So You Want to Publish that Op-Ed

We look for timeliness, ingenuity, strength of argument, freshness of opinion, clear writing and newsworthiness. Personal experiences and first-person narrative can be great, particularly when they’re in service to a larger idea. So is humor, when it’s funny. Does it help to be famous? Not really.
                --David Shipley, The New York Times

If the op-ed template from yesterday’s post were the nail, today’s offering is the hammer. If you’ve got something to say about your college’s innovative approach to helping more students get through developmental education and on to completion, we want to be sure people hear it.

Op-ed refers to the opinion page--that’s Opposite the Editorial page--in most newspapers. It’s a great way to bring attention to an issue that’s important to you, especially when it’s suddenly in the news. It can help reshape public debate and affect policy while bringing attention to your organization.

In the DEI Online Resources section, under “Communications,” you’ll find two documents that can increase your chances of placing that brilliant op-ed:

• “How to Write an Op-Ed” is chock full of tips for writing a great piece and getting it published.
• Once you’ve got your piece ready, check out “Press Pointers” from our ATD communications colleagues for instructions on developing relationships with reporters in your area.

Richard Hart is MDC’s Communications Director.

A Stepstool to a Dev Ed Soapbox

Given current resource constraints, adequate funding for community colleges is becoming more tenuous.  As enrollment grows and tax bases shrink, policymakers are examining budgets with a fine-toothed comb and college leaders are struggling to do more with less. In many circles, there is concern that the growing burden of funding and teaching developmental education is distracting community colleges from their core mission. This fear is noted in a recent New York Times article about remediation programs in New York City, which we blogged about earlier this month.

One of our DEI priorities is to stimulate a positive public conversation about developmental education. We want to make sure that effective developmental education is recognized for the life-changing impact it has on students. Inspired by the great stories and opinion pieces some of our DEI colleges have written for local news outlets (like this one by Madeline Barillo, Norwalk Community College’s director of public relations), we’ve constructed a sample op-ed that can be adapted by any college for local use. You can download the op-ed from the Resources section of the DEI website; it’s under the “Communications” tab.

Plug in your data and send it off, or draw on it to inspire an original piece. Whether you use this template or not ,we’d love to know about any op-eds that your college submits to your local paper that address your college response to dev ed work. Have you already started this conversation in your community? Share the link in the comments section below.

Richard Hart is MDC's Communications Director.

Free Statway/Quantway Webinar on Friday, April 1

Don’t forget, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is hosting a free webinar this Friday, April 1, to introduce their developmental math work. You can register here. The one hour discussion will cover two new developmental math pathways: Statway and Quantway. Here’s the description from the website:

“Carnegie and its partners are addressing the low success rate of developmental mathematics students by providing alternatives to the current community college mathematical sequence and content. The Statistics Pathway (Statway) is designed to take developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year. Quantway provides an alternate and accelerated pathway with an innovative quantitative literacy focus in which students use mathematics and numerical reasoning to make sense of the world around them.”

We’ll definitely be tuning in!

Guest Post: Texas is Taking Developmental Education by the Horns

The theory of change for both Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative rely on the integration of institutional change and policy change. Today’s post comes from Cynthia Ferrell, director of the Texas Developmental Education Initiative state policy team. Cynthia introduces the Texas approach to this college/state integration.  For more on Texas developmental education policy and to see some legislative action, check out Bruce Vandal’s post over at Getting Past Go. Now, let’s get ready to rodeo!

We Texans pride ourselves on doing things big. And like our famed and fearless rodeo bull riders, we have strapped ourselves, with full intentions of victory, to the back of the massive and stubborn challenge of improving developmental student success. Four brave Texas DEI colleges—Coastal Bend College, El Paso Community College, Houston Community College and South Texas College—have sparred with the beast and have found innovations that are making a dramatic impact.

These institutions, and other Texas ATD colleges like them, collaborated with the DEI state policy team to co-construct a strategic state policy plan founded on what the institutions had learned about improving developmental student success and the state policy supports needed for further improvements and scaling. The new Texas Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Strategy placed their promising innovations at the center of a statewide cycle of continuous improvement and policy planning aimed at closing student success gaps. The following graphic illustrates the four core priorities of the plan.

