Scaling Up is Hard to Do

In May, MDRC released an evaluation of our 15 colleges’ first year of the Developmental Education Initiative. The evaluation examined the progress that DEI colleges are making as they work to scale up successful developmental education strategies. To structure their analysis of the factors that obstruct and reinforce college scaling efforts, MDRC used the SCALERS model that we’ve been blogging about. The evaluators found that three of the SCALERS drivers were especially important: staffing, communicating, and alliance-building. “In particular,” they write, “scaling-up was more likely to proceed smoothly when the right people could readily be found to put the strategies in place, when there was ample communication with faculty members, when the necessary parties were engaged in alliances, and when the colleges could capitalize on preexisting working relationships.”

The MDRC evaluators also distilled six lessons for colleges as they seek to scale up their strategies:

• Make sure that the best available data are used in intervention planning.
• Find numerous occasions for the college president to express early and public support for the intervention.
• Recognize that involving adjunct staff is likely to be critical for going to scale.
• Consider making staff participation in professional development activities mandatory.
• Actively market new strategies to students.
• Anticipate complexities in scheduling and arranging space.

You can download the full report here.