Accelerating Achievement

Are We Riding the Wave of the Future?

2012-02-22T13:58:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of different ways that technology can influence classrooms, faculty, students, and campuses. In a Fast Company article last week, Michale Karnjanaprakorn presented a useful breakdown of the five buckets of technology innovation in education delivery:

Gadgets and blended learning: “Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime.”
Social learning and collaboration: “Teachers are using [new] platforms…to share content and lessons with each other online so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or keep content to themselves anymore.”
Open resources and classrooms: “Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever....”
Adaptive, personalized learning: “Teachers are figuring out how to teach each student the way he or she learns best, and assessment is viewed as an ongoing process, since learning is not a constant.”
Creative certification: “The more people are culling unassociated resources and experiences to learn specific skills, the more urgent it is for there to be a place for them to record their efforts and success, to study with peers, and to present their learning portfolios to future employers or partners in a meaningful way.”

Often in the higher ed reform world we debate the broad merits of “online education” or “technology use” without really specifying what we’re talking about. Thanks to CCRC research, we are confident that delivering underprepared students a full course through online lectures doesn’t work very well. But we’ve seen in DEI how powerful some uses of technology can be in dev ed. The North Carolina Community College System is collecting best practices in a searchable online innovations database, and a few DEI colleges are using technology to individualize instruction.

Karnjanaprakorn makes it all seem a little too simple, though. He doesn’t give much space to the major changes in infrastructure, policy, and practice that would be necessary to implement these in our current higher ed sector. (Of course, he may be suggesting a completely different structure for that system….) Still, institutions may be generally supportive of everything in those five buckets, but they must also consider the amount of capital required to do any of it well. There are also questions about whether (or how) bureaucratic systems can escape the “weight of history”, as Uri Treisman says, to make space for effective use of technology—and whether they can do it while ensuring equal access to technology for low-income students. Finally, one hopes there will be commitment—and capacity—to gather and make sense of the data required to see if this new technology actually achieves the results expected.

Since Karnjanaprakorn digresses into a reiteration of the “who needs college?” argument at the end of his article, we have to choice but to follow him there. We think college is the right choice for a lot of people, and we can tell you why in just one chart:

Click Image to Enlarge

Associate’s degree holders make almost $150 dollars more per week than people who don’t go to college, and their unemployment rate is 3 percentage points lower. Whatever means we end up using to deliver it, it’s clear that connecting people to education and credentials remains essential to their economic security.

This can save you money.

2012-02-15T12:52:00.002-05:00

Today’s post is our fourth installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating impact, and stimulating market forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)

Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. So far, we’ve covered staffing, communicating, and alliance-building. Below, Ginger Miller of Guilford Technical Community College shares what GTCC has learned about lobbying--or demonstrating impact, as we like to call it.

With a headcount enrollment of about 15,100 students, Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) is the third largest community college in North Carolina. Its developmental education program serves 4,780 students on three campuses. As with any developmental education program, the primary goal at GTCC is for students to take the fewest number of developmental education courses necessary and complete them as quickly as possible. Our focus here is to describe how COMPASS testing supports this goal. Reviewing and re-testing the COMPASS test can save you time and money. That is the message we emphasize to incoming students. As an example, if a student places out of two developmental classes in English, that translates into tuition savings for the credit hours as well as two semesters—a full academic year—of their time.

As part of the application process, students complete the COMPASS placement test. Among the biggest obstacles to accomplishing proper placement in development education classes is student misconception about the test itself. Students may confuse COMPASS as an entrance test, rather than a placement test. Since they know they are accepted by a community college, they may not do their best to score well. To address this, we emphasize during registration the importance of taking the review workshop and re-testing, depending on their score. They must complete a review workshop before they are permitted to re-test. This workshop, available online or face-to-face, reviews the question format and the content for the math, English, and reading sections of the test.

As a result of completing a review workshop, followed by a re-test, 1,288 students have tested out of one or more developmental classes from fall 2010 through fall 2011. This represents a total estimated tuition savings of about $370,600 during the past three semesters. The largest percentage of students to test out of developmental education coursework appears in English and reading. For three semesters between fall 2010 and fall 2011, an average of about 61 percent placed out of at least one developmental course in English. About 59 percent placed out of reading courses. In math, the results are lower, at about 33, 39, and 29 percent, for fall 2010, Spring 2011, and fall 2011.

At GTCC, the numbers of students to use these workshop reviews have increased from 981 students in fall 2010 to 1,241 students in fall 2011. The greatest increase has appeared in the online reviews, as compared to face-to-face workshops. For example, in fall 2011, 73 students attended the face-to-face reviews, compared to 1,168, who worked online. We also continue to reach out to local high schools, explaining the importance of the placement test; we have arranged for graduating seniors to take the test, the review workshop, and re-test again.

Links we like!

2012-02-03T13:35:00.001-05:00

A new study from CCCSE makes the case for mandatory requirements. Inside Higher Ed has the details: “Community colleges have a growing arsenal of tools that research shows will help students earn credentials—like academic goal-setting, student success courses and tutoring. Yet the study found that relatively few students take advantage of those offerings.”
Math is a huge barrier to completion for many students. An article from Joanne Jacobs in U.S. News & World Report tackles an important question: are we “overmathing” our students? Jacobs looks at Virginia’s decision to change math requirements for non-STEM students, and she highlights the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to redesign developmental math through Statway and Quantway.
“I would suggest that it is time to move from a deficit to an asset model of student success. From a model where we keep trying to ‘fix’ our students to one where we turn the mirror on ourselves and consider that we might have to fundamentally transform how we approach the role of math in preparing a competitive workforce.” Check out the full post from Luzelma Canales of the Lone Star College System in Texas.
Last week, we linked to a few articles on using technology to “flip” the classroom and individualize learning. A new post from Katie McKay on Digital Is reminds us that equal access to technology for students is increasingly important.
JFF’s response to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reaffirms the principle that “creating integrated, accelerated educational pathways directly tied to the skills needed by regional employers is the best road to success for those struggling to improve their lives.” That’s a statement we can all agree on!

