursue it. She
went on to explain that as part of this work, she spent considerable time with teachers to help
them understand that while “a teacher thinks they’re doing the right thing by making the
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recommendation a certain way…the student takes that as that teacher doesn’t view that I have
the skills or that I’m good enough.” Joan recognized that while teachers made course
recommendations they thought put the student in the best position for success, students
sometimes saw the recommendation as the teachers’ aspirations and confidence in their abilities.
She saw a connection between the messages adults sent, students’ concept of success, their
mindset, and their ability to learn in the classroom, and sought out opportunities to support
students’ development of a growth mindset and positive learning environment.
These two counselors saw part of their role as building a network of support around the
student to impact their learning and academic success. This work required them to reach out and
engage with many more people and resources in order to support the student. Both cited their
previous experiences as educators as what led them to seek out opportunities to work with the
students they were most passionate about supporting. For these counselors, even though the
additional time and energy they devoted to building these “network of supports” for their
students was not part of their job description, nor was it something other guidance counselors
did, they felt it was important work for them to carry out. As one counselor put it, building these
supports “are all important pieces of my job because they’re supporting my kids and if we’re
involved in those different aspects, I can better ... I can see the whole picture for them.” For the
counselor, there was a clear benefit to the student for her additional support. They were also able
to describe how this work aligned with their schools’ values of providing personalized, caring
support for all students and with school and District goals around “supporting all students to
access high levels of learning” (OVHSD Belief Statements, 2015).
For other guidance counselors, experiences as students influenced their decisions to enter
the profession and shaped the type of counseling they most wanted to engage in. For some,
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positive experiences with an adult on campus or guidance counselor were the driving factor; for
others, negative experiences drove their desire to be a different kind of counselor from what they
had. Trina described her inspiration for becoming a guidance counselor was her experiences in
high school, where her counselor took special interest in supporting her through a difficult
personal situation. Because of her experiences as a student, Trina felt strongly that her calling
was to provide socioemotional support to her students:
I feel like I’m getting...I feel like also in recent years that’s been coming up a lot more
too. So, not just the demands but like being new or...academic planning, the D-F, but I
feel this emotional stuff has become a lot more prevalent. I’m seeing a lot of kids who
are just emotionally stressed. They have a lot more...There’s a student in my alpha...Last
year we’re seeing her weekly. Which I didn’t feel like...It was hard. But I know she felt
comfortable so I’m like “Okay, well, we can meet once a week.” And then towards the
end I felt like things were getting better, so then it was more like every other week. This
year I just didn’t...I honestly didn’t have the bandwidth to continue with that.
Trina felt compelled to support students who were “emotionally stressed,” and noted that “in
recent years that’s been coming up a lot more.” Given her experience as a high school student
going through a difficult time with her guidance counselor’s support, Trina saw her role as a
counselor as providing that socioemotional haven and support to her students. While she noted
that “it was hard,” she made the commitment to meeting with the student once a week because
“she (the student) felt comfortable.” While Trina felt compelled to help this student and devote
weekly meetings to her well-being, she realized that she “didn’t have the bandwidth to continue
with that.” Her word choice of “bandwidth” suggested that in addition to the time cost of
meeting with the student every week to provide socioemotional support, Trina was also
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expending considerable emotional energy that was taking its toll. Numerous studies suggested
that high school counselors often struggled to balance personal, mental health counseling with
academic or college counseling that could support students’ postsecondary aspirations (Bryan et
al., 2012; McKilip, Rawls, & Barry, 2008; Perna et al., 2008). While these studies cited a
number of organizational and structural reasons for this dynamic, they also identified counselors’
motivations for entering the profession—to support students’ socioemotional well-being—as one
of the main reasons individual counselors chose one type of counseling task over another
(McKilip et al., 2008; Perna et al., 2008). In Trina’s case, her inclination to support her
students’ socioemotional well-being herself, instead of referring the students to the on-campus
mental health professionals, was a personal choice based on her experiences as a high school
student and her reasons for becoming a guidance counselor. It was only when she realized the
impact of these choices on her own well-being and her other duties that she stepped away from
the role she had assumed as personal counselor.
A few counselors (30%, or n=3) explained that as first-generation college-bound students
who benefited from adults on campus who guided them toward college, they looked for
opportunities to reciprocate by playing that guiding adult role for students. As Bella put it, it was
her opportunity to “pay it forward.” She described one of her teachers as “the one I did plans
with, who motivated me, literally figured out what I needed to do to go to college,” and
explained how she wanted to play a similar role with the first-generation college-bound students
who came to her for help:
I think, for me, the motivation was I wanted to come back and make sure that we target
that population a little bit more, give them more support, making sure that they…I went
through high school and college, had to...I know the struggles. However, now there’s a
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lot more support. So I want to make sure you either take an advantage because I feel like
there’s no excuses for you guys to not get an education because it’s very different now.
Bella’s motivation for becoming a guidance counselor was the students who, like her, would be
the first in their families to attend college. She saw it as her mission to “make sure that we target
that population a little bit more,” suggesting a more proactive method of reaching these students
from what she had experienced as a student. Not only did she want to “give them more
support,” but Bella repeated several times that she wanted to “make sure” that students were
doing what she thought they needed to do to pursue college, and “make sure they take
advantage” of the resources now available at the school. Just as Bella’s teacher had “guided her,
