Preserving the Ladder of Opportunity

Equity Week is coming to a close. We’ve covered how the marginalization of a field can further marginalize the students in it. We’ve heard about how instructional technique and curricular redesign can empower students in the classroom. And just this morning, we learned about an approach that boosts student success by addressing students’ economic barriers. 

In our first post this week, we highlighted the important role that community colleges, and developmental education in particular, have to play in creating equal opportunity. But the responsibility to pursue equitable policies and practices extends across the educational pipeline. On Tuesday, The New York Times ran an article about elite four-year colleges serving a disproportionately small number of low-income students. As evidence, the article looks at a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges.  According to the study:

“As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.”

These are dramatic statistics for a society that prizes equal opportunity and claims to be meritocratic. The article goes on to tell us about how one elite school is venturing to change these grim numbers.

Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College, has spent the past seven years trying to make his institution more economically diverse. In the process, he has made Amherst College a model of equity that the entire American education system should consider. In order to enroll more low-income students, Amherst has re-imagined their admission process and their financial aid and transfer policies. Now, nearly two-thirds of Amherst’s transfer students are from community colleges.

I’m going to close out equity week by returning to some words from the 1947 Truman Commission referenced in Tuesday’s post: “If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.” In light of the results of the above study, these somber words of warning from over 60 years ago seem almost prophetic. The American educational system, often viewed as the hallmark of social mobility, seems to be increasingly determined to preserve the status quo income distribution. Community colleges must continue to do their part to keep the door open to all students, and we must hope that equitable policies like those seen at Amherst will catch on.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

Guest Post: Retention Economics

As we said on Tuesday, developmental education is an essential rung on the ladder of educational and economic opportunity for many American students. Students who are placed in dev ed travel a difficult educational road, and they also face significant non-academic barriers to college success. While these barriers may seem outside the realm of college responsibility, addressing them can have dramatic effects on student success outcomes. Today’s guest post about a program that integrates academic and financial stability comes from Colin Austin, senior program director at MDC.

It’s a simple idea, really. Help students with their finances and they will be more likely to stay in school. Lower-income students in particular are often just a car break-down or hospital bill away from dropping out. How can educators and campus systems respond to these non-academic issues? What role should community colleges play in organizing supports that address the economic challenges that students and their families face?

The Annie E. Casey Foundation developed an approach called Center for Working Families that bundles services across what are usually three distinct platforms: education and training, income supports, and financial services. For colleges, bundling means building on existing training and financial aid and adding additional supports such as matched savings programs, financial literacy instruction, screening for public benefits, and one-on-one achievement coaching.

Sound expensive? Community colleges participating in MDC’s Center for Working Families Network find that small amounts of early investment can spark new connections on campus and stronger relationships with community agencies. And results indicate that students who receive an integrated set of supports are 3 to 4 times more likely to reach a major economic goal such as finishing a degree or credential and landing a job.

At Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina, students tap into tax credits and human services benefits such as food stamps and health insurance, all from one on-campus location.  Skyline College in Northern California partners with the United Way of the Bay Area to operate a SparkPoint Center – a place where students work with a coach to improve their credit, increase income, and create a step-by-step plan to meet personal financial goals. Other colleges adopting the Center for Working Families approach are engaged in similar activities, all focused on addressing economic barriers to student success.

Colin Austin is a senior program director at MDC. Colin directs several initiatives for MDC including the Center for Working Families network of community colleges and a U.S. Department of Labor Pathways Out of Poverty grant for green job training.

Guest Post: Equity, Opportunity, and Developmental Mathematics

Today’s contributor is Jack Rotman. Jack has been teaching at Lansing Community College in Michigan since 1973, specializing in developmental mathematics. As a member of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges’ (AMATYC), Jack is involved in a number of efforts to innovate developmental math instruction. Below, he shares his insights into how this work is connected to equitable instruction and opportunity for community college students.

Mathematics often serves as a gatekeeper to credentials in higher education, with the discipline sometimes being placed in this role against our will.  In this post, I will share some thoughts on the connections among developmental mathematics, equity, and current innovations.