From the Shadow of the Everlasting Cascades

2012-02-01T15:59:00.002-05:00

It's time for another ATD/DEI State Policy Team meeting. ATD and DEI state policy teams have come to Seattle, WA, for two days of working, learning, and recommitting. Even the introductions were impressive as state team leads described their most significant work since last July's meeting. From TAA grants that will align adult basic education, developmental education, and workforce training to statewide developmental education redesign, states continue to advance the student success agenda, building on the ATD/DEI foundation of data collection, innovation, and supportive policy. There are leaders from state higher education offices, boards of regents, community college associations, state legislatures, the business community, and philanthropy, all here to contribute to the conversation. By the end of the day tomorrow, we'll have covered scaling innovation, performance funding, a state role in acceleration strategies, and much more. Stay tuned for more updates and a full recap in the coming days.

Sir Linksalot

2012-01-27T12:32:00.000-05:00

Have you heard of flipped classrooms? Last week on CNN’s Schools of Thought blog, high school Principal Greg Green explained how his entire school has implemented the flipped class structure:
Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they’ve already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education.
According to Green, this new structure is really changing the student experience: “Our attendance rate has increased, our discipline rate decreased, and, most importantly, our failure rate—the number of students failing each class—has gone down significantly.” Inside Higher Ed covered a similar style of teaching at Central Michigan University. Would this structure work in a developmental education program?

Innovation requires creativity. But when we’re generating new ideas, whether for curriculum design, educational delivery, or strategies for scaling up, how do we identify the good ones? “Taking a break is important,” says the research, “but make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work.”

How can colleges help students identify credentials with labor-market value? Our friends at Jobs for the Future got a shout-out last week in The New York Times for their Credentials that Work initiative, “which uses new technology that scrapes information from online job postings and provides real-time labor market information.”

On Tuesday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hosted a webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The presentation slides and webinar recording are available on Carnegie’s website.

Diego Navarro, the founder of the Academy for College Excellence, is hosting an interactive webinar on “Supporting the Students of the Future: Retention of Vulnerable & Tentative Students.” You can register now for one of two upcoming sessions: February 29th at 12:30 pm Pacific Time, or March 23rd at 11:00 am Pacific Time.

SuccessNC

2012-01-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

Last week, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) was featured in the Atlantic Cities series “The Next Metro Economy.” Bruce Katz of Brookings Institution and Judith Rodin, of the Rockefeller Foundation, lifted up ten innovative efforts to shape the post(?)-recession economy, among them was the NCCCS initiative SuccessNC.

SuccessNC “is working with all 58 community colleges in the state to strengthen the college and career pathways available to North Carolina students, with the ultimate goal of doubling the number of students completing career credentials by 2020.” Katz and Rodin applaud NCCCS efforts to increase collaboration across the system, pointing to the system-wide listening tour conducted from February to October of 2010. (You can read a bit about how the tour fit into a broader state policy strategy in this Accelerating Achievement post.)

Leaders of the tour collected best practices from colleges as they went; those best practices are now housed in a searchable, online innovations database. You can search by college, by category (access, quality, success) or issue (from accreditation to developmental education to human resources and professional development.) NCCCS will continue to update the database with new promising practices from across the system.

We add our applause for NCCCS! It’s great to see DEI states receiving well-deserved national recognition for their efforts to increase student completion. What’s happening in your state that is worthy of celebration? We’d love to hear about it!

Many Happy Returns

2012-01-20T15:17:00.003-05:00

Today’s blog birthday post is brought to you by the letter S. We look back at Accelerating Achievement posts on two of our favorite topics: scaling and state policy.

In Scaling Up, we’ve been harvesting the latest thinking on scaling from the social innovation field, calling attention to tools and resources that can help colleges and states increase the impact of developmental education advancements. We’ve also highlight stories of colleges and states that have found ways to expand the reach of promising practices. The Joy of Scaling launched a seven-week series on 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. MDC adapted this model from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business for use in community colleges. An ongoing series is delving deeper into the individual SCALERS, seeing how they apply to supplemental instruction, self-paced courses, and faculty engagement.

Supportive state policy is an essential component in any institutional plan to expand innovation to more students. This year’s Statewise posts have followed DEI state policy teams, coordinated by Jobs For the Future, as they work within state community college systems and legislatures to change outdated rules, funding, and incentive structures that stand in the way of innovation. Michael Collins, associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at JFF, laid out the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy strategy in a three-part series. The first segment showed how collecting the right data can inform state policy to accelerate dev ed innovation across a system. Part two detailed how states are investing resources in that innovation. The final installment, our most read Statewise post, made the case for a continuous improvement cycle focused on strengthening policy supports.

Finding ways to bring what works to more students will remain a vital concern for higher education—and for Accelerating Achievement—as colleges and states continue to face increasing enrollments, diminishing resources, and intensifying pressure to move students to credentials more quickly and efficiently.

Birthday Wish: Equal Opportunity

2012-01-19T14:53:00.000-05:00

Today, Accelerating Achievement turns one. This week, we’re looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.

There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. All year, we’ve been highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas in DEI Dispatches. Our What’s Up with DEI series featured the work of all fifteen colleges and six states; one week last May, we brought you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion. We kicked off that week with The Ladder of Educational Opportunity, which reminded us that supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help ensure 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.

As Americans, we pride ourselves on being members of a society where equal opportunity offers everyone a chance at success. But mounting evidence suggests that children born into low-income families are not likely to ever improve their economic security. In a speech last Thursday, Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, illustrated the lack of social mobility in America:

Studies find that your parent’s income is a good predictor of your subsequent income. Studies that use income data averaged over longer periods of time for parents and children tend to find higher correlations between parental and children’s income. A reasonable summary is that the correlation between parents’ and their children’s income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents’ height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5’6” tall having a son who grows up to be over 6’1” tall. It happens, but not often.