made plans with her,” Bella wanted to guide her students by “mak[ing] sure” they took
advantage of the fact that they had “a lot more support,” including a guidance counselor who,
like them, had been the first to navigate college. Bella had high expectations for her students,
stating “there’s no excuses” for them because “it’s different now,” and she wanted to support her
students in being the first in their families to attend college, as she had.
A handful of guidance counselors saw their calling in addressing what they perceived to
be a highly competitive academic environment among students and parents by guiding them
toward aspirations that were appropriate for the individual student and not based on peer culture,
popularity, or name recognition. This group of counselors (40%, or n=4) included newer and
more experienced counselors from higher and lower performing schools, and saw themselves as
stewards, protecting students from what they worried were lofty ambitions based on peer culture
and college or university reputation. For some, their experiences as high-achieving high school
students that they saw as “more normal” compared to what their students were experiencing
made the mission especially relevant. As Lia explained, her own high school experience
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provided valuable insight and perspective in working with her high-achieving students whom she
perceived as “stressed:”
I feel like I had a good balance. I felt in some ways, I was supposed to be at this school
because I can get where the kids...I got why they were feeling how they were feeling, but
I didn’t have to go home to what they went home to. I feel like it gave me some insight
into why they were anxious about certain things and made it easier for me to try and help
them see a different way if that’s something that they were open to.
Lia felt a personal connection to her high-achieving students because she saw herself in them.
She believed her experiences “gave [her] some insight into why they were anxious about certain
things” and stated, “I felt like in some ways I was supposed to be at this school” because she
could relate to their ambitions and desire to succeed. While this personal connection helped her
empathize with her students, she was also compelled by the observation that she “didn’t have to
go home to what they went home to.” She implied that the pressures coming from home were a
greater source of her students’ anxiety, and indicated her reason for wanting to help students “see
a different way” to mitigate the pressure and find the kind of balance that she perceived she had
as a high school student. She went on to explain,
It made me, I guess, worry for them. What is this going to do? How are you going to
function when you get to college? Are you going to even know why you're there? You've
just done what everybody else has planned for you because you haven't even had the time
to sit and think about what you want…I have to do this path or I'm going to shame my
whole family, which was a whole...The family pride being tied to their kids' academic
success was new.
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Lia felt a personal connection to her high achieving students, but also expressed that she
“worr[ied] for them” because of the anxiety and pressure she saw them struggling with. She
questioned how students would “function when [they] get to college” and whether they would
“even know why [they’re] there” implying she believed students were making decisions about
college based on something other than their interests. She attributed much of the pressure to
students’ families and home life, as students have “just done what everybody else ha[d] planned
for [them].” Lia suspected her students’ anxiety was rooted in the students’ belief that “I’m going
to shame my whole family,” and while she related to the students’ high achieving ambitions, she
worried for her students who struggled with the anxiety caused by that sentiment. Lia
empathized with her students who struggled with “the family pride being tied to their kids’
academic success” because it was so different from the balanced, high achieving high school
experience she had. For Lia, working with the highly academic students to make appropriate
choices, navigate the competitive school and family context, and find balance was a personal
mission based on her empathy for students whose anxiety-filled high school experience was so
different from her positive one.
While Lia felt called to this cause because of her personal experiences as a high school
student, others in this group of guidance counselors held similar views that they were
safeguarding students against the competitive, high-pressure peer culture surrounding college
applications and admissions. They cited increases in students reporting high levels of stress and
“crying in my office” and “long lines outside the [mental health professional’s] door,” as well as
school and District initiatives such as Low-stress Week and Community Wellness Task Force as
evidence that they needed to intervene in students’ postsecondary planning. Sophia noted,
“There were often times when I would talk to students about them being stressed and
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overwhelmed and having to perform at such high levels. The stress was coming from peers or
family members.” Other counselors noted these pressures came from “their friends comparing
grades and tests,” the “school newspaper list of where everyone is going at the end of the year,”
and even “some lady in the parking lot who asked [a student] what his SAT scores were.” The
guidance counselors acknowledged the peers, parents, and school community proud of its
reputation as an “academic powerhouse” placed high value on academics and acceptance to the
most prestigious colleges and universities, and therefore made it challenging for them to counter
the student push to do “more…better…faster.” Yet given their beliefs that part of their role was
to reduce student stress, the counselors felt compelled to confront students and their families
about the “appropriateness” of their postsecondary ambitions, as a way to help students they
perceived as needing their support navigating the multi-faceted pressures and expectations upon
them.
While counselors were clear that their first priority was to support struggling and at-risk
students toward high school graduation, individual counselors held different interpretations of
how they supported highly academic, college-going students, as well as how they identified and
worked with students not in either of those two aforementioned groups. Studies have found that
guidance counselors’ personal experiences and interests in social justice impact their decisions to
enter the profession, the students they choose to spend more time with, and how they see their
work (Bryan et al., 2011; Savitz-Romer, 2011). As a result of this ambiguity in their roles, when
they were not working with other high priority groups or school-directed tasks, the guidance
counselors chose to pursue opportunities to support students they felt most connected to based on
their perceptions of their role, their personal interests, and their belief that they were working to
actualize school and District values.
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Finding 4: Underserved Hidden and Middle Students

