Happy Birthday, Accelerating Achievement!

This week, Accelerating Achievement turns one. According to What to Expect the First Year, we should have nail-trimming, sleep schedules, and solid foods all figured out. In addition to those milestones, we’ve had more than 100 posts ranging from explanations of how successful bridge programs work, to ways that data can be used to influence state policy, to an invitation for skeptics to change the way they think about developmental education. Forty-two of those were guest posts written by community college faculty, higher education researchers, workforce development experts, state policy leaders, and other friends from across the education sector. Over the next few days, we’re going to do some birthday reflecting, looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.


Our Talking About Dev Ed section features posts that explore the varied definitions and passionate opinions that can make conversations about developmental education tricky. In What's in a Name?, we introduced some developmental education messaging tools and general advice for discussing developmental education with any audience. The tools include talking points tailored to key audiences, an economic appeal for supporting the success of underprepared students, and a way to talk about the essential coordination of institutional innovation and state policy. You can find all of these docs in the Resources section of our website under “Communications.” As we move into an election year, there will—we hope!—be more meaningful dialogue about the connections among educational success, employment security, and civil society. These resources could be useful as you participate in these conversations.


In Tales of Technical Assistance, we turned the spotlight on our DEI colleges that are making taking advantage of expert consultation to overcome barriers to expanding effective programs. One success story on the continuous improvement loop came from El Paso Community College (EPCC), as recorded in What Do Students Really Think? EPCC invited Arleen Arnsparger, consultant for the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program, to come to campus and lead a workshop about creating student focus groups. “We’re all getting better at making decisions by looking at institutional data and survey data, rather than just anecdotal information,” says Arleen. “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.” El Paso has continued to incorporate students into their decision-making process and as peer mentors. You can see a recap of their DEI progress here.