Why is it that so few low-income young people are able to advance in America? The readers of this blog know from experience that our education system, the keystone of our society’s meritocracy, has fallen on hard times. The pipeline that carries students from childhood to postsecondary education and living-wage work is leaky, damaged, and archaic. A postsecondary credential is now more vital than ever for finding work, but the majority of students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared for college-level courses. Too many students who need developmental education never progress on to a credential. Dev ed practitioners and policy-makers know that as long as our dev ed programs allow so many students to stagnate, social mobility will remain low. Promising innovations all around the country are getting more students quickly through these programs and on to credit-bearing courses, but they need to be expanded and replicated. Transforming dev ed from a barrier and a burden for underprepared students to a stepping stone toward achievement will restore a crucial rung on the ladder of opportunity.

Every birthday girl needs a network

2012-01-18T16:37:00.001-05:00

We’re paging through our first year of Accelerating Achievement posts, pulling out some reader favorites and seeing what’s new. Today, we return to two posts from colleagues not directly associated with DEI, but from institutions that are committed to the same work. We’ve learned a lot this year from people throughout the community college sector and beyond.

Through In the News we’ve followed developmental education media coverage and spiced it up with conversation starters and a little analysis. In Take a Load Off, we recapped a great webinar from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning about the Foundation’s work on Statway and Quantway, two pathways to help take developmental math students “to and through” transferrable college math in one year. One big takeaway came from Uri Treisman:

“We need to sit back and not let the weight of history determine what we’re teaching. The weight of history plays too much of a role in these courses, more than our own best professional judgment, learning sciences, or the needs of the workforce.”

Both initiatives have made great strides in the last year; you can hear all about the progress during the Foundation’s upcoming January 24 webinar.

Innovation Highlight segments introduced colleges and states that are developing new strategies to get students through dev ed successfully. We’ve discussed learning communities, supplemental instruction, tutoring, acceleration and the data collection that undergirds any improvement.

One of the most popular posts came from Katie Hern at Chabot College. In Mobilizing Faculty toward Dramatic Curricular Change, Katie shared what she has learned about motivating individuals to take on the challenge of accelerated developmental education courses as an English instructor and lead of the California Acceleration Project. Hearing from faculty at different colleges, teaching in different disciplines and different modalities has been one of our favorite parts of this last year of blogging!

Happy Birthday, Accelerating Achievement!

2012-01-17T16:12:00.002-05:00

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.

Lucky Links

2012-01-13T14:49:00.001-05:00

It may be Friday the 13th, but here's your links equivalent of a rabbit's foot:

Webinar fun! Boosting College Completion for a New Economy, an initiative of the Education Commission of the States, is hosting a webinar next week, looking at state legislative policy and funding trends. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, January 25 from 1-2pm ET. You can register here.
The application period for the third wave of Next Generation Learning Challenges funding for blended learning models is open until June 8, 2012. There are two separate requests for proposals, one directed at secondary grantees (Breakthrough School Models for College Readiness) and one for postsecondary grantees (Breakthrough Models for College Completion). You can check out the details here.
And while we’re talking about blended learning, you should check out Bill Tucker’s Ed Sector commentary on a new Fordham policy piece, The Costs of Online Learning. Tucker encourages advocates on all sides of this issue to dig deeper into the economics of online learning while they’re looking at student learning outcomes. (For more related reading, link to this Community College Resource Center brief about online delivery of developmental education.)

Happy New Links!

2012-01-06T11:19:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Data Notes, Achieving the Dream’s bimonthly data newsletter, identifies early predictors of student success: “The findings indicate that, in general, students who complete 20 or more credits during the first academic year have better long-term outcomes.” Many students who do not complete 20 or more credits during their first year are enrolled in non-credit-bearing developmental education courses. As we learned from a previous issue of Data Notes, “Students who are placed into developmental education coursework are more likely to struggle academically and are at a greater risk of stopping out or dropping out of college.”
A Hechinger Report article from last week describes Ohio’s decision to phase-out funding for remedial courses at four-year schools: “Some experts worry that this shift will discriminate against students from low-performing high schools in poor areas, pushing more students away from universities and into already-overburdened community colleges.” Is Ohio’s decision a smart way to allocate resources, or will it damage the state's pathway to educational opportunity? What do you think, readers?
According to a recent post on Community College Spotlight, the California Community College’s Student Success Task Force is recommending that colleges encourage students to enroll in a non-credit student success course. As demonstrated by Chaffey’s program for probationary students (which we’ve featured previously), student success courses can improve student outcomes when paired with other student supports.

Guest Post: Modeling Accountability

2012-01-04T09:15:00.000-05:00

When you’re expanding a new initiative, it can be difficult to build new responsibilities into the already complicated and busy lives of faculty. Below, Lisa Dresdner, director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Norwalk Community College, shares her advice on how to encourage accountability.

Rarely does the dog eat homework anymore; instead, the printer is out of ink or the computer crashes. Sometimes it’s a court date or a car accident that prevents a student from handing in her homework, or a student has to take his little brother or mother to [fill in the blank] and missed class. We’ve all heard the excuses, and we all have sympathy for our students’ complex and challenging lives. However, we also insist on holding our students accountable: We have carefully laid out our expectations for assignments, participation, and attendance in our syllabi; we have offered extra help to accommodate their various needs; and we have continually emphasized the requirements for successful completion of our courses.

Interestingly, this same need for accountability occurs in adult behavior: “I’m exhausted/overworked/overwhelmed with [fill in the project] and haven’t been able to get to [fill in your requirements].” Sound familiar? The truth is, everyone’s lives are complicated; as faculty, shouldn’t we model what we want our students to do? How then do we encourage accountability among faculty? Over the last two years of scaling up our learning communities with our DEI grant, we’ve found that three basic steps need to be taken.