Guidance counselors acknowledged there were groups of students who received little or
none of their attention and support. They recognized that they did not serve all students because
of the way they went about allocating their time, and expressed limited belief they could change
the situation for their students.
The guidance counselors recognized there was a group of students they were not
reaching, and that they knew very little about them. Students in this group were neither part of
the high-achieving, college-going group that initiated meetings with their counselors, nor were
they considered struggling or at-risk students who could potentially not graduate and impact the
school’s and District’s high graduation rate. The guidance counselors referred to these students
as their “hidden,” “under the radar,” “middle-of-the-road,” or “middle” students who “never
came in” or asked for help. Consistent with the literature, these students also tended to be from
traditionally underrepresented groups who had less social capital and ease in navigating high
school procedures, and school offices, and therefore were less inclined to ask for help (Bryan et
al., 2011; Holland, 2015a, 2015b; Lapan et al., 2014; McDonough, 1998, 2005; Perna et al.,
2008). Several counselors commented that they enjoyed working with this population of
students and believed they were able to make positive impacts in these students’ academic and
postsecondary plans, but simply did not have enough time to devote to them. Despite their
acknowledgements that this group of students was underserved and could benefit from more of
their support, guidance counselors did not indicate any plans or need for them to change their
practices.

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Every guidance counselor, regardless of school context and years of counseling
experience, had a story about their “hidden” and “middle” students. Some counselors defined
these “hidden” students as those who conceivably went through part or all of high school without
ever meeting individually with a guidance counselor. Others used the term “hidden” to describe
students who were “kind of are left out in some ways” because they were not part of the
struggling or highly academic, college-going student groups they spent so much time with, and
would “just go through quietly if they’re not causing problems.” Other counselors used the
“middle” or “middle-of-the-road” terms to describe students who were “not demanding your
attention like the high fliers or the parents of the high fliers,” who were not regularly earning Ds
and Fs, but who “sometimes would show up on progress reports for one or two classes.”
The majority of guidance counselors seemed to accept that some students were not
served, and did not indicate any plan or desire to see things change. As Dana explained, she felt
the “hidden” or “middle” students were
[t]he kids that didn’t need help. They managed to pick the right classes and they earn As
or Bs or Cs or Ds and they were content with that. May not have ever met. That is
entirely possible yes. There are kids that we don’t know well.
Dana assumed that because the students did not show up in her office, they “didn’t need help”
and “managed to pick the right classes.” She suggested that the students might have earned “As
or Bs or Cs or Ds and they were content with that,” failing to acknowledge that a D grade would
have placed a student’s college eligibility and perhaps high school graduation status at risk.
Dana was very matter-of-fact when she stated that it “is entirely possible, yes” that a student had
never met individually with his or her guidance counselor, and did not refer to her own role in
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that relationship. She acknowledged that “there are kids we don’t know well,” yet offered no
thought as to whether that was acceptable or not, or what could be done to change that dynamic.
Across school contexts, guidance counselors described their “hidden” and “middle”
students as those who were “not on any radar” for low grades or credits, nor were they actively
pursuing meetings for college guidance. Karen described this group as “the students that cause
me the most pause or I worry about the most” because they are “the students that are doing the
bare minimum to get by,” who are “the ones that we worry about how are we reaching the most.”
Like Dana, she offered no thoughts on her role in working with this student population or about
how to reach them.
Joan, on other hand, recognized that she and her fellow guidance counselors could do
something to better serve this population, but explained that they were not able to sustain it:
I would say [we’re] honestly not prioritizing them. Things that we have done or tried to
do in the past is we’ve tried to run some groups and target some students. We’d say,
“Okay, let’s find students that have the 2.3 GPA and are sophomores. Can we form
groups?” We’ve done that. We just haven’t continued the momentum with them. I think
that’s really what it would take is the, “Okay, this is important to us. Let’s get it on a
regular schedule. Let’s make a team that does this.” And then we continue to follow
through with it. That’s kind of an honest response…It’s a priority. They’re making their
way through, so they’re not on any major radars or things, but that’s the one that we
spend time talking about because we struggle with how can we do it, and they’re the ones
that we feel are not being serviced at the same level as others.

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Joan admitted that the “middle students” were not prioritized and therefore were not served “at
the same level as others.” She noted that these students are “not on any major radars,” indicating
that because these students were not in other groups that were identified by the school and
District as high priority, they were not afforded the same attention or time allocation. Joan’s
comment reflected a reality based on accountability: struggling and at-risk students whose
success impacted graduation rates, and highly academic, college-going students who boosted
college-related metrics and the community profile of the schools and District, were higher
priority because their success had measurable impact on public measures of schools and
Districts. Joan pointed out that they “lost momentum” in the target group efforts she and her
colleagues had tried and implied that it was both the individual counselors and the overall school,
through its messages about priorities, that were complicit in allowing the target group meetings
to flounder.
A majority of the guidance counselors (60%, or n=6) attributed the lack of service to
“hidden” and “middle” students as a matter of priority. In addition to the target groups that Joan
described above, Sophia at another school mentioned groups “could have” been used to address
certain groups of students or cover certain procedural tasks. Counselors from yet another school
described a proposal they were working on with their school administration to designate full
weeks to “middle-of-the-road student week” to meet with students in a certain group identified
by demographics, grade point average, and course-taking patterns. For that particular school,
one of the counselors mentioned some contention that prioritizing one group of students for
“middle-of-the-road” student week meant other students would be served less, and that was
causing some consternation among staff. Another group (40%, or n=4) were matter-of-fact in
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describing all the things they needed to do, and cited large caseloads and not enough time as
justification for not attending to every student. As Lia explained,
There’s just too many kids. The recommended ratio for high school by our national
organization is 250 to 1. I think the job would look different if that was the case because
you would have more time to meet. There’s just a time, it’s just a time challenge.
With caseloads that ranged from 520:1 to 630:1, some OVHSD counselors like Lia believed
there was little they could do to better serve students without seeing the number of students they
were expected to serve lowered. These counselors pointed to online resources students could
turn access, such as the 4-year academic plan template on the school website, ad hoc workshops
during brunch and lunch, and standard school programming such as annual course selection
presentations in classrooms for students to access for information, and saw their ability to meet
with students as a straight numbers game. They referenced recommended ratios published by
national counselor organizations as evidence that they had too many students to serve
adequately, yet did not explain how job duties and caseloads compared. Lia commented that
“the job would look different” if the caseloads were smaller but did not offer any suggestions for
how the job could look different with the caseloads as they were. Trina offered a similar
viewpoint about the impact of a large caseload on her ability to serve students:
I feel bad when I say “I can meet with you, but 3 weeks out.” That’s how booked I feel
and that frustrates me because I don’t want you to wait 3 weeks but I have no room on
my calendar so I don’t know where else...And I just feel like I wish there was more of us.
As I’m daydreaming “Oh, even if we had an extra two people, like, it could bring down
my caseload to like maybe 450 and maybe I can meet more kids.” So, I feel like just my
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challenge is really being able to give unconditional attention to my kids and to really
meet with them on a real regular basis.
For Trina, the large caseload meant long wait times for students and parents and a sense of
frustration and helplessness on her part. She replayed a response of, “I can meet with you, but
three weeks out” to illustrate that her limited availability is not just a matter of time, but
importance. By juxtaposing her offer of “I can meet with you” with the “3 weeks out” caveat,
she implied that at that point, the relevance or value of meeting with her might have diminished.
She lamented at “how booked [she felt]” and how that “frustrates [her]” because she saw her lack
of availability as an impediment to her ability to support her students. Trina referred to her
“daydream” of more counselors to reduce her caseload to “maybe 450” students, and suggested
that if she had fewer students she would be able to meet more of them. However, she then
stated she wanted to be able to “give unconditional attention to [her] kids” and “meet with them
on a real regular basis” implying she defined support for students as “unconditional attention”
and regular meetings with them. Trina expressed a desire to meet with more students, to have
more “unconditional time” with her students, and have regular meetings with her students, and
saw her full calendar and large caseload as the impediments to her vision of supporting her
students.
Conclusion