We have a tendency to believe that the gaps in equity among student groups are beyond our control, that perhaps inequity is due to lifestyles, culture, or other factors that we cannot influence. However, there exist bodies of knowledge and theories which predict that our instructional design can have profound influence on these inequities if we understand the factors that need to be addressed. For example, in Berliner and Calfee’s Handbook of Educational Psychology,  Webb & Palincsar point out that “ethnic background and race operate as status indicators” in our classrooms, meaning that non-minority students feel more comfortable (contributing, asking questions, etc.). Another related concept from the work of Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the “default trajectory of failure,” where the culture or sub-culture not only accepts failure but expects failure. An exciting body of evidence in social-psychological interventions in education is suggesting some effective means to counter this default trajectory. An analysis of this work is forthcoming from David Yeager and Gregory Walton of Stanford University. For other applications of theories and research, you might start by looking at the work of Craig Nelson who conducts workshops on improving the retention of all students—including minority students—in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. 

Increasing equity involves being aware of language, power, and the social climate in academia. The most fundamental of these ideas is power; without power, there can be no real opportunity, which is the outcome of equity. There are many different power dynamics that play out in an individual classroom, but as professionals, we can consciously employ strategies that build up students’ sense of academic power. In my own classes, I use a combination of “cold calling” to include all students and rotating small groups, along with keeping an eye out to make sure that everybody is active. This kind of empowerment is not a “zero-sum” process; indeed, it is possible to create an environment where all students increase their power in academia.

Evidence shows that HOW we do WHAT we do can move us towards more equitable approaches to developmental mathematics—and some approaches might take us in the wrong direction: One of the current trends in developmental mathematics is the emphasis of online homework systems, and the related module-based redesign efforts. I believe that these trends will not increase equity in our classrooms. Our response needs to include face-to-face time that is structured to empower all students. On the other hand, many colleges are implementing learning communities, and evidence suggests that this practice has a lot of potential to make classrooms more equitable. Another current set of initiatives involves a basic re-design of the curriculum, and this is a good thing from an equity standpoint. The existing curricular model is based on a calculus-target, and a non-engaging set of learning outcomes. Redesigns—like Statway and Quantway, for example—contextualize abstract mathematical concepts with more practical applications; the New Life model is similar, though a more general approach than the Carnegie models. We need to base our curriculum on the mathematics that will inspire students and provide benefits in their non-math courses. You can learn more about other venues exploring this work by following these links:  American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges’ (AMATYC) Developmental Math New Life Community and my blog, Developmental Mathematics Revival.

Jack Rotman has taught at Lansing Community College (MI) since 1973, specializing in developmental mathematics. Jack chaired the Developmental Mathematics Committee of AMATYC twice, from 1993 to 1997, and from 2005 to 2010.  He was a reviewer for the original Crossroads standards (1995), and a contributing writer for the Beyond Crossroads document (2006).  Since 2009, Jack has led the AMATYC ”New Life Project” for developmental mathematics, a project that includes over 60 professionals in a national effort to develop a new model for developmental mathematics. Jack, along with Julie Phelps (Valencia CC, FL), serves as an AMATYC Liaison to the Carnegie Foundation’s pathways work.

Guest Post: We Are Not Alone: Community and a Shared Vision for Basic Writing and Equity

Let’s welcome today’s guest blogger, J. Elizabeth Clark to Accelerating Achievement. Elizabeth is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY where she teaches Basic Writing, English 101, and literature electives. She is also the incoming co-chair of the Council on Basic Writing with Hannah Ashley. We asked Elizabeth to introduce us to the Council on Basic Writing after reading an Inside Higher Ed piece on the organization; Serena Golden’s article, Basic, But Vital, pointed to a pattern “of ever-decreasing access for the students with the most need, and ever-decreasing visibility for those who teach them.” The CBW is working to change that pattern. Below, Elizabeth describes the Council and their efforts to support faculty that are supporting underserved students.

All too often, basic writing faculty members feel isolated on their campuses. Working in small departments separated from a college’s larger writing program or as one of a few faculty members in a larger writing program or in some cases as the sole basic writing faculty member on campus, many faculty members wish for a larger community to support their work as they serve some of the most at-risk students in our colleges and universities.

Since its formation, the Council on Basic Writing (CBW) has actively sought to provide that community. Established in 1980 by Karen Uehling and Charles Guilford, today the CBW provides an online and face-to-face community for teacher-scholars passionately devoted to the teaching of basic writing. The CBW-L listserv® provides a space for questions and conversations about everything from materials to use in classes, to questions about teaching, to emerging news in the field. At each year’s annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the CBW hosts a preconference workshop featuring presentations by basic writing scholars and emerging leaders in the field, opportunities for networking and sharing practices, and a working session for following up on online conversations.

