The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) was among the first Texas school systems to automatically enroll eligible students in grades 5 through 8 in advanced courses. A new study by Daniel Vargas Castaño, Dareem K. Antoine, and Trey Miller of the University of Texas at Dallas found that the policy—which required students to opt-out of advanced courses rather than opt-in—increased participation in advanced coursework and led to more students taking Algebra I before high school. The effects were especially pronounced among Hispanic students, while Black students saw smaller gains.
Using data from the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, the researchers tracked academic outcomes and demographic information for cohorts of 5th grade students from the 2011-12 to 2021-22 school years. DISD implemented its opt-out policy during the 2018-19 school year, automatically enrolling 5th grade students who scored in the “Meet” or “Masters” achievement band on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) into advanced courses for 6th grade. To isolate the policy’s effects, the researchers compared DISD to a control group consisting of four demographically and academically comparable school districts: Houston ISD, San Antonio ISD, Alief ISD, and Aldine ISD.
Following implementation of the policy, DISD experienced an 11.7 percentage point increase in the share of students taking Algebra I before high school relative to the control group. Early Algebra enrollment increased across student subgroups, rising by 13.8 percentage points for Hispanic students, 5.7 points for white students, and 4.8 percentage points for Black students. Although white students continued to enroll in Algebra I before high school at higher rates overall, the policy narrowed the Hispanic-white gap by 8 percentage points, while the Black-white gap widened by 1 percentage point.
The authors offered a potential explanation for the weaker effects among Black students: fewer met the automatic enrollment criteria based on the STAAR performance. As Texas and other states continue pursuing opt-out policies, Castaño and his coauthors argue that while “the establishment of default options lowers the advocacy and information burdens under normal opt-in systems, it does not alleviate the existing disparities in academic readiness.” In other words, while opt-out policies can expand access to advanced coursework, they may still leave some students behind without additional equity-focused supports.