This study focused on guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role in supporting
“middle” students toward college and career readiness. Based on interviews from 10 OVHSD
guidance counselors, four findings emerged. The first finding was that in response to school and
District expectations spurned by external accountability measures, guidance counselors’ first
priority was to support struggling and at-risk students who were in danger of not graduating.
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The second finding was that when they were not attending to their struggling students, guidance
counselors experienced considerable pressure from high-achieving students and parents who
wanted to meet with them for academic and college planning. The third finding was that
guidance counselors also sought opportunities to meet with students who fit a profile they were
most passionate about helping, based on their own experiences in education. The final finding
was that guidance counselors did not have time to meet with all students. The counselors
recognized this was because of the way they allocated their time to their struggling students, their
college-going students, and their passion projects, leaving the “middle” students underserved.
Guidance counselors can be powerful institutional agents of change, moving a school
toward equity and narrowing the achievement gap by providing guidance and opportunities to
students. This study sought to capture guidance counselors’ perceptions of their ability to reach
the students in the “middle” who not struggling or at-risk of not graduating and were not high-
achieving students aiming for competitive colleges or universities. These “middle” students were
likely to graduate from high school but often did not have strong postsecondary aspirations or
plans. The findings revealed that while guidance counselors had the ability in knowledge and
skills to support their students, they were constrained by time and external pressures from the
school, District, and parents to enact their roles in specific ways that did not reach all students.
Chapter Five will discuss implications and recommendations based on these findings.

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CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS

The underlying problem addressed in this study was the disparity in achievement and
opportunity for students from traditionally underrepresented groups, as measured by rates of
college and career readiness and college-going. Research has shown that guidance counselors
have the potential to play a significant role in addressing gaps in graduation and student
achievement (Bodenhorn et al., 2010; Johnson & Rochkind, 2010) and opportunity gaps related
to college and career readiness and college-going (Belasco, 2013; Bryan et al., 2011; Engberg &
Gilbert, 2012; McDonough, 1998, 2005; Perna et al., 2008; Stephen & Rosenbaum, 2013). This
study sought to explore the gap between guidance counselors’ potential to impact the opportunity
gap in college readiness and their actual enactment of it.
The purpose of this study was to understand guidance counselors’ perceptions of their
role in supporting “middle students” toward college and career readiness. The study site was the
Orchard Valley High School District (OVHSD) and its five comprehensive high schools: Apricot
High School, Apple High School, Cherry High School, Blossom High School, and Vineyard
High School. OVHSD and its schools enjoyed accolades across the community, state, and nation
for academic excellence and innovation. While all five schools had graduation and college-
going rates well above the state average, achievement gaps remained between Hispanic/Latino,
African American, Filipino, Pacific Islander, and Socioeconomically Disadvantaged student
groups and their Asian and White counterparts.
This qualitative study was based on semi-structured interviews with 10 OVHSD guidance
counselors, who ranged in years of counseling experience from 1 to almost 30 years. In order to
ensure a balanced sample across school context, the five schools were divided into three
performance bands—low, medium, and high—and participants were matched to each. After
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data collection, inductive data analysis and coding followed in order to discern patterns and
themes. From that analysis, four main findings emerged and are discussed below.
Summary of Findings

The four findings suggested that the District and its schools sent messages about
individual guidance counselor, school, and District accountability that influenced the guidance
counselors’ perceptions of their role and their enactment of it.
The first finding was that guidance counselors’ first priority was to support struggling
and at-risk students who were in danger of not graduating. They set this priority based on school
and District expectations for maintaining high graduation rates. This finding surfaced three
themes related to how guidance counselors enacted their role of supporting struggling and at-risk
students and prioritized the work:
a) Guidance counselors saw their first priority as supporting struggling and at-risk
students toward high school graduation. They saw themselves as “high school
counselors, not college counselors” and therefore focused their attention on students
who were in danger of not passing classes. They were aware of the importance to the
school and District of maintaining high graduation rates to meet local, state, and
federal accountability measures.
b) In order to manage the volume of students in this priority group, guidance counselors
allocated their time and attention based on a hierarchy of need. They recognized that
this meant they were not serving some students, generally those who were younger or
struggling in non-academic classes.