Recently at CCCC 2011, the CBW worked to heighten the role of basic writing within the composition community. Although basic writing has historically been a critical component of the composition field, represented by scholars such as Mina Shaughnessy, Mike Rose, Bruce Horner, and David Bartholomae, many faculty members believe that basic writing has been increasingly marginalized within the field and its work is increasingly invisible in journals, at conferences, and in the scholarly representations of the field of composition. This marginalization mirrors the isolation many feel on their individual campuses. At the 2011 CBW workshop, entitled “We Are Not Alone,” faculty discussed how this sense of marginalization conflicts with the growing need for basic writing and developmental skills in our colleges and universities. At the same time faculty need new and innovative pedagogical and professional resources to address student needs, they are becoming increasingly difficult to find. In response to this, the CBW sponsored a Sense of the House resolution at CCCC as a first step in reemphasizing the important role that basic writing plays in the composition community:

“Be it resolved that Basic Writing is a vital field and its students and teacher scholars a productive force within composition; is under attack by exclusionary public policies; and therefore must be recognized publicly and supported by CCCC as a conference cluster and with featured sessions.”

This motion was passed unanimously at CCCC and represents the CBW’s commitment to raising awareness around basic writing, its pedagogies, practices, and scholarship. It also represents a renewed commitment to advocating for basic writing as an essential part of students’ educational opportunities and to helping new and emerging scholars meet the need for increased resources to help our faculty and students. To that end, we are creating a CBW mission statement that reflects the current state of basic writing and our commitment to it. If you’re interested in the CBW’s recent work at CCCC, please check out this CBW blog post.

You can read more about emerging basic writing pedagogy in our journal, the BWe. Although it is a separate entity, the CBW also shares a long-time relationship with the Journal of Basic Writing.

The CBW also supports scholars and programs with two awards, the annual Travel Award to fund travel expenses to CCCC and the Innovations Award to honor distinctive and cutting edge programs in basic writing. The CBW also maintains a Facebook page and website to provide additional information about the organization and its work. To join the CBW listserv, please follow the instructions here.

J. Elizabeth Clark is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY where she teaches Basic Writing, English 101, and literature electives. She is part of the college’s award-winning ePortfolio team and is a faculty member in the Global Skills for College Completion project (GSCC).

SCALERS Series: L is for Lobbying

Welcome to the fourth week of our seven-week series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling up effective programs. If you’re joining us for the first time, check out the series intro and the posts on the first three drivers: Staffing, Communicating, and Alliance-Building.

Since “lobbying” has very specific—and sometimes negative—connotations, for some people, we like to call this driver “demonstrating impact.” In order to secure and sustain support for an expansion plan, you’ve got to articulate to institutional, state, and federal decision makers that expanding (and/or continuing) a particular practice or program will have substantial benefits relative to costs. These same arguments must be made to individuals delivering the program as well as program participants. Scaling up a program or practice that has been successful on a small scale may require some disruption of organizational culture; this intensifies the imperative to clearly demonstrate how such change will advance institutional priorities—or why those institutional priorities need to change.

No matter what program you’re expanding, you should start by articulating the rationale for expansion and the connection to the college’s larger strategic plan. Then, consider what data you need to show how effective the strategy is at meeting the specified goal for the specified target population. Since it’s Equity Week at Accelerating Achievement, we encourage you to analyze data disaggregated by race, income, and other demographic factors and identify achievement gaps among student populations. If closing these gaps is an institutional priority for your college and one of the desired outcomes of your program, then it is essential that you analyze the evidence for how effectively the program accomplishes this goal. You should also ensure that your organization has the institutional research capacity to collect, measure, and communicate all of these data elements.

Collecting and analyzing data only serves this driver if you get to the demonstrating step. Make a plan to share information about program outcomes—within the organization, within the broader community, and with individuals who are in positions to influence program continuation, innovation, and further expansion. Your team should include individuals who can connect to state and federal policy decision makers; these individuals must have access to up-to-date information about program outcomes. Consider ways that those delivering program services and those participating can inform policy decisions through advocacy and information sharing. All these relationships and practices require that the organization consider other SCALERS drivers, in particular Communicating, Alliance-Building, and Sustaining Engagement.

For an example of the power of data, we refer you back to one of this blog’s first posts from Michael Collins, program director at Jobs for the Future.  JFF developed the DEI State Policy Strategy, a state-level developmental education improvement strategy, with three action priorities:

• A data-driven improvement process that ensures the right conditions for innovation.
• A state-level innovation investment strategy that helps states align and coordinate support from multiple sources to provide incentives for the development, testing, and scaling up of effective models for helping underprepared students succeed.
• Policy supports that provide a foundation for improved outcomes for underprepared students, facilitate the implementation of effective and promising models, and encourage the spread of successful practices.