1. Cultivating Broad Engagement: The colleges found that getting everyone involved was an important key to developmental student success. So, this state policy priority is about getting lots of Texans involved in scaling up effective practices. Much of this work is being done through collaborations between the policy team, lead institutions, and established state associations. One exciting new development is a grass-roots initiative of enthusiastic ATD faculty who want to build a statewide network for all Texas community college developmental education faculty. These faculty leaders, with DEI state policy team support and coordination, are building face-to-face and web-based opportunities to encourage statewide scaling of developmental innovations that work.
2. Building a Statewide Culture of Evidence: Colleges are building institutional cultures of evidence and we want to do the same for the state. Texas has great statewide data on community college developmental education outcomes. This priority is dedicated to raising awareness of the state of developmental education, increasing commitments to improving developmental student outcomes, and informing policy and decision-making by sharing state data in more meaningful ways. We (the DEI team and the DEI colleges) are in the midst of planning the Texas Community College Developmental Education Data Summit for core teams from each community college.  
3. Scaling Successes: While the 26 ATD college districts and DEI colleges are busy piloting and scaling successes funded by state and national foundations, Teaxs legislators committed state funding to finding sustainable solutions to the developmental dilemma. In addition to the state formula funding of developmental courses in the last biennial budget, the state appropriated $15 million for developmental and adult basic education innovations, pilots and demonstration projects.
4. Providing Policy Supports: All of the colleges revised their institutional developmental policies to support student success. Likewise, this priority was designed to inform state-level policy and advocate for innovation funding to support colleges’ efforts. Although it is too early in the legislative session to predict the outcome, several developmental education bills and riders have been filed and are currently being debated, including legislation regarding statewide college readiness assessment and placement, statewide planning that would require offerings of technology-based developmental coursework and faculty development, success-based outcomes funding (momentum points), and non-semester length developmental education funding.

Together, the Lone Star State’s ATD and DEI colleges, and the DEI state policy team, are truly taking developmental education by the horns.

The More Learning Communities, the Merrier

Last week, Accelerating Achievement featured learning communities: we talked about engagement, expansion, and evidence. But one week is never enough, so today we’ve got a quick snapshot of some of the outstanding technical assistance DEI colleges are receiving that’s helping them make their learning communities more successful.

• At Zane State College in Zanesville, Ohio, DEI technical assistance provider Emily Lardner met with student services staff and faculty to discuss the advantages of learning communities. Emily started by connecting with student services at a breakfast session to help them understand the benefits of learning communities. “When you’re trying to have a learning community on campus, [student services] are the first line to get people in the door and enrolled, so it’s crucial they understand the importance,” says Becky Ament, Associate Dean of Developmental Education and the First-year Experience at Zane State. Meeting with faculty on campus, Emily guided small groups in thinking about integrated learning assignments as an alternative to a full- scale learning community; such assignments can help students engage across courses, but without some of the logistical challenges of learning communities. Since Emily's technical assistance, Zane State has developed two college-level learning communities and four learning communities pairing developmental courses with college-level general education courses, including:
• Introduction to Psychology with English Composition (college-level)
• First-Year Experience Course with Introduction to Computer Applications (college-level)
• Introduction to Sociology with Developmental English
• Principles of Biology with Study Skills
• Consumer Economics with Pre-business Math
• Microeconomics with Beginning Algebra

• We talked to Ruth Silon, DEI Project Director at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, about changes that the college made in their learning communities after bringing in technical assistance provider Julie Phelps. On Julie’s visit, she led a focus group with learning community faculty from various departments. From these conversations, the college learned there was a disconnect between what the faculty needed to form learning communities versus what was being offered. As a result, the Western campus took the lead and organized a Learning Community Summit; faculty from Valencia Community College provided learning community training. Since then, Julie has returned and met with this group of faculty and administrators to discuss progress. 

Show Me the Evidence!

This week we’ve been blogging about the learning communities as a way to engage students so that they’ll be more likely to succeed. But what evidence do we have that learning communities are an effective way to improve student outcomes?

MDRC, a social policy research firm, has recently released a number of studies on learning communities at community colleges. The evaluations show some positive short-term outcomes:

• developmental math students in learning communities at Queensborough and Houston passed their classes at higher rates than those not in a learning community
• Learning community students at Kingsborough Community College (KCC) felt more engaged than students not in a learning community, and they passed their assessment exams at higher rates

…but less certain long-term effects:

• At Queensborough and Houston, students in the learning communities did not persist at a higher rate or earn more credits than their non-learning community peers, and
• At KCC, there was only a slight increase in long-term persistence for learning community students

An earlier report evaluated Hillsborough Community College’s learning community program for developmental reading students. At Hillsborough, there was a positive impact for learning community students only when there was effective faculty collaboration and curricular integration.

We can discern a few important lessons for colleges that are working to establish a learning community program from this research:

• Colleges should consider options for providing more continuous support for students beyond their time in a learning community
• Effective collaboration and communication between faculty teaching linked courses is vital to successful delivery and positive outcomes for students
• Waning impacts suggests that colleges should look at ways to strengthen peer bonds for a more lasting effect

Have you seen these benefits and challenges in learning communities on your campus? What do you do to encourage faculty collaboration? How do you sustain student connections beyond the end of the semester?



Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

Guest Post: Slow and Steady Scales the Learning Community

Today’s post comes from Rachel Singer, Director of Academic Affairs at Kingsborough Community College in New York.

Learning Communities at Kingsborough Community College have evolved dramatically over the past 15 years. We have gone from serving approximately 120 students each semester to approximately 1,000. The majority of students served in our learning communities are first-time, fulltime freshman who are underprepared for college-level courses, 75% of who test into developmental English. We know the underprepared, late-tested student is most likely to drop out of college, so our incoming freshmen learning communities are a critical element in helping students achieve success. 

Learning communities began at Kingsborough with the institution of the Intensive ESL Program, which, each semester, serves incoming freshman who are not native speakers of English. The Opening Doors Learning Communities began in the fall of 2003 as part of a study conducted by MDRC, a social policy research group. Students in both of these learning community programs have consistently attained higher GPAs than those who do not participate in learning communities, have higher retention rates, and generally pass out of the developmental sequence at a higher rate. Such results prompted the 1998 decision to make the Intensive ESL Program a requirement for incoming, full-time day ESL students. We have expanded our Opening Doors Learning Communities offerings to 32 groups each semester. These results also were the driving force for the requirement that all first-time, incoming freshmen take English in their first semester.  The positive data that we see coming from our learning community cohorts has prompted us to build Advanced Learning Communities for students who are beyond their first-time freshmen status. 

Each learning community program assembles a rich constellation of team members, all of whom work together to provide students with a coherent interdisciplinary experience. Faculty teaching the linked courses collaborate to identify shared student learning outcomes as well as to choose course texts, themes, activities, and assignments. We strongly encourage faculty to work with other members of the learning community team in order to provide students with an integrated learning experience.

Student Development Case Managers serve as advisors, counselors, instructors, and student advocates. They do this by teaching skills for attaining academic success, providing academic support and advisement throughout the semester, and introducing students to college resources. They promote connections among the courses by integrating the theme of the linked courses into their college orientation course.

Our ability to scale up our learning communities at Kingsborough speaks to the dedication and support of these programs by faculty and administration from all areas of the college. The scale-up has evolved over 15 years with a slow and steady vision that brings student needs into consideration at every step.

You Are a Community

Last week, we blogged about interesting ways that technology can help colleges match instruction to the needs of individual students. But we also acknowledged that tech-time needs to be balanced with face-time. Lauren Stowe Jones from Zane State College wrote, “For our students, that personal connection and the face-to-face time is vital. I do believe that technological literacy is an essential skill, but our students tend to learn it best when in a supportive face-to-face environment.”