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c) Guidance counselors referred students to other resources within or outside the school,
including other staff members, as another means of supporting them. Guidance
counselors at schools with more struggling students reported having more resources
available to support their students, while those at higher performing schools with
fewer struggling students often had to “be creative” or do more on their own to
support their students.
The second finding was that when they were not supporting their struggling students,
guidance counselors felt pressured to meet with students and their families who initiated
meetings with them for academic and college guidance. They struggled with the near-constant
barrage of meeting requests from students and parents, and reported they had no mechanism for
regulating or managing it. The guidance counselors experienced this pressure in different ways
depending on how they perceived their role: while some saw their role as consultants who gave
feedback to students and parents who developed the academic plan, others thought their role was
as educators providing the information but struggled when students or parents questioned or
challenged the information they shared. This difference in role perceptions influenced the
choices they made about how and when they worked with these students and families.
The third finding was that in addition to addressing the needs of their struggling or at-risk
students or their highly academic, college-going students, guidance counselors sought out
students they wanted to support based on their individual passions and their experiences in
education. Guidance counselors drew from their own experiences in education, either as a
student or as an educator, as their inspiration for what kind of counselor they would be to their
students. They sought out opportunities to work with students who fit the profile they felt
passionately about supporting. These guidance counselors cited their personal experiences in
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education that drove them toward supporting certain types of students, especially in the areas of
supporting the whole child and addressing student stress and wellness, and they saw their work
as an extension of their counselor role in support of the students’ ability to learn and achieve.
They enacted these roles based on their passions, and believed they were supporting students in
alignment with school and District values.
The fourth finding was that guidance counselors recognized that there were groups of
students who received little or none of their attention and support because of the many demands
for their time. Guidance counselors acknowledged that these “hidden” and “middle” students
were not served to the same extent as other student groups, even though many of them found this
group of students to be the most enjoyable to work with. Guidance counselors offered few
explanations for why some students were “hidden” or not served, including not prioritizing them,
too many competing interests, and large caseloads.
This study sought to understand guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role in
supporting “middle” students toward college and career readiness. Collectively, the findings
suggested guidance counselors were not able to distribute their time and attention to all their
students, and struggled to prioritize effectively because of competing demands, which they saw
as equally important. The next section is a discussion of implications and recommendations for
practice, policy, and further research related to these findings.

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Implications and Recommendations for Practice, Policy, and Research

Implications and Recommendations for Practice

The findings suggested that guidance counselors were torn between competing demands
and interests, and had no effective system for managing these demands. The schools and
District sent conflicting messages that showed support for the guidance counselors and guided
how they allocated their time. On one hand, certain messages about priorities as they pertained
to external accountability factors including graduation rate and parent requests for meetings were
made clear through stated expectations for tracking D-F-I meetings, summer school registrations,
or graduation status (OVHSD Local Control Accountability Plan, 2017). At other times, the
absence of a system or guideline meant individual guidance counselors were left to manage the
volume of tasks, such as college guidance meeting requests, on their own. The result was that
individual guidance counselors made choices about which tasks to prioritize and which students
to serve, based on their own interests or inclinations, and necessarily aligned to the school’s and
District’s priorities. Implications and recommendations for this dilemma fell into two main
themes: a need to clarify priorities, and systemic, data-driven practices.
Clarify priorities. This study revealed that guidance counselors prioritized their work in
response to pressures they perceived from their school and District; however, with several
competing pressures, guidance counselors struggled to prioritize effectively. Some of these
pressures were from time-sensitive school- or District-directed tasks such as scheduling,
community college concurrent enrollment permission, summer school registration, and letters of
recommendation. Other external pressures came from students, parents, and the larger
community who placed high value on education and college, and wanted guidance from the
counselors. For example, the schools and District reinforced expectations that guidance
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counselors attend to both logistical course scheduling and summer school tasks as well as the
college application-related tasks with communications to parents and students about processes
that included the suggested step of “meet with your guidance counselor” (OVHSD Math
Information for 8
th
Grade Families, 2016; OVHSD Course Selection Guide, 2016). Recent
school and District initiatives around student wellness and mental health, including professional
development workshops specifically for guidance counselors on gender identity, trauma-
informed care, and student mental health, also created pressure for guidance counselors to
address mental health concerns with their students (OVHSD Local Control Accountability Plan,
2017). These multi-faceted pressures made it difficult for guidance counselors to identify clear
expectations for how they were to prioritize their time. Guidance counselors also expressed
frustration that school and District directives often came with little information and no explicit
permission to set aside time and reprioritize; therefore counselors made individual decisions
about what to support. In their national study of guidance counselors and their roles, Freeman
and Coll (1997) found that ambiguity over priorities, both for the organization and for the
guidance counselors, was a leading cause of counselor confusion and dissatisfaction. To address
these pressures and their impact on how guidance counselors approach their many tasks, the
schools and District should clarify priorities for guidance counselors so they are able to focus
their attention and take a more proactive approach to identifying students in need of their
support. In his study of guidance counselors’ job satisfaction, Pyne (2006) found that guidance
counselors in schools that adopted a comprehensive counseling framework reported higher
scores of self-efficacy. The framework included protocols that guidance counselors, in
collaboration with their school administration, used to establish priorities and expectations for
how they allocated time to different tasks (Pyne, 2006). The American School Counselors
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Association (ACSA) protocol, for example, required guidance counselors to develop a plan with
their administrator that included tasks, the type of service (direct or indirect; responsive
socioemotional or individual student academic planning) (ACSA, 2014; Pyne, 2006). Such a
protocol would allow guidance counselors and administration to agree on expectations for time,
the types of tasks, and the order of priority for these tasks.
Systemic, data-driven practices. This study revealed that the general practices for how
students came to guidance counselors for support was random and unpredictable, and as a result,
guidance counselors were largely reactionary in their approach to serving students. While school
processes were in place to identify struggling and at-risk students each grading period, guidance
counselors made individual decisions about which of those students to meet with based on their
perceived load and amount of time. Student- and parent-initiated meeting requests were constant
and unpredictable. Because guidance counselors passively received students who came to them
either through school processes (struggling and at-risk students) or student-initiated (high
achieving, college-going students), some students who did not fall into either of those groups
were not served. This was consistent with research studies that found when school guidance
programs relied on students to initiate contact, students who lacked social capital, who tended to
be from traditionally underrepresented groups, were not accessing their guidance counselors
(Bryan et al., 2011; Engberg & Gilbert, 2014; McDonough, 1998, 2005; Perna et al., 2008;
Stephan & Rosenbaum, 2013). Rather than rely on students to initiate contact, the schools and
District should create systems and clear processes that support guidance counselors’ ability to
identify and meet with all students. Such a system would require the use of data to monitor the
progress of all students, as well as to identify students in need of targeted support or intervention.
The only systemic, data-driven process guidance counselors mentioned was the D-F-I lists each
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grading period to identify students in danger of failing courses. Guidance counselors would
benefit from using data consistently to identify other groups of students such as those who are
just shy of college eligibility or college readiness. Systemic data-driven processes such as early
warning notifications (Bruce & Bridgeland, 2012) and an ongoing, action-research model that
aligns guidance counselor efforts with school goals (Dahir & Stone, 2009) could enable guidance
counselors to assume a more proactive approach to identifying students and their needs. These
data-driven activities all contribute to a school culture that relies on a systemic approach to
monitoring student progress, the effectiveness of counselors, and outcomes of their services
(Fitch & Marshall, 2004; McClafferty-Jarsky et al., 2009). Further studies found schools that
used data-driven outcomes to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the guidance program
were better able to systematically address school equity goals and target populations (Gyspers &
Lapan, 2001; Perea-Diltz & Mason, 2010).
Implications and Recommendations for Policy