By focusing on data-driven planning, resource coordination, and policy that supports effective practice, JFF’s strategy provides a framework for demonstrating impact at the college, system, and state level.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

Equity Week: The Ladder of Educational Opportunity

“We have proclaimed our faith in education as a means of equalizing the conditions of men. But there is grave danger that our present policy will make it an instrument for creating the very inequalities it was designed to prevent. If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”  –Report of the Truman Commission on Higher Education, 1947

Equal opportunity is a core American value that rests on the idea of a level playing field for all, regardless of social or economic position. But when the practices and policies of a society offer advantages to some and create disadvantages for others, the playing field is anything but level. These structural inequities are manifested at community colleges as achievement gaps, when certain groups of students are less successful. By making equity an institutional priority, community colleges can work to close these gaps.

Achieving the Dream’s A Tale of Two Students: Equal Treatment is Not Enough explains the difference between equal and equitable treatment: “When patients arrive in an emergency room, they go through the triage process, which sorts them out according to the urgency of their conditions. Some receive care before others. This is not equal treatment, but it is equitable treatment. Resources are allocated according to need so as many as possible are likely to survive their illness or accident. Few would argue that everyone should be treated the same in an emergency room.”

Community colleges play a vital role in preserving educational and economic opportunity for many Americans, especially low-income students and students of color. Since so many students begin postsecondary education unprepared for college-level work, developmental education is an essential rung on the ladder of educational opportunity. Without it, our system would be inaccessible for a large portion of students. Supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help us ensure that developmental education programs accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability.

This week on Accelerating Achievement, we’re bringing you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion.

Struggling to address these issues at your college? Check out Achieving the Dream’s Equity Resource Center. Want to know more about how the vision of the Truman Commission steered the American education system over the last half century? The Community College Research Center wrote the book on it.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

Linky, Linky!

To round out our week-long focus on developmental math, we’ve collected some additional reading. Enjoy!

• From Jobs for the Future, with support from MetLife Foundation, a new brief featuring three community colleges that have invested in developmental math improvements and have seen better results for their students: Innovations in Developmental Math: Community Colleges Enhance Support for Nontraditional Students.
• An Education Week article on math anxiety, with neuroscience!
• Also from Education Week, a blog interview with the founder of Mathalicious, an organization that “builds high-quality, standards-based math lessons designed to transform how students learn math, and how teachers teach it.” Though Mathalicious is kind of a silly name and geared toward middle-school math instruction, the focus on problem-solving over procedure could apply to the community college classroom.
• Developmental Mathematics Revival compares mathematics instruction to bowling—you can learn a lot from gutter balls!
• Let’s not forget the Community College Research Center’s Assessment of Evidence series. Working Paper No. 27 fits right in this week: Reforming Mathematics Classroom Pedagogy: Evidence-Based Findings and Recommendations for the Developmental Math Classroom. You can read the full paper or a brief that summarizes the findings.

Guest Post: The Policy of Redesign

Today’s post comes from Cynthia Liston, a Jobs for the Future consultant that is helping facilitate the work of the North Carolina Developmental Education Initiative state policy team. Her description of the DEI Math Task Force is a great example of how a state-level system can act as a convener, bringing faculty and administrators together to address the challenges of developmental math innovation, from assessment, to pedagogy, and all the way to financial aid.

Redesigning developmental math is well underway in North Carolina, and we’re learning a lot as we go. In October 2010 the North Carolina Community College System DEI State Policy Team approved design principles to steer developmental math redesign, as well as a process to identify 18 developmental and curriculum math faculty from across the state to do the “roll up your sleeves” work of curriculum redesign.  

This new DEI Math Task Force started its work in January to create developmental math modules that will result in more flexible paths toward curriculum-level math courses.  In 2012 the new modules will be paired with a to-be-developed custom diagnostic placement test and revised placement policies. North Carolina’s common course numbering system and central system office make this kind of statewide curriculum work possible.

So, how’s it going so far?  Here are a few thoughts to share.  First, early on the faculty team had some “aha” moments. Taking to heart the ambitious design principles, the Task Force decided that to truly affect change, it should do more than reduce curriculum redundancies and take out those competencies better taught at the curriculum level. So while the creation of eight modules, designed so they can be taken in a year in contrast to the current three-semester sequence, is important in and of itself, the modules also incorporate a pedagogical shift. They strive to strengthen students’ conceptual understanding of math through an emphasis on applications and problem-solving. 