Establish expectations early: Just as a syllabus establishes a contract at the beginning of a semester between the instructor and the students, a written outline of responsibilities and due dates at the beginning of a project or initiative serves as an agreement among faculty. The fulfillment of these requirements is often tied to an incentive of some type. Two elements of this agreement are key: First, the requirements should be presented both orally and in written form, allowing for discussions and questions about why the various tasks are necessary; and second, the participants should sign the sheet confirming their agreement to be responsible.

At Norwalk Community College, we have a Learning Community (LC) leadership team consisting of the dean of academic affairs, the DEI project director, and the chairs/directors of the departments pairing classes in the LCs. This team outlines the kinds of tasks we want LC faculty to complete:

create three integrative learning assignments
meet regularly to discuss the students and the course
write two narratives reflecting on specific questions—an individual report mid-semester and a group report at the end of the semester.

In different semesters, we have asked faculty to attend professional development activities that connect to the type of work we are emphasizing in our LCs.

Because faculty know these tasks are requested by a team, rather than by “administration,” they are often more receptive to them. Additionally, we use the grant requirements to encourage individual responsibility; that is, we explain how grant funding requires accountability in both gathering and reporting data and other information. In a sense, the grant helps to create an accountability pathway that we are institutionalizing. We let potential instructors know their responsibilities prior to their agreeing to participate in an LC, and then we go over the “contract” again during an interactive workshop where they begin creating their assignments together. They all know that receiving their stipend is contingent on fulfilling their obligations.

Follow up and feedback: Since each responsibility comes with a due date, the project leader may need to prompt the faculty throughout the semester. A quick e-mail reminder to the whole group works well, and this can be followed – if necessary – by more personalized e-mails or phone calls to individuals who are excessively late. As requirements are met, feedback is crucial! Not only must we acknowledge fulfillment of a responsibility, but we should also comment to emphasize that the participants and their work are valued. Additionally, as the point person, you are in a position to respond to questions or challenges to help faculty navigate their role in the project and to highlight shared struggles and triumphs.

One of the advantages we’ve found is that by requiring faculty to submit their integrative learning assignments, we’ve built a bank of resources faculty can use in subsequent semesters. This shared resource generates further collaboration as instructors find ways to tweak and revise an assignment.

Celebrate: Faculty almost always like to celebrate with food and talk. The food and drink may cost a little money, but the opportunity to gather over refreshments and share their experiences is priceless. Reflecting as a group on the semester, especially with some focused questions, also provides feedback to you on the whole project. If this celebration occurs after the final reports or responsibilities are completed, you might share your analysis of the commonalities and differences you discovered. In past semesters, we have written a summary of what faculty have expressed and circulated it as a draft, asking for issues we may have missed. What faculty gain from this experience, besides camaraderie and an increased understanding of the project’s purpose and its value, is the knowledge that their voices are heard. Really, in the end, being heard and valued strengthens the accountability pathway for all of us.

Lisa Dresdner is director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Norwalk Community College.

Mark Your Calendars!

2011-12-21T14:32:00.001-05:00

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is hosting another free webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern. Here’s a description of the webinar from their website:

During the broadcast, the presenters will:
Provide an update on what students and faculty members are experiencing with these new pathways.
Explain how faculty and others have and can contribute to the development of the materials for these pathways.
Outline how Carnegie integrates "Productive Persistence" into developmental math courses.
Reveal how analytics is being used to inform future development.
Give details on how to get involved with this work in the future.

You can register here.

Guest Post: Understanding and Reconciling the Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Programming

2011-12-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Much developmental education research today focuses on which cog needs the most grease; in other words, how do we fix a system that everyone seems to agree is broken? In a developmental education working paper published by the Community College Research Center in November 2011, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Michelle Hodara take a different tack. In this description of a case study of the City University of New York’s six community colleges, they ask why the system is broken and propose a framework that can help institutions answer that fundamental question. Below, Shanna Smith Jaggers introduces the study and the new framework.

Those who attempt innovation in developmental education often find our efforts thwarted by administration or faculty who seem dead-set against change. Too often, we dismiss our detractors’ objections as springing from short-sightedness, or worse, sheer obstinacy. Yet if we do not make the effort to understand and validate the real (and often positive) motivations of the opposite camp, we are unlikely to make any progress. Based on a recent case study of a large urban community college system, Michelle Hodara and I have developed an “opposing forces framework” that may help innovators understand the conflicting motivations that shape developmental education. In today’s post, I want to focus on one key set of opposing forces: support of student progression versus enforcement of academic standards.

Nationwide, faculty and administrators all want to support students to succeed. Evidence is mounting that accelerated strategies (such as shortening sequences, or mainstreaming developmental students with additional supports) can help do this. While accelerated strategies vary, many of them are based on the fact that placement exams are notoriously imprecise in their assessments of students’ capabilities; such acceleration strategies work by allowing students to “place upward” -- tackling more difficult work than the placement exam would suggest that they should. And indeed, while some students will falter and fail in this more difficult environment, on the whole, upward-placement methods allow more students to enter and successfully complete gatekeeper math and English courses than would be possible under the traditional sequence.

Why would anyone oppose such a strategy? It allows far more students to succeed in the long term, and at a lower cost to both the institution and the student. To put the problem into perspective, however, consider the fact that upward-placement methods are fundamentally equivalent to lowering your institution’s placement cut score -- and then imagine how people would feel about that. In our case study, although all faculty were passionate about student success, they were also universally uncomfortable with the notion of cut score decreases, based on three types of worries. The first worry is that the school would be perceived as having poor academic quality. The second is that introductory college-level courses would be harder to teach due to wide variation in student preparedness. Strongly related to that is the third worry: that a flood of less-prepared students would give faculty the uncomfortable choice of either failing more students or relaxing their standards. All three worries reflect the generalized fear that teaching quality, grading rigor, and academic standards would decline at the college -- in ways that would fail students, exhaust faculty, and disappoint the community. Viewed in that light, acceleration strategies could be understood as an existential threat to hardworking and committed faculty across the campus. Who can blame them, then, for opposing your work?

