This Just In!

Jobs for the Future published two briefs this week, highlighting how Florida is leading the way in college-readiness reform and improving outcomes for students who arrive at college unprepared for college-level coursework. From the JFF release:

Testing Ground
Florida is turning to a familiar tool of education reform—assessment—as a valuable lever to tackle the national imperative of improving college readiness. A new brief written by Pamela Burdman for Jobs for the Future (JFF)—Testing Ground—describes how Florida’s Division of Colleges worked with K-12 partners to design, plan, and launch an ambitious college-readiness agenda with a new college placement test as its centerpiece. By using data to create a sense of urgency and making faculty central players, Florida’s education system is well on its way to implementing major college-readiness reforms. Download Testing Ground.

High Flyers
Florida’s statewide developmental education policies also shed light on potential ways to improve the success of students who begin their college careers in developmental education. A case study produced by BTW Informing Change and published for the Developmental Education Initiative—High Flyers—uses a framework of five characteristics of high-performing colleges to analyze the colleges’ strategies and then explores how key developmental education policies influence institutional practice. Download High Flyers.

It’s great to see DEI states moving this work forward across their systems—and demonstrating how innovation can happen statewide!