One particularly influential piece of research driving this shift has been James Stigler’s (and his colleagues) article “What Community College Developmental Mathematics Students Understand About Mathematics.”  True numeracy means understanding and applying mathematical concepts, but too often students default to “plug and chug” formula-driven approaches. The new modules winnow the number of competencies taught, yet seek deeper understanding of core concepts. This shift means we will need to offer professional development to encourage faculty to move away from procedural-based teaching methods, and the Task Force will create sample assessments and tips to implement this approach.

A current issue is figuring out the changes in colleges’ administrative processes that are necessary to support the new modules. Ideally students will be able to move through modules at different rates—a competency-based approach. But our registration, tuition, and data management systems, as well as Federal financial aid regulations, are contact-hour based. A group of administrators is working on developing new models and processes to address these issues. Please wish them well—this is not easy! 

Stay tuned for implementation updates: beta testing of the modules begins in fall 2011 followed by larger pilots in spring 2012 and rollout across the state in fall 2012.

Cynthia Liston is a Jobs for the Future consultant who is helping facilitate the work of North Carolina’s Developmental Education Initiative state policy team.

Guest Post: A Network Approach to Education Improvement

Accelerating Achievement has already featured STATWAY, an effort of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to develop a one-year pathway from remedial math to college statistics. Today’s post from Gay Clyburn, associate vice president for public affairs at Carnegie, delves a little deeper into the Foundation’s networked approach to improving developmental math instruction and student outcomes.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is working to help community college students succeed in developmental mathematics. Carnegie aims to double the proportion of students, who, within one year of continuous community college enrollment, are mathematically prepared to succeed in further academic study and/or academic pursuits, regardless of limitations that they may have in language, literacy, and mathematics and their ability, on entry, to navigate college. The $13 million initiative, funded now by six foundations, is building a networked community working on the development of two newly designed mathematics pathways.

The Statistics Pathway (Statway) will move developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year. The Quantitative Literacy Pathway (Quantway) is a one-semester course that will prepare students to take a Quantitative Reasoning or non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college-level course already available at the college, or to enter a vocational specific program requiring mastery of developmental math concepts. Both the Statway and Quantway include an intensive student engagement component within the classroom environment focused on increasing student tenacity, as well as helping students develop tools to navigate college. We are currently working with 30 colleges.

The Network
We are catalyzing and supporting the growth of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to develop these two pathways. Specifically, the Carnegie network involves the community college faculty in participating institutions who teach and implement the math pathway, and with Carnegie’s improvement specialists and researchers, tests hypotheses, provide for local adaptations, and over time contribute to the modification of the pathway. The NIC also includes deans, institutional researchers, and others who address the institutional requirements; thinking partners who are those individuals with technical and substantive expertise; Carnegie staff who provide ongoing support and who are documenting the work; and NIC leadership, the formal body that tends to the health and well being of the network itself.

Our major partner in this work is the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is developing open access instructional resources organized in a core curriculum with accompanying instructional philosophy. We have also engaged a number of key organizational partners to both guide and help us support the scaling of this work.

The Approach
Carnegie is developing and promoting a Research and Development (R&D) infrastructure that we call Improvement Research that allows us to cull and synthesize the best of what we know from scholarship and practice, rapidly develop and test prospective improvements, deploy what we learn about what works in schools and classrooms, and add to our knowledge to continuously improve the performance of the system.  Beyond leading the co-development of the Statway and Quantway, we are orchestrating a common knowledge development and management system to guide network activity, and make certain that whatever we build and learn becomes a resource to others as these efforts grow to scale. We believe that this approach will not only produce powerful solutions to the challenges of developmental mathematics, but will also offer a prototype of a new infrastructure for research and development. Carnegie’s aim is to support system reforms that will simultaneously impact community college instruction, the field of developmental mathematics and the process of continuous educational improvement.

For more information or to get involved, email Carnegie at pathways@carnegiefoundation.org.

Gay Clyburn is associate vice president, public affairs, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. You can download a Carnegie paper about Networked Improvement Communities from the Resources page of the DEI website in the “Curricular and Instructional Revisions” section.

SCALERS Series: A is for Alliance-Building

Welcome to the third week of our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling up effective programs. If you’re joining us for the first time, check out the series intro and the posts on the first two drivers, Staffing and Communicating.

