Three school districts, in partnership with JFF and Educate Texas, attempted to use early college as a districtwide high school transformation strategy from 2012 to 2018, supported by an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. An external evaluation was completed by the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Over 90 percent of 12th graders in participating schools were taking courses for college credit by graduation, surpassing the rates of enrollment and completion for students in comparison schools included in the evaluation. However, these and other results were not statistically significant. A lesson from this effort is that complex school systems did and can make notable progress on a variety of student success measures by using the interventions applied by the partners to implement early college schools. But it takes much time and continuous work for such efforts to fully bear fruit and achieve consistency in results across schools.   

Other resources that describe the progress, successes, and challenges in bringing early college to scale can be found below.