Overall, our case study illustrated that everyone involved in developmental education is passionately committed to the greater good, but they tend to fall on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they think should be done to advance the greater good. I think this study has convinced us that it may be impossible to fix developmental education unless administrators and faculty sit down and candidly talk with one another, in a context that allows people to bring some of these fears out into the open and work through them. If these conversations happen, then colleges can work out strategies to support progression while at the same time enforcing standards. For example, to ensure high standards in accelerated developmental courses and introductory college-level courses, faculty could work together to develop common learning outcomes across sections of each course, collaboratively creating standards that are meaningful, clearly defined, and maintained at a high level. If faculty are having trouble getting their students to meet the defined learning outcomes, there would be more clear information about exactly where students are struggling, and which teachers have materials and techniques that seem more helpful in certain areas. And rather than punishing faculty who have low pass rates or pressuring them to increase their pass rates, departments could support faculty to experiment and learn together about strategies that seem to be effective with struggling students.

In our case study, we discuss the tension between progression and standards in more detail, as well as two additional tensions (centralization vs. autonomy, and efficient vs. effective assessment). For more details and recommendations, I encourage you to take a look at our report: The Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Education: Assessment, Placement, and Progression at CUNY Community Colleges.

Guest Post: Allied Forces

2011-12-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

Today’s post is our third installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating impact, and stimulating market forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)

Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. So far, we’ve covered staffing and communicating. Below, Nick Bekas of Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, shares what he’s learned about successful alliance-building over the years.

Ten years ago, we had an initiative at Valencia focused on developmental math. It failed. However, it did not fail because of its ineffectiveness in improving student learning. It failed because of people, and no one person could be blamed. It was really an organizational failure. I watched from the sidelines as a promising initiative that showed real learning gains for students unraveled because the key players never developed working relationships. (Note: Watching from the sidelines makes you part of the failure. Had I stepped on the field and tripped someone, I might have made a difference.) One would think that professors who are committed to learning could put aside philosophical differences or perceived slights for the sake of improving student learning. This one failure taught me a very important lesson about the importance of building alliances. All relationships are personal even if they are professional. In my checkered past at Valencia directing a variety of initiatives both successful and not so successful, here is what I have learned about building alliances.

1. Find the acid drippers.
We use this term for people at our institution who will criticize everything even if they proposed it. By seeking their advice and participation, I head off issues down the road. This is not to say that we will agree on the direction and scope of the project or that they will actively participate, but it does make them part of the conversation and validates their voice. I don’t try and convert them; I listen to them, hear what they have to say, and tell them how they can help. If they choose not to, it’s on them, but at least I tried. I have found that I get less interference and more cooperation even though it is mostly passive. And maybe on the next project, they will participate.

2. Engage people on the ideas, not just the process or the product.
If I want an initiative to get off the ground, I don’t talk just about the initiative. I focus on the ideas informing the initiative and get people to have conversation about the ideas. When you give someone a finished product and ask them to comment on it, you have already divested them from it. Educational initiatives are not new products; you are not showing them the latest version of a Snickers bar and asking for comment. You are asking their opinion on something they are experts on, so they want to be part of the process, not just the product. Ideas excite people.

3. Build on natural alliances.
You have to know your institution and your people. Find people of like mind and purpose and put them at the core of your work. I am not advocating for a “clone” army, but for a group of people who are philosophically aligned with the goals of your project. This group should be the “true believers” who help you shape the scope and direction of your work. You can then use them as “subversive” agents to help build support for your project. The director of a project or the lead on a project is often at a disadvantage when it comes to getting buy-in simply because he or she is the face of the project and not a person. I am not “Nick” but DEI. However, someone else talking about DEI is perceived differently and may get more of a response. A project director is perceived as having an agenda, which is true, but sometimes this perception precludes engagement with different groups, especially if it is not immediately clear how the goals of the initiative align with their everyday work.

4. Tap the “newbies” and “oldies.”
New faculty are always willing to participate and bring fresh ideas to the game. They see things through a different lens because they have not been part of the organization long enough to have been assimilated into its culture. They are also willing to be “exploited” for a small stipend and food because they are excited to be part of something, and if they are adjuncts, they need the small stipend and food. Also, veteran faculty are sometimes not involved because they are not asked to be. You can’t assume that they just don’t want to participate because they don’t respond to an all call. You have to give a personal invitation and tell them why you need their experience and expertise.

5. Be persistent and consistent.
I learned this from my kids. It applies to other forms of life as well. People crave consistency and reward persistence. I don’t stalk, but I do suddenly show up at an office to say, “Hi.” You have to work at building relationships, and you have to be consistent in your message. This is the only way to change behaviors and to get wider participation. I have failed at this with my kids up to this point, but I have been pretty good with my colleagues.

Nick Bekas is DEI project director and professor of English at Valencia College.

Guest Post: We're Getting the Band Back Together!

2011-12-09T14:17:00.001-05:00

The Developmental Education Initiative is all about sharing good ideas and successful practices so that more states, colleges, and students can take advantage of what’s working. There are many ways to do this across a campus, a system, or the entire community college sector. One example comes from Houston Community College (HCC). Last month, HCC held a conference that brought together developmental educators and national experts to focus on accelerating progress across the state. Below, Maria Strauss, director of instructional initiatives at HCC, recaps the conference.

Houston Community College hosted our third statewide developmental education conference, “Texas takes Developmental Education by the Horns” on November 18, with almost 200 participants from 18 Texas community colleges. The focus and theme of the conference was “Accelerating Achievement” [Great name! --Eds.]. Participants were organized according to their teaching fields and areas of specialization as we listened to speakers and enjoyed guided “table talk” during a working lunch.