We all need somebody to lean on. Alliance-building, the third driver of the SCALERS model, focuses on the importance of a network of individuals and groups that will support your scaling effort. As defined by Paul Bloom and Aaron Chatterji, the model’s creators from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, alliance-building is “the effectiveness with which the organization has forged partnerships, coalitions, joint ventures, and other linkages to bring about desired social changes.” Colleges need the same ability to create partnerships and coalitions, engaging the necessary parties to support the expansion of a particular strategy.

Start by conducting an analysis of potential alliances that you could build to increase the likelihood of successful scaling up. These can be existing or new relationships, and can include individuals or groups representing faculty, staff, students, and departments. It might be people outside of the college, too. Consider parties that will be a champion for the work, as well as ones that are likely to resist change. If you invite those who could present roadblocks to participate in the planning process early on, you may prevent them from turning into opposition.

Once you have identified the necessary parties, develop a plan for engaging each group or individual. Secure commitments of implementation support from as many as possible. To do this, you’ll need to have an individual on your team who has the necessary positional authority to convene and invite new allies to participate. As the program expansion begins, put a system in place to provide for regular convenings to keep allies informed about program progress and changes. Your alliance-building plan should be informed by your plan for the other SCALERS drivers, especially communicating, demonstrating impact, and sustaining engagement.

We’ve blogged previously about an example of effective alliance-building. In April, Karen Scheid, director of the Developmental Education Initiative for the Ohio Board of Regents, described Ohio’s efforts to align adult basic and literacy education (ABLE) programs with developmental education. This effort has required the integration of the state policy team, the colleges, and the local basic education providers. As Karen told us, this alliance has already started to bear fruit: “Since the launch of the pilot at the end of July 2010, 22 of Ohio’s 23 community colleges and their ABLE partners have submitted agreements for colleges to make ABLE referrals for students who score below an agreed level on a placement test.”

Check back tomorrow for a guest post from Gay Clyburn, associate vice president for public affairs at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, to learn more about how Carnegie is using alliance-building to perfect and scale an initiative to develop a one-year pathway from remedial math to college statistics.

Guest Post: More Than Reshuffling

This week, Accelerating Achievement will focus on developmental math. We’ll look at innovative program design, state policy supports, and the latest research on what works. We begin with a summary of a recent paper from Steve Hinds, university mathematics staff developer at the City University of New York. Below, Steve introduces the design, implementation, and early outcomes of the College Transition Initiative, a CUNY program that is restructuring developmental math pedagogy with promising results.

More Than Reshuffling—Lessons from an Innovative Remedial Math Program at The City University of New York describes the teaching and learning practices of an intensive remedial math program at The City University of New York (a part of the College Transition Initiative, or CTI), and puts that work in a larger context of community college remedial math reform in the U.S. CTI is actually a reconfiguration of an earlier program that provided GED graduates with an intensive semester of study after they completed that credential but before they entered college.

The paper begins by outlining the structure of CTI, including who is eligible, the schedule of instruction and advisement, cost, and the basic staffing. The program targets students who are considered to be the least likely to be successful in their college study based on their need for multiple remedial courses in mathematics, reading, and writing. Enrollment and retention data are described for students who participated in the first two CTI semesters (fall 2009 and spring 2010).

Assessing student learning takes many forms in the CTI math course, and the paper includes description of how this is accomplished. Many people will focus on CTI students’ end-of-course placement exam results because of the high stakes attached to them (and these scores are very encouraging), but I make the argument that the COMPASS math placement exams do a poor job of measuring some of the most important gains that students make during the CTI math course.

The innovative teaching and learning practices in CTI math are compared with more traditional teaching practices that exist and that are encouraged in standards documents for K-12 and community college settings. CTI math instructors utilize what are called “balanced/constructivist” teaching methods, and in doing so go beyond a limited emphasis on procedural fluency to also promote students’ conceptual understanding, communication skills, and other components of a broad notion of what it means to be mathematically proficient. This section also refers to a 2009 companion paper I also wrote that gives more description and rationale for the pedagogical emphases in the course, and also includes detailed examples from the curriculum.

The major claim of this paper is that community college remedial mathematics reform should be centered on improvements in teaching methods, should move in a “balanced/constructivist” direction, and should not be limited to the more common “reshuffling” of traditional teaching practices. Changing teaching practices is a great challenge, though, and the paper describes in detail how efforts in this direction must simultaneously embrace new thinking on instructional intensity, content, assessment, administration, and faculty development.

Steve Hinds is the university mathematics staff developer at the The City University of New York. You can download “More than Reshuffling” and the companion paper, " More than Rules,” from the Resources page of the DEI website, in the “Curricular and Instructional Revisions” section.

What Do Students Really Think?

The College: El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas

The Difficulty: EPCC is implementing several institutional policy changes that will reshape the entering student experience:

• mandatory enrollment in developmental education and EPCC’s student success course for students who test into dev ed
• a new case-management advising system, which includes a mentoring component

While the college is confident these changes will improve student success, administrators want to fully understand how the changes will affect students, so they can minimize any negative impact and keep students from becoming discouraged.

The Expert: Arleen Arnsparger is a consultant for the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program. “We tend to make assumptions about why students behave in certain ways or what their experiences are with the college,” Arleen says. “We’re all getting better at making decisions by looking at institutional data and survey data, rather than just anecdotal information. Colleges have a lot of numbers to point them in the right direction, but student focus groups help them dig a little deeper into what they’re seeing in the data.”

The Accomplishment: Shirley Gilbert, EPCC’s program director for the Developmental Education Initiative, saw Arleen’s presentations at Achieving the Dream Strategy Institutes and was impressed by her ability to capture and convey the student voice. EPCC invited Arleen to come to campus and lead a workshop about creating student focus groups. Arleen helped participants identify what they needed to know about students’ experiences and then find the right questions to ask. The workshop also covered the logistics of creating a student focus group, including recruitment of focus group members, designing a discussion guide, and reporting findings to the college. She concluded with a model focus group session.

What Really Worked: The workshop participants left with a better understanding of how to involve students in decision-making; many faculty and staff have gone on to host their own student focus groups. “EPCC leaves no stone unturned in understanding the student experience,” Arleen says.

Lasting Effects: El Paso Community College is getting ready to roll out additional student focus groups, but is planning to bring Arleen back to give the college a boost as it moves forward, especially since the focus groups will involve a larger number of staff this time around. “We’ve scratched the surface, but now we need to get a deeper understanding,” Shirley Gilbert says. “We asked our students, ‘Tell me what you think,’ and now we need to ask, ‘Tell me what you really think.’”

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

SCALERS Series: C is for Communicating

Last week, we began our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling up effective programs. You can read the series intro here, and you can read the post about Staffing, the first driver, here.

When you think communications, it's not just marketing, it's telling the story in a way that will make the value of your work clear to everyone on campus. A compelling message will help students, faculty and staff understand that your change strategy is essential to student success and worth adopting and supporting.

In order to ensure the necessary participation in scaling up your strategy, you’ll need to clearly articulate the rationale, expectations, commitment, and process for the expansion. Once you figure out how to say it, figure out how to share it. What formats are appropriate for getting your information out to faculty, staff, and students? Consider websites and course catalogs, as well as program-specific convenings and marketing materials.

Communication is an ongoing need, so put processes in place to share up-to-date information about the program to responsible faculty and staff as well as students and all departments and individuals responsible for enrolling, counseling, and advising students. Pay close attention to making sure individuals with authority understand the enrollment, registration, and scheduling changes that are required for successful expansion of your program.

When Patrick Henry Community College began the Developmental Education Initiative, they formed a committee to launch and maintain a marketing campaign for their DEI work, known as the Progress Initiative. The Progress Initiative focuses on fast-tracking students through developmental education in the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which also incorporates cooperative learning and case-management advising. To create buy-in across the campus for this program, the committee developed an exciting verbal and visual identity for the Progress Initiative. They launched the campaign with a public event featuring a nationally known speaker, and the team made presentations at a variety of campus meetings to acquaint faculty and staff with the initiative. Once PHCC had effectively established an identity for the Progress Initiative, they worked to reinforce it over time. All faculty who present about the initiative are given a thumb drive loaded with the logo and the theme music as well as T-shirts with the logo on it.

You probably don’t need a full marketing campaign for every program you expand, but you do need to create a communications plan that determines the appropriate methods and processes for sharing the necessary information with your campus. PHCC is a stellar example of using communications to persuade faculty, staff, and students to support a strategy. What are your communication success stories? What problems have you encountered in getting the word out?

SCALERS Series: S is for Staffing

Today, we begin our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling-up effective programs. You can read the series intro here.