This week, we’d like to focus on the personal connection that is critical to student persistence and motivation. We’ll be blogging all week about learning communities. For a little art-imitates-life moment, check out this clip from the pilot episode of Community, an NBC sitcom in which seven students (both traditional and non-traditional) form a study group at the fictional Greendale Community College:




Since the pilot aired in 2009, the students in the study group have grown together as a true community. On their own, each member of the group struggles to overcome difficult pasts and build self-worth, but together they form a surprisingly stable group. They have supported each other through the academic and personal challenges of exams, bullying, divorce, racism, financial woes, pregnancy, and zombies. It may be a comedy, but Community deftly tackles some pretty serious topics. By the end of every episode, the group demonstrates the principle that we’re going to focus on this week: students have a better chance at success when they are supported and engaged in a community of their peers.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC and a loyal follower of Community.

Adapting the Way We Learn

Yesterday, we wrote about using technology to support tailored instruction. Technology isn’t just providing an opportunity for us to find new methods of delivering information; it is also fundamentally changing the content of our courses. Over the weekend, NPR ran a story about the changing ways that elementary-level math is taught. As computers have become omnipresent in our lives, it has become less important for us to be able to actually do the math. Rather than being able to complete arithmetic problems, students now-a-days need to be able to understand the thinking behind arithmetic.The same could be said about higher levels of math. It is more important for students to be comfortable constructing a formula than it is to plug numbers into a formula and solve it. Since technology has altered the way we use knowledge, it makes sense for it to alter the way we learn it, too.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC. 

Balancing Tech-Time and Face-Time

In a feature story in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed, Adapting to Developmental Education, Steve Kolowich reports on private companies—from publishers to test-makers—that are marketing products specifically designed for college developmental education instruction, many of which include sophisticated diagnostic tools to tailor instruction to a particular user:

“It is similar to what Google and Netflix and other web applications are using, where they measure activity that user is doing and bringing back the data … based upon actions that you’ve taken,” says David Liu, Knewton’s chief operating officer. “Not only do we data mine all [your] activities as a student, but we also begin to understand some of the tendencies you have and compare you to cohorts that we have using the system.”

Technology-supported tailored instruction has been in the news elsewhere this week; in her coverage of this week’s annual meeting of the American Council on Education, EdWeek reporter Caralee Adams lifts up how such innovations can save scarce faculty and space resources. DEI colleges are showing how this can be done: Housatonic Community College’s “Open Entry/Open Exit” program allows students to move through material at their own pace and allows fewer faculty members to serve a greater number of students. El Paso Community College is expanding its “Math Emporium” model, which allows students to work only on the concepts and skills in which they are deficient, completing courses in less time.


But tailoring takes serious coordination. Yesterday on this blog, Kathleen Cleary of Sinclair Community College called for “technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction.” Are these adaptive programs the way to get there?  Cleary notes that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all tailor, so colleges must “take advantage of peer and social learning” to find methods that work for all students. Models like the School of One are one way to incorporate technology and face-to-face instruction. How does your college integrate tech-time with face-time?

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative. 

Guest Post: School of One in 26,000?

Yesterday, Mickey Muldoon introduced us to New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today, Dr. Kathleen Cleary, Dean and DEI Project Director at Sinclair Community College, explores how this concept might be applied to developmental education at the community college.

I attended the Big Ideas Fest at Half Moon Bay in December and heard an inspiring presentation on the School of One in New York City.  According to its website, “the mission of School of One is to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction.”  Each student receives a different schedule each day to allow them opportunities to learn in different modalities and to maximize the ways he or she learns best.

I left the festival pondering how the School of One mission might play out in a community college setting, particularly with developmental education students.  I was immediately struck by the challenges of scaling an individualized approach to instruction.  At Sinclair Community College, a 26,000-student campus, we currently offer developmental mathematics in multiple modalities: classroom-based instruction that heavily emphasizes inquiry-based and group learning; online classes to reach students who are unable to come to campus; an intensive boot camp experience for students who only need a quick refresher to catch up on their math readiness; and finally, a technologically-rich lab setting where students learn the material at their own pace, with an instructor and tutors to guide them along the way.  At first glance, the lab setting would seem to be the closest fit with the School of One philosophy, and, in fact, 80% of students surveyed would take a class again in this format.  Their success rates are higher than those for the traditional classroom or online formats, but not all students are able to learn this way, either because they are home-bound, or because they are social learners who benefit from the peer and instructor interaction of the traditional, group-based classroom.  How do we find the best fit for each individual student and scale that for the 7,000 developmental education students we serve?