Our first speaker, Joe Cuseo addressed academic advising and first-time-in college students’ need for college knowledge. Cuseo compared colleges with hospitals to illustrate the necessity of continued commitment to developmental education: if hospitals only admitted healthy patients their success rates would be great, and if colleges only admitted college-ready students the need for developmental education would be extinct; but with over 60 percent of community college students in need of some form of remediation, we must find ways to remediate them and make them college ready.

Hunter Boylan was our second speaker; Boylan reviewed the research on the best and promising practices for developmental programs. He was a strong advocate for improving students’ knowledge of assessment tests and their consequences on placement. He recommended making refresher courses available before giving students placement tests. He also argued for the new model of reducing the number of developmental courses and combining developmental English with reading courses. He suggested that colleges develop more 5-to-8 week refresher courses, provide intensive short-term open-entry/open-exit courses, and pair college-level courses with study strategies courses focusing on content.

We also heard from Karen Graham and Linda Thompson who are the current review coordinators for the National Association for Developmental Education (NADE). They discussed the accreditation principles of NADE certification and encouraged all participating colleges at the conference to consider going through the process.

We concluded the conference with Cynthia Ferrell, the director of the Texas Developmental Education Initiative state policy team. Ferrell brought information from Austin about what is ahead for our state. For example, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is considering adopting one assessment test for the entire state to determine college placement. She also announced several leadership groups across the state that will be looking at developmental education redesign and making recommendations for state-wide strategies.

Everyone had the opportunity to interact with likeminded colleagues and share promising practices. After every presentation we had a question and answer session so participants could pose questions to the presenters. We all learned and reflected on our work with developmental students. We are already planning our fourth statewide conference for the spring of 2012!

Guest Post: The Benefit Bank Helps Community College Students Claim Work Supports

2011-12-07T16:16:00.001-05:00

We’ve looked before at different ways to help students build a safety net that enables them to meet school obligations as well as personal, family, and work obligations, including financial counseling and financial literacy instruction. Today’s post from Michael Schultz, MDC VISTA, details another MDC initiative that helps connect individuals to available financial supports that could make the difference between a completed semester or an early withdrawal.

Consider this: an estimated $70 billion in work supports goes unclaimed by eligible households in the United States each year. Unbelievable, right? Community college students are often eligible for federal work supports beyond financial aid, yet lack of knowledge and barriers to access result in federally apportioned dollars going unclaimed.

Most notably, many community college students may be eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. In order to be eligible for SNAP, full-time college students between the ages of 18-49 must meet at least one of the following criteria:

They work at least 20 hours a week
They work any number of hours in a federal or state work study program
They are a married parent with at least one dependent under the age of 6
They are a single parent with at least one dependent under the age of 12

Students must also meet the program’s income and asset limits that vary from state to state in terms of definitions, exemptions, and deductions.

Another work support likely available to community college students is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Available to anyone who earns income during the year, the EITC is fully refundable, meaning even households that owe no taxes can still receive the EITC as part of their refund. The greatest benefit is to households with children. The maximum credit for a household with one child is $3,094, with two children it is $5,112; with three or more children, it is $5,751. Households without children are also eligible: a single person without children, over the age of 25, and earning roughly between $6,000 and $7,500 is estimated to receive the maximum $464 tax credit. The IRS estimates that as many as 1 in 5 eligible households fail to claim the EITC. This population almost certainly includes many community college students who don’t realize they are eligible. (Check out the EITC Carolinas website, an MDC initiative, for more information.)

MDC’s Works Supports Initiative seeks to connect eligible populations, like community college students, to the federal and state benefits for which they are eligible. This national initiative uses an online service called The Benefit Bank^® (TBB) in partnership with community and faith-based organizations to help clients fill out benefit applications, e-file taxes, and complete the FAFSA. The Benefit Bank allows individuals to complete multiple applications in a user-friendly format with simple prompts and gateway questions that determine when more information is required. With TBB, a client can receive help filling out benefit or tax forms at a familiar community organization with the trusted assistance of a counselor. With confidence, knowledge of the application process, and the proper forms in hand, TBB helps to make it easier to connect low- and middle-income households to work supports.

Benefit applications can currently be completed using The Benefit Bank in ten states: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Federal benefits are accessed through state agencies with states having flexibility to shape their state’s version of the program. Thus, to complete benefits applications, TBB requires partnerships with the appropriate state agencies. Affiliate partners in each state help to build the necessary partnerships with state agencies and with the community organizations whose trained counselors use TBB to serve their clients. To receive benefits, the completed applications must be accepted by the proper state agencies that then determine eligibility, including checking the paperwork and identification.

Of immediate use in all states is TBB’s Quick Check feature, a one-minute benefit screener that estimates the likelihood of eligibility for a range of benefits. Also available in all states is TBB Self Serve, a free e-File service for federal taxes paired with a FAFSA application. The key strength of TBB is its ability to take the proper information from one form and pre-populate another benefit form. For example, after completing taxes using TBB, a significant portion of the tax information on the FAFSA will already be filled in when a user completes the application. This “bundling” saves time and is kept secure within each client’s individual password-protected portal.

In a time when community college students are hard pressed to make ends meet, connecting students with financial aid and works supports can help students stay in school. The Benefit Bank makes connecting students to works supports like SNAP and the EITC that much easier.

Michael Schultz is an AmeriCorps VISTA at MDC.

Guest Post: Coordinating State Policy for Completion

2011-12-06T14:28:00.001-05:00

Facilitate the identification and removal of barriers to innovation
Secure new policies that make it easier to implement new models
Establish incentives to serve students that are academically underprepared

Remove policy barriers
Community college completion rates can be improved by a coordinated effort to identify policy barriers to developmental education innovation. The North Carolina Community College System, for example, implemented a listening tour of the system’s 58 colleges to identify policy barriers to innovation. Interestingly, it turns out that state policies did not constrain innovation as much as the colleges thought. Often, policy barriers that colleges thought were state-level were actually college-level policies or rules. Being clear on perceived and real barriers to innovation is critical to improving completion.