People who need people are, indeed, the luckiest people; but it may not feel that way when you’re trying to find the resources and individuals to expand a program. The SCALERS staffing driver calls for effective use of resources to meet labor needs; in a community college setting, this includes administration, faculty, student services, and student employee positions, as well as individuals responsible for data collection, analysis, and evaluation.

As you look at a program slated for expansion, you must consider how labor-intensive it is and whether it requires skilled services. This necessitates a clear definition of the labor needs and the local labor market. An organization also must look at the existing recruitment pool and the institution’s ability to recruit sufficient staff to sustain expansion. Such efforts are supported by a staffing plan that includes job descriptions for all requisite positions that details the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities. Such a plan should include the required administrative, student services, academic, and student employee positions. It’s also important to review current staffing levels and identify any existing positions that may need to be redeployed or those that will see additional work volume under expansion.

While a team responsible for day-to-day implementation of a particular program can make a good start on a staffing plan, there are broader organizational considerations that may require support from administration. Adding or redeploying positions necessitates discussions about a broader human resources strategy; does the organization have capacity (and will) to recruit, train, retain, and sustain the requisite expertise? You must ensure that HR processes for recruitment and hiring are in place; someone on the “scaling-up team” should be familiar with these processes and have the authority to initiate and execute hiring.

Of course, once individuals are hired, the organization should see to their continued development and training. Another part of the staffing consideration is the organization’s approach to professional development; a sustainable scaled-up solution requires a professional development system that specifically addresses the needs of the faculty and staff implementing the program, as well as the processes and resources to ensure quality delivery and continuous improvement. These concerns are closely related to other SCALERS drivers that will be featured in coming weeks, including communicating, alliance-building, resources, and sustaining engagement.

Chaffey College came up with a unique solution to a staffing issue as they expanded their Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program. The goal of ODE is to move students off of probation and back into good standing. Participating students develop an educational plan with an advisor, take a student success course, and complete a series of directed activities in the college’s student success center. The director of the program meets with every student (between 300 and 400 students per semester), but student follow-up is carried out by a cadre of Counselor Apprentices. These Counselor Apprentices are graduate students from a local university who can apply the experience to completing required clinical hours, allowing the college to expand its advising force. For more information about Opening Doors to Excellence, check out the presentation ODE Program Director Ricardo Diaz made at the 2011 Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute pre-institute workshop, “Bringing Innovation to Scale.” You can find the presentation in the Resources section of our website, under the “Scaling Up” category.

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

The Joy of Scaling

The chief aim of the Developmental Education Initiative is to identify the most effective developmental education programming and deliver them to more of the community college students who need them—or find ways for most entering students to bypass those courses all together. In other words, what resources and practices are essential to take something that works to scale? There are a lot of different organizations exploring an apparently elusive definition of “scale”—the feds, foundations, and Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, among many others.  And though there isn’t one definition that will suit every situation, the imperative is undeniable: organizations in the business of social benefit must develop the capacity to expand the reach of their effective programs. Large-scale problems won’t be solved by small-scale programs. A program is not good enough for what we’ve been asked to do (i.e., graduate 5 million more students and double the number of adults with postsecondary credentials). Though the term is certainly more popular these days, the concept is not new; scaling up is an essential part of continuous improvement processes and systems-change because a solution that is not sustainable and available to most of those who need it is not a solution. The required organizational change can be disruptive and likely will necessitate new priorities for the institution.

There are certainly barriers to expanding something that has value. Politics, resources, traditions—the obstacles you always face moving anything new through a human system, especially when that system is under stress. Over the next several weeks, Accelerating Achievement will tackle these obstacles, working step-by-step through a scaling model. In “Scaling Social Entrepreneurial Impact,” Paul Bloom and Aaron Chatterji present a conceptual framework of seven organizational capacities that support successful scaling of a social enterprise, represented by the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. Given the differences between a typical nonprofit or private sector venture and public institutions, MDC has translated the model for application at community colleges. Here are Bloom & Chatterji’s original definitions of each capacity and our definitions adapted to community colleges:

Each capacity, or driver, can influence the expansion process, though some may be more important than others in any particular situation. The drivers also overlap and interplay during the design and execution of a scaling strategy.  Each Wednesday for the next seven weeks, we’ll dive into one of these drivers, exploring this overlap and interplay, teasing out how the model might play out in the community college. Over the coming weeks, please add your observations and experience to the mix. We’d like to hear about efforts to expand effective programs that have been successful, as well as what you’ve learned from scaling attempts that didn’t go as planned. We hope you’ll join us! 

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