My current thinking is that we need to become much more sophisticated in our ability to use predictive analytics: a student who places into developmental education after passing Algebra II in high school has completely different needs than a displaced worker who may never have gotten through Algebra in the first place.  We need technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction, but we also need to take advantage of peer and social learning through processes such as block scheduling, learning communities, and far more robust orientation programs.  Finally, we need to figure out how to build more flexibility into our system, so that if a student discovers he or she is not a good fit with a learning modality, we can quickly move the student to a different type of class and not make him or her sit through an entire term in a form that compromises the student’s ability to succeed.

It would take champions from student services, information technology, and instruction to figure out what it would take for a School of One model to work in a large community college, but the benefits for developmental education students could be substantial.

Kathleen Cleary is Project Director of DEI at Sinclair Community College.

Guest Post: Applying Promising K-12 Models

In December 2010, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) hosted a Big Ideas Fest, an “inspirational extravaganza” where participants shared “ideas and real world results that prove when you put the learner in the center of all systems, anything is possible.” Big ideas, indeed! Thanks to support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, three DEI colleges were able to send representatives. Dr. Kathleen Cleary, from Sinclair Community College attended the event; she was particularly struck by a presentation from the New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today’s post is an introduction to the School of One approach from Mickey Muldoon, School of One’s manager of external affairs. Tomorrow, we’ll feature a post from Dr. Cleary, exploring how such an approach might be applied in developmental education at the community college level.

School of One was inspired by the simple insight that students in New York City classrooms – and across the country – have incredibly variable skills, knowledge, abilities, and challenges. Treating all the students in any classroom as identical cogs doesn’t do justice to their differences – and can be inefficient and taxing on teachers. So just like Amazon.com and Pandora.com respond to the unique preferences of their users, we are building a classroom that adapts to every student, with the help of sophisticated technology behind the scenes.

Below are some of the key principles of our philosophy and design:

• Multiple modalities enable personalization. Our classrooms are large (~2,000 square feet) and divided into learning stations in different modalities: large and small group instruction, small group collaboration, software-based instruction, live remote tutoring, and independent practice. Because students are distributed across the stations at any given time, the fast students can work on advanced material, and slower students are not left behind in the back of class. Moreover, students who struggle in traditional classrooms often thrive in small groups, one-on-one, or with software or online tutors.
• Data-driven scheduling. All School of One students take a short, custom online quiz at the end of each math period. Then at the end of each day, School of One’s learning algorithm processes all the quiz results and generates a unique plan for every student for the following day. Students who pass their quizzes are automatically moved on to new material; students who don’t will continue on the same material on the following day, often with extra help from the teaching staff.
• Classroom tools should empower teachers to do what they do best. Our technology and data systems streamline administrative tasks, assessments, grading, and data analysis. This means that School of One teachers can easily access the key information they need, and spend more time planning and delivering great instruction and working directly with students.
• Constant performance evaluation. In addition to daily online quizzes, School of One students participate in mandatory and voluntary evaluation and testing. So far, the results are promising: in the most recent in-school and after-school pilots, School of One students significantly outperformed their peers. For more information, go here.

To learn more about School of One, please visit www.schoolofone.org.

Thanks to DEI and Accelerating Achievement for the opportunity to share our work.


Mickey Muldoon is School of One’s manager of external affairs.

Whose Life Are You Pivoting?

Yesterday’s New York Times featured a story about developmental education at the City University of New York’s community colleges. The article is a succinct description of the costs, benefits, and challenges of developmental education instruction. Dr. Gail Mellow, president of La Guardia Community College was interviewed for the article and declared her support for dev ed:

“I embrace developmental education because it pivots lives,” Dr. Mellow said. “If students get an associate’s degree, they can become nurses, making $85,000 a year. If they don’t make it through that developmental class, they’ll barely make minimum wage.”