Secure new policies
Sometimes new policies can clear the path to innovation. In Texas, for instance, until recently, community colleges were required to provide developmental education through semester-length courses. This requirement presented a barrier to colleges that wanted to implement interventions that were not course-based, such as open-entry/open-exit models, advising, or tutoring. New legislation changes that. A bill was passed that allows community colleges to submit non-course-based developmental education interventions for funding, allowing the colleges to design more nimble and targeted interventions.

Establish Incentives
Incentives can keep community colleges focused on serving students who are academically underprepared. Momentum points-type models, such as the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Student Achievement Initiative, provide financial rewards to colleges that successfully move students to and through key milestones, including basic skills and developmental education. These performance-incentive models are worth watching. Preliminary results suggest that the process and consensus on desired outcomes is as important—maybe even more important—than the money.

Continuous Improvement
Ultimately, policy supports are about continuous improvement. Policy supports, properly leveraged, can assist colleges’ efforts to design newer, faster, and better ways to ensure that developmental education students get the support they need to earn credentials and degrees that provide family-supporting wages, and not only survive in today’s economy, but thrive.

Michael Collins is associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future.

Fa-La-La-Links!

2011-12-01T14:27:00.001-05:00

It’s December 1 (not sure how that happened) and there are already radio stations playing holiday music 24-hours a day. Here’s a few interesting pieces to help you forget that year-end is right around the corner and that you’ve already heard “Jingle Bell Rock” nine times too many.

The student loan landscape is a tricky one. Take everything you qualify for? Take as little as you can? What’s the right amount? Joanne Jacobs at Community College Spotlight comment s on the rock and hard place where students find themselves: those that are debt averse may reduce the likelihood of graduating, but many who borrow and never graduate won’t be able to pay back their loans. Jacobs’ answer is providing students with financial literacy training that helps them balance reasonable debt against future incomes.
Today, Inside Higher Ed has a great overview of the American Association of Community College’s (AACC) new Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) standards. AACC is lifting VFA up to the field as rigorous and fair measures of what works at community colleges. You can download the vetted and pilot-tested Metrics Manual here.
Today’s Inside Higher Ed also included a counterpoint to the call for standardize success measures. Susan Bernadzikowski and Jennifer Levi, faculty at Cecil College, argue that such standards ignore the success of students who take much longer to graduate, but who are doggedly determined and do complete. We’d like to know what you think about how colleges can accelerate students’ progress through developmental education, without punishing those who, out of necessity, go at a slower pace. Bernadzikowki and Levi would like to hear from the students, faculty, and anyone else on the college front lines about what’s missing from the completion agenda discussion. They’re collecting them at Stories from Higher Ed—get your 200-300 words in by December 30 and you could be included in their book.
This EdWeek blog post might suggest a new topic for student success courses: sleep management tips, because not enough sleep can decrease academic performance and increase the chance of car accidents, illness, depression, and anxiety. Lesson #1: put your phone on silent when you are sleeping.

Gobble Gobble

2011-11-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

This Thanksgiving, we're thankful for evidence-based practices:

Click Image to Enlarge

Enjoy the holiday!

Linkums!

2011-11-18T15:30:00.001-05:00

On Monday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published an update on their Pathways work. There are 1,200 students enrolled in 60 sections of Statway™ across the country, and Quantway goes live in classroom beginning in January. Early student focus group results show that Statway™ is transforming the student experience.
… We actually read an article about how we can learn math, in the statistics class—like how to grow your brain and stuff like that. … It kind of gave me hope. It was something that we did at the beginning of this quarter. … I was like, ‘Okay, I can grow my brain.'

The November issue of AAC&U News features Queensborough Community College’s Freshman Academies, a new enrollment strategy that integrates academics and student affairs to ensure new students get plenty of individual advising and attention.

This week, EdWeek ran an article about overhauling the GED to make it a more effective pathway to postsecondary education. Another EdWeek article this week focused on how Kentucky is using data systems to align K-12 with postsecondary.

Jack Rotman blogged over the weekend about his session at the AMATYC conference on the New Life Project, complete with slides comparing the New Life curriculum with the math emporium model.
CNN has a new education blog.
From pre-kindergarten through college, for parents, teachers, students—and anyone who has ever been a student—Schools of Thought offers food for thought in the national conversation on education.
Join the conversation and make sure they include community colleges and developmental education in the mix!
Earlier this month, The Quick & the Ed blogged about California’s priority registration proposal. (And they included a clip from Community, which makes it an A+ post for some folks around here.)

Guest Post: Getting the Message Right

2011-11-16T10:00:00.005-05:00

It’s time for the second installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)

Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. Last month, we looked at staffing. Today, Becky Samberg of Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT, shows what HCC is learning about how changing the message can change behavior.

Remember playing the childhood game of telephone? As the message was whispered from one child’s ear to another, one thing was certain: the game always ended with peals of laughter when the message whispered by the first child never was the same message repeated by the last in the chain. From this childhood game, we learn a very valuable lesson: communication needs to be deliberate and precise.

In our DEI work, we strive to be deliberate and precise in communicating with our HCC community about the initiatives on which we are working. Over the last year, however, lower-than-expected success rates in self-paced courses led us to change how we communicate to our students the nature of the self-paced program and the unique expectations of students enrolled in these courses.