Role clarification. This study revealed OVHSD guidance counselors saw themselves
assuming various roles depending on the student population they were serving. Some of the
roles they assumed were consultant or educator, high school counselor or college counselor,
paperwork chaser, and scheduler. A few others followed their passions to act as a social worker,
a negotiator between students, parents, and teachers, or a socioemotional counselor. The
District’s job description for guidance counselors was equally all-encompassing in including
“academic planning, college guidance, socio-emotional well-being” as activities guidance
counselors were expected to engage in (OVHSD Guidance Counselor Job Description, 1998).
School and District initiatives, including professional development targeting guidance counselors
regarding mental health, parent engagement, and reducing student stress also contributed to
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guidance counselors’ choices about how they enacted their role and whom they decided to serve.
Numerous research studies found that high school guidance counselor roles were varied and
ambiguous (Bryan et al., 2012; Freeman & Coll, 1997; Lapan et al., 2014; McClafferty-Jarsky et
al., 2009; McDonough, 2005; Perna et al., 2008). Consistent with the literature, the role
ambiguity provided space for OVHSD guidance counselors to make individual determinations
about their role. Based on the findings, guidance counselors had varied interpretations of their
role expectations, in part due to messages they received from their schools and from the District.
The District should clarify role expectations with regard to the two main areas: the balance
between high school academic counseling and college counseling, and socioemotional
counseling.
High school academic counseling vs. college counseling. As reported in the findings,
some guidance counselors saw their high school academic counseling role as separate from that
of their college counseling role, and the former as the priority. Because the focus for these
counselors was on high school graduation, postsecondary options never entered into the
conversation. The OVHSD Guidance Counselor job description included both academic and
college counseling but did not specify priorities or expected allocation of time to each. The
schools and District sent messages through strategic planning documents (OVHSD Local
Control Accountability Plan, 2017; OVHSD School Plans, 2017), and guidance documents to
students and families that indicated both types of counseling were important and expected. As
part of the work of clarifying roles and expectations, the District should reinstate the explicit
expectation that guidance counselors meet with every student annually to develop and update an
academic plan that charts a path for the student through high school and on to their
postsecondary aspirations (OVHSD Guidance Commitments, 2008). Research has demonstrated
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 117

that students who had regularly updated academic plans were more likely to matriculate into
postsecondary education opportunities (Belasco, 2013; Johnson & Rochkind, 2010; Perna et al.,
2008). In the interest of attaining the District’s goal, the District should clarify a vision for
guidance counseling that explicitly addresses the relationship guidance counselors are expected
to build for their students between high school academic counseling and college counseling.
Socioemotional counseling. The findings revealed that with increased media and local
community attention on student wellness and mental health, guidance counselors were spending
considerable time on tending to the socioemotional needs of their students. Others went further
to provide more individual support for students they felt needed it. In a District where every
school site has multiple mental health professionals, the role of the guidance counselor with
regard to socioemotional counseling should be examined and clarified. While guidance
counselors certainly are likely to be the first contact with many students, clear protocols should
be developed indicating at what point guidance counselors should refer students to other staff
members on their campus.
Support for internal and professional accountability. While the findings indicated
guidance counselors felt the pressure of answering to school, District, and community
accountability pressures to deliver support for students, they did not extend that sense of
accountability to their colleagues or to their professional obligation. Instead, guidance
counselors supported students and addressed the expectations of their roles, as they perceived
them, but as individual agents and not as a collective guidance program driving toward a unified
vision or goal. Internal accountability occurs when individual agents align with the
organizational values to drive toward collective expectations and outcomes (Elmore, 2005).
Dahir and Stone (2009) described a counseling program that supported internal accountability as
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one that is “intentional and purposeful” and “aligned and integrated with the educational
enterprise” (p. 13). Elmore (2004, 2005) asserted that schools with strong internal
accountability are better equipped to deal with external accountability pressures and change as
the individual players are able to coordinate an effective, efficient response aligned with their
shared goals and values. In order to support a guidance program that aligns with school and
District goals and fosters internal accountability, the District needs to articulate a vision for a
guidance program that embodies an equity agenda to close the achievement and opportunity gap,
and build infrastructure. This means first building the case for “why,” developing a unified
vision for a guidance program that is “more than the sum of its parts” and aligns with the District
beliefs that “all students can achieve at high levels” and goals of “all students graduating college
and career ready” (OVHSD District Belief Statements, 2013). The infrastructure needed
includes first creating dedicated time and space for guidance counselors to meet, plan, and
analyze data to evaluate progress toward guidance program and school goals. The District would
also need to explicitly require data use in the monitoring, assessment, and support of students,
and provide opportunities for professional development and skills training to support these
expectations.
Implications and Recommendations for Further Research