Developmental education as a pivot point is a powerful image—a lot can turn on the experience students have in your dev ed courses. It can affect whether or not they return the next semester, whether or not they have the skills to be successful in the next class, and even whether or not they decide to become a part of the broader college community. As I thought about what this means for individual students, I couldn’t resist checking out what other readers had to say. As a general rule, I avoid reading comments for online newspaper stories. It usually goes something like this:

“Hear hear! ...oh…but no.”
“This one has it all wrong.”
“How could s/he possibly think that?”
“Where do these people come from?”

… and suddenly I’ve lost 30 minutes of my life. However, this time, I’m glad I took a few minutes because I found this in the comments section:

“I am one of those ‘remedial’ students and take offense to most of the comments here. Glad I didn't listen to all the naysayers and met the educational challenges that remedial math students require. The end result was a degree in biology and a six figure salary (after many more years of climbing the corp ladder). Don't give up on these students. I value everything I learned in college including math. There is hope in community college where none could be found in HS.”

Now, I know s/he’s still a bit cranky, and I know that climbing the ladder to a six-figure salary isn’t realistic for a majority of…well…any group of people, but what’s important is the plea that we don’t give up on these students. I applaud the educators, administrators, and policymakers who are willing to admit what’s not working, who are constantly improving their practices, and who are taking risks to deliver improved instruction to more students. That work can pivot lives in a positive, postsecondary-success, family-sustaining wage, community-building kind of way. And that’s a direction I think we’d all like to be facing.

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

Leading the Way in Arkansas

Aligning state and institutional policies with student success goals is key to the changes DEI and ATD institutions are making.  Arkansas provides a great example of this approach. In January, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, reported on Arkansas’s higher education policies and their effectiveness in Increasing the Competitiveness of the Arkansas Workforce for a Knowledge-Based Economy: How Do Current Higher Education Policies Help or Get in the Way?.

NCHEMS analyzed data on Arkansas’s educational attainment, economy, and higher education performance and observed:

• Arkansas ranks 46th in the nation in the percentage of adults, ages 25 to 64, with an associate degree and 49th in the percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• In order to reach competitive levels of educational attainment, more Arkansas adults must complete postsecondary education—at least to the level of a certificate necessary to make a living wage.  Necessary gains can’t be made only by educating recent high school graduates.
• Arkansas must make dramatic improvements in college participation, retention, and completion across the system to be able to double the number of degrees and certificates produced annually by 2025.

NCHMS also reviewed existing statutes and policies and found:

• Arkansas has a number of promising initiatives intended to improve college and career readiness and student success leading to a certificate or degree, but the state faces major challenges in moving from isolated good practices to a system-wide implementation and sustainability. 
• State policies regarding alignment of K-12 and higher education standards and assessments and developmental education must be fundamentally redesigned.
• Arkansas needs a targeted strategy to serve adults who have serious deficits in the basic skills needed to further education leading to a living wage job.

I think you’ll agree these all sound pretty familiar. The report was not news for Ouachita Technical College and National Park Community College (NPCC), either.  These Arkansas Achieving the Dream institutions have been working to increase retention and completion on their campuses using innovative programs to meet the needs of their students, and they are seeing results.

In NPCC’s Math Cascade program students progress through three, five-week math modules; students are allowed to repeat modules if they are unsuccessful. With Math Cascade, students are able to fast-track their learning and master math skills, which has resulted in a 62 percent student success rate in pre- and beginning-Algebra courses. “When students are more comfortable with math, they’re more successful at it,” says Dana Murphy of NPCC.

To increase retention and educational attainment, Ouachita Tech is implementing the College and Career Access Program (CCAP), in partnership with the Arkansas Department of Career Education, Adult Education Section. CCAP will offer free reading, writing, and math courses to students desiring to enter college but whose assessment scores fall below the enrollment threshold.  The goal of CCAP is to use adult education instructors and classrooms on a college campus to provide certifiable job skills by focusing on specifically-diagnosed deficiencies. Donna Hill of Ouachita Tech says, “We are excited to provide something that may give [students] the skills they need to move into college level work and be successful.”

Breanna Detwiler is MDC's Autry Fellow.