Snacktime!

Here are a few tasty morsels from the internet’s pantry this week.  Enjoy!

• Complete College America just launched a new blog, which is featuring remediation for its first week! This will be a great source for news and commentary from across the college completion arena. We were happy to see them call attention to Community College of Baltimore’s co-requisite model. Want to know more? CCBC’s Andy Rusnack guest blogged for us yesterday about their innovative approach.
• Earlier this week on Talk of the Nation, host Rebecca Roberts spoke with Diane Ravitch and Angel Harris about closing the gap between white students and students of color in academic achievement. We’ve written about equity on this blog before, because the achievement gap has significant implications for developmental educators. As Roberts says, “Educators hear the statistics all the time, but if you're a parent or even just an observer, the facts are still shocking: Students of color lag well behind their white counterparts, despite education reforms aimed at narrowing the gap. By age 17, the average black student is a full four years behind the average white student. Race and economic background are still overwhelming determinants when it comes to academic success in this country.”
• Last weekend, The New York Times ran an editorial from Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford about quantitative literacy. They write that “different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.” Hear, hear! Carnegie’s Statway and Quantway programs are trying to do just that.
• Check out Bridgespan Group’s Matthew Forti over on the Stanford Social Innovation Review; he writes about the dangers of letting conventional wisdom shorten our vision of long-term impact. The important drive for more evidence might lead an organization to focus on the program outcomes that are easy to measure, rather than finding ways—inevitably more complicated—to measure whether we’re really changing the trajectory of program participants for the better. This is a critical consideration when it comes to questions of which programs should be scaled up. As Mr. Forti says “instead of fragmenting impact into measurable bites, we need to purpose measurement to create solid pathways to better, ultimate outcomes for those we serve.”