This study focused on the perceptions of the guidance counselor role in supporting
“middle” students toward college and career readiness from the perspective of the guidance
counselors themselves. The findings revealed that the guidance counselors’ perceptions of their
role was influenced by a combination of external messages from the District, school, students,
and parents, as well as from their own personal expectations and conceptions of the role that may
have motivated them to enter the profession in the first place. An area for further research would
GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 119

be to examine the perspectives of other stakeholders including students, parents, and other staff
members.
Additional areas for further research specific to OVHSD include guidance counselors’
use of time. While the guidance counselors all reported not having enough time to meet with all
their students and therefore having to make choices, many of them also talked about students
they went above and beyond for, their “passion projects.” An evaluation of how guidance
counselors allot their time throughout the day may also lead to insights about the balancing act
between high school academic counseling and college counseling, and the impact of the
logistical tasks such as scheduling and various paperwork for students. A handful of guidance
counselors believed their struggles to serve all students would be rectified only by increased
staffing that would lower their caseloads. While OVHSD guidance caseloads were large
compared to the national averages they cited, school context, processes, and job responsibilities
all factor into the overall role of a guidance counselor. The findings also revealed that guidance
counselors perceived mixed messages from the community, the school, and the District that
influenced the choices they made about whom to serve and how. All these factors, and how
guidance counselors spend their time, must be examined as part of any consideration of caseload.
Conclusion

Guidance counselors are uniquely positioned to shape students’ high school experiences
and postsecondary trajectories, and therefore are critical agents for schools in addressing equity
concerns and working to narrow the achievement and opportunity gaps for traditionally
underrepresented students. This study found that competing demands and resource constraints
sometimes contributed to the opportunity gaps for OVHSD students by creating an attention gap,
where guidance counselors were not able to meet the needs of all their students. External
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pressures from the District, school, and parents contributed to the complex web of students and
tasks guidance counselors navigated in as they worked to balance and address both the
“important” and the “urgent.” The District has a powerful resource in their guidance counselors;
leveraged strategically, they can affect change for individual students and for their school, and
move the District closer toward actualizing the vision that “all means all.”

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APPENDIX A: Interview Protocol
Demographics
These first few questions are for some basic background—what motivated you to work with
high school students and become a guidance counselor. (Guidance Counselor > Motivation >
Personal background/experiences)

1. What led you to become a guidance counselor?
2. Was there a particular experience you had, either as a student or as an adult, which helped
to steer you in that direction?
3. Tell me what drew you to this school and district?

Guidance Counselor factors
Thank you for sharing a little about how you got into guidance counseling…let’s talk about
what it’s like being a guidance counselor here at [school]. (Guidance Counselor > Knowledge;
Guidance Counselor > Motivation)

4. Think back to this past week. Can you give an example of something that happened
which speaks to why you like working here?
5. (following #4) What about an example that illustrates some of the challenges of being a
guidance counselor here at XX High School?
6. Think about a new student you have worked with recently. Can you walk me through the
steps you took to design a schedule and orient the student to your school?
7. Tell me about a student you’ve worked with recently who do not think of (him/her)self
as “college material.” Describe the conversation you had with this student. (How do students
get messages about whether they are or are not college material? How do you approach the
academic planning for such a student—what’s the goal?)
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8. Think about a student you have worked with who was not quite but who wanted to be
college ready. Talk me through how you helped him or her work through the challenges or
obstacles they faced.
9. Do all students have a four-year plan? Take me through how students get one? Follow
up: How do they adjust/modify/maintain it as they go through high school? Who do they go to if
they need help? What happens if they don’t have one or don’t update it?
10. Tell me about the students do you have the easiest time helping? How about the students
are you most challenged by?

Organizational Influences (Resources, Culture, Accountability messages)
I’m going to move us into the next set of questions, which pertain to your role as a counselor
within the school, and how the school as a whole supports and guides students. (Organization
> Resources; Organization > Culture; Organization > Accountability)

11. These first few questions are about how you spend your time…If we were to look at your
calendar for the week/month, what would we see?
a. Tell me about the types of meetings you have on your calendar…
b. What students have you met with this week? Describe the process for these
students to request a meeting with you.
c. Are there students who end up on your calendar because someone else puts them
there? Tell me about these students.
d. Take me through how you determine which students you are going to meet with.
How do you prioritize them?
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e. Think for a moment about the students you don’t get to meet with (or perhaps not
as often as you’d like). Who are these students? What makes it difficult to get to
every student?
f. We all have things on our list that we don’t get to…or don’t get to do as much as
we’d like. Tell me about the things on your list that you don’t get to…what gets
in the way?
12. Classroom presentations aside, how possible do you think it is for a student to go through
high school without seeing a guidance counselor? What do you think about that?
13. How does your guidance department determine its goals? How do these goals get
prioritized? Describe how these priorities affect how you decide how to spend your time.
14. What would happen if your goals conflicted with your department’s goals? How would
you proceed?
15. Think about a time when competing demands, equally important, required your time and
attention. How did you decide which to work on first?
16. We all have moments when we can benefit from talking things through with someone
else. Who are your thought partners? Who do you reach out to for guidance?
17. Think about a recent workshop or training you attended where you came away feeling
that you learned something. What did you learn? How are you applying it in your job?
18. Are there areas of your job for which you wish you had more training? How would it
help your work?
19. What parts of your job are most important to you as a guidance counselor?
20. Last question – What would you ask that would help me understand your experiences as
a guidance counselor in our schools?
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APPENDIX B: Informed Consent/Information Sheet
University of Southern California
Rossier School of Education/Organizational Change and Leadership

INFORMATION/FACTS SHEET FOR EXEMPT NON-MEDICAL RESEARCH

REACHING THE MIDDLE: AN EXPLORATION OF GUIDANCE SUPPORT SERVICES IN
PURSUIT OF COLLEGE READINESS FOR ALL STUDENTS

You are invited to participate in this research study conducted by Marianne Hew under the
supervision of Dr. Julie Slayton at the University of Southern California because of your
position as a high school Guidance Counselor. Your participation is voluntary. This document
includes information about the study; please read it carefully and ask questions about anything
that is unclear to you before you decide whether to participate.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
This study addresses the problem of achievement gaps in college readiness among students. The
purpose of this study is to explore the factors that influence how schools, through their guidance
counselors, policies, and programs, facilitate or impede students in becoming college-ready.

PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT
If you volunteer for this study, you will be asked to participate in an individual, semi-structured
interview that will last approximately 45 minutes. The interview will be conversational and will
focus on your role as a Guidance Counselor and your perspective about the guidance policies and
practices in your school. If there are questions you do not want to answer, you may decline to
answer. The interview will be audio recorded and then transcribed. A third-party transcription
service may be used. If you do not wish to be recorded, you will not be able to participate in the
study. If you agree to participate in the study, you have the right to change your mind at any
point in the interview process.

ALTERNATIVES TO PARTICIPATION
Your alternative is to not participate. Your relationship with the District will not be affected by
your decision to participate or not in this study.

CONFIDENTIALITY
Efforts will be taken to protect your confidentiality should you choose to participate. You will
not be asked to identify yourself in the interview, and you will have the right to review the audio
recordings or transcripts. All data, including the audio recordings, transcripts, and notes, will be
kept on a password-protected computer in a secure office by the Principal Investigator, and will
be accessed only by members of the study team. Data will be kept for three years after the study
is completed and then will be destroyed.

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The results of this research may be published, shared with the District, or discussed in
conferences and meetings. When results are reported, they will be shared in group or general
terms so that no individual can be identified. No identifiable information will be included.
The members of the research team and the University of Southern California’s Human Subjects
Protection Program (HSPP) may access the data. The HSPP reviews and monitors research
studies to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects.

INVESTIGATOR CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact:

Principal Investigator: Marianne Hew
Email: hewespin@usc.edu
Phone: (650) 776-3720

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Julie Slayton
Email: jslayton@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-3292

IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions, concerns, or complaints about your rights as a research participant or
the research in general and are unable to contact the research team, or if you want to talk to
someone independent of the research team, please contact the University Park Institutional
Review Board (UPIRB), 3720 South Flower Street #301, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0702, (213)
821-5272 or upirb@usc.edu.

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APPENDIX C: Recruitment Letter

Dear Guidance Counselor,

I am a doctoral student at the University of Southern California in the Rossier School of
Education, and I am conducting a research study about how our school district supports students
in reaching our district’s college readiness goals, particularly our “middle” students. My study
focuses on the perspective of guidance counselors because in our District, counselors interact
with a broad range of students and staff across programs and grade levels. I am here to invite
you to participate in this study by sharing your experiences in working with students at your
school. Your participation is voluntary and would consist of an interview, approximately 45
minutes long. The purpose of the study is to improve how our schools and district support all
students in becoming college ready through our policies, practices, and programs. You are
eligible to participate in this study because you are a guidance counselor in our district who
works with a diverse range of students.

Your participation in this study is voluntary and has no bearing on your job or status.
You may choose to not participate. If you decide to participate, I will give you an information
sheet about the study and you can return the bottom portion to indicate your willingness to
participate and to schedule an interview. The interview will take approximately 45 minutes in a
location of your choosing. Your participation in this study, and the contents of your interview,
will be kept confidential unless you choose to talk about it with others.

If you have questions about my study or about participating in it, please do not hesitate to
ask. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Marianne Hew
Doctoral Candidate, USC Rossier School of Education
650.776.3720

GUIDANCE SUPPORT FOR THE MIDDLE 134

APPENDIX D: Research Study Participant Preliminary Survey

Dear Guidance Counselor,

Thank you for expressing interest in participating in my research study. Please answer these
brief questions to help provide background information that will be used to determine your
eligibility to participate.

For more information about the study, please refer to the information sheet or contact me.

Thank you for your consideration,

Marianne Hew
Doctoral Candidate and Principal Investigator
USC Rossier School of Education
hewespin@usc.edu
650.776.3720

Your name: _______________________________________________________

1. List your current school site:

2. Below is a list of descriptive categories we often use to talk about students and how to
support them. Select the categories that best describe you when you were in high school
(check all that apply):
 African American/Black
 American Indian/Native American
 Asian
 Filipino
 Hispanic/Latino
 Pacific Islander
 White
 English Learner
 Struggling or at-risk
 High-achieving

3. How many years have you been a guidance counselor? (If this is your first year, enter
“1”): ____

4. How many years have you been a guidance counselor in this District? (If this is your first
year, enter “1”): ____

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Research suggests that guidance counselors can be powerful institutional agents of change by shaping students’ academic paths and post-secondary aspirations, especially for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds who may have fewer resources or access to information about their post-secondary options. This qualitative study explored guidance counselors’ perceptions of their role in supporting students in the “middle” who were neither at-risk nor high-achieving, who were likely to graduate from high school but without strong post-secondary aspirations or plans. The study was based on 10 guidance counselor interviews in a high school district with participants representing a range of school contexts and years of experience in counseling and in education. The findings revealed that guidance counselors were constrained by time and external pressures from the District, school, and parents to enact their roles in specific ways that did not reach all students.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hew, Marianne (author)

Core Title Reaching the middle: an exploration of guidance support services in pursuit of college readiness for all students

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Organizational Change and Leadership (On Line)

Publication Date 08/28/2017

Defense Date 08/18/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag college readiness,counselor accountability,high school guidance counselors,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-secondary plans

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Slayton, Julie (committee chair), Green, Alan (committee member), Hoffman, Jaimie (committee member)

Creator Email hewespin@usc.edu,makhew@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-424152

Unique identifier UC11264245

Identifier etd-HewMariann-5691.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-424152 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HewMariann-5691.pdf

Dmrecord 424152

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hew, Marianne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA