Prior research has discussed high school counselors’ role in students’ experience, but counselors’ understandings of their work and of students has received little commentary. We interviewed counselors in a high-poverty, low-performing urban school district in which two structural elements shape how counselors make sense of their work. First, counselor “success” is contingent on convincing students to act in (what schools see as) students’ own best interest, and many students do not do so. Second, resource constraints severely limit planned one-on-one counseling. We find that counselors see students as both victims of crushing circumstances and as agents actively undermining their own opportunities, as holding ambitions misaligned with performance and as vulnerable to despair. Counselors’ strategies follow from these conceptions: building self-efficacy, emphasizing the importance of goals, and nudging plans toward realizability while maintaining hope. We discuss how counselors cope with the rarity with which they experience professional “success,” given student outcomes.
This chapter presents a call to action grounded in a graduate student clinical program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. The WCER Clinical Program (wcerclinicalprogram.org) creates a reciprocal space where graduate students and community‐based partners develop and practice connections between research, evaluation, practice, and policy through applied projects in the community, in real time, in real contexts, and with real impact. The Evaluation Clinic evolved from two primary needs: systematic and applied learning in Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation (CREE) for graduate students in the School of Education; and accessible, high‐quality evaluation from WCER for local community‐based partners. Our ultimate vision is that people and organizations have the capacity to critically reflect on and mobilize knowledge to support equitable opportunities and outcomes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.