Our self-paced program began in 2007 with developmental math courses. Originally, students could enroll in self-paced math courses—what we then called “Open Entry/Open Exit”—at any time in the semester and exit whenever they finished the course. Students also could start the next course in the same semester. We learned, however, that “Open Entry/Open Exit” was a misnomer. Students were not accelerating as quickly or as successfully as we anticipated, and students’ financial aid obligations and status as a full- or part-time impeded their ability to move from one course to the next during a semester. As we considered these challenges, we concluded that the individualized instructional format and our expectations of students in these courses were not made explicit by the Open Entry/Open Exit title, so we made the following changes:

We adopted the name “Self-Paced,” emphasizing the focus on individualized mathematics and English instruction. This new course name more explicitly communicates that students enrolling in these courses will have individualized instruction at a self-determined pace.
We defined our expectations of students and developed an orientation so students hear a consistent message from their instructors and the Self-Paced studies lab coordinator, who conducts the in-class orientation and oversees students’ visits to the lab.
We made lab visits mandatory, deliberately delivering the message that self-paced does not mean no pace, and regular engagement with the course material is essential to student success.
We re-designed the courses, communicating to students their obligation to make consistent progress throughout the semester and establishing the expectation that students work toward the goal of successfully completing the course within or in less than a traditional semester.
We created a schedule for completing the self-paced courses in a single semester, sharing it with students, and embedding it in the course software. Students are told the pace at which they need to work and the benchmarks they need to reach to successfully complete the course in one semester.

Moving forward, we hope that the changes we have made will increase student success in our self-paced courses. In changing the course title to better communicate the nature of the course and in deliberately and precisely communicating class policies and our expectations of students, we hope to avoid the inevitable outcome of a game of telephone.

Becky Samberg is the chair of developmental studies and DEI director at Housatonic Community College.

A Little of This; A Little of That

2011-11-10T15:01:00.000-05:00

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Higher Education (ISKME) is offering scholarships for their 2011 Big Ideas Fest. The conference is scheduled for December 4-7 in Half Moon Bay, California. The website describes the event as “a unique three-day immersion into collaboration and design with a focus on modeling cutting-edge thinking in K-20 education.” Last year, there were a few DEI folks in the house; Kathleen Cleary from Sinclair Community College described some of her experiences here on the DEI blog.

Registration for the conference is $695 (not including hotel and travel), but ISKME scholarships can cover some or all of that amount. Applications are due next Tuesday, November 15. You can link to the scholarship form here. ISKME encourages faculty, staff, and students to apply.

***

We’ve featured the Chaffey College Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program a couple of times on Accelerating Achievement. ODE is a program designed to help probationary students get back in good standing and increase their chances for college success. This month, MDRC released four-year findings from their study of the program. While we were particularly interested in how Chaffey had scaled the program to reach their entire target population, now you can read more about program outcomes and cost-effectiveness. You can link to the full report here.

***

Last week, Bruce Vandal from ECS and Brad Phillips of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change commented on the importance of aligning K-12 and postsecondary education at the state-level, especially as states tackle common core standards implementation. You can read a little more about—and link to—their Education Week article here on the Getting Past Go blog.

Guest Post: Making Space for Good Decisions

2011-11-03T10:00:00.001-04:00

Rob Johnstone made a presentation at the July ATD/DEI State Policy meeting in Florida; we thought Rob’s work with the RP Group, and specifically a project called BRIC (Bridging Research, Information & Culture), would be of interest to the Accelerating Achievement crowd, so we asked him to guest post today. Below, Rob reflects on the importance of carving out time for crucial exploratory conversations—and introduces some tools to help you do the same.

Greetings from sunny California, where I sit in my office at Skyline College just south of San Francisco, with what the hotel industry would term a “partial ocean view.” This means, on the 45 days a year it’s not shrouded in fog, if I squint, I can see a sliver of blue between some trees.

The RP Group is a nonprofit organization that strengthens community colleges’ ability to gather, analyze, and act on information to improve student success. We provide research, evaluation, professional development, and technical assistance services that support evidence-based decision-making and inquiry. Because our work is defined and conducted by community college practitioners, the RP Group provides a unique, on-the ground perspective on complex issues within the California community college system, and, through our work on Completion by Design and the Aspen Prize, across the country.

The unifying thread is a desire to engage all of the groups working on a campus—faculty, staff, administrators, and IR professionals—in developing deep cultures of inquiry that serve as the foundation for improving student outcomes. We define “culture of inquiry” as the institutional capacity to support open, honest, and collaborative dialogue that strengthens the institution and student outcomes. In practice, this means we encourage a variety of people across the campus to ask a wider collection of questions, and then use the evidence gathered to inform campus decision-making.

As I reflect on these projects, I’m struck both by the similarities in the issues we face and the vast array of structures and approaches colleges have put in place to address these issues. The problems we wrestle with in the community college sector are complex and challenging, and there are no silver bullets (at least none that we’ve found!). The analyses we conduct don’t speak for themselves, and there are no self-evident answers. Given this, the strongest take-away from our work is how critical it is to structurally create the time and space for deep conversations, to explore the available data and evidence, and to extract insight and meaning that forms the foundation for action. These conversations work best when a wide range of participants from different parts of the college are brought to the table to explore the data.

As important as it is, in our work, we’ve found that creating that time and space for critical inquiry and data exploration conversations is challenging. Colleges are already strapped for their most precious resource—time!—and creating yet another committee for this work can be difficult. We’ve seen colleges be more successful when they re-purpose existing venues for these types of discussions, such as department and division meetings; committees devoted to developmental education, college success, first-year experience, or institutional planning; academic senates, and even the President’s cabinet.

In each of these venues, we’ve found that many participants actually welcome the shift, as these meetings tend to be bureaucratic and process-driven; re-focusing on research, evidence of student success, and outcomes is often energizing and engages the participants’ passion. This also has the benefit of weaving the work into the fiber of the college, rather than encapsulating it in one committee. Clearly, college leadership has to prioritize the importance of such a change in these meetings or committees, but we have seen it work in practice.

For ideas on the kinds of questions to ask and ways to translate the answers into decisions, take a look at some of the resources we’ve put together on our website. I’d start with the BRIC Inquiry Guides or the “Evidenced-based Decision-making” section of our resources page. Colleges have used the discussion questions from the Inquiry Guides in department meetings and other campus committees to start conversations that open the door to future inquiry into practices, structures, and student success data.

In the end, we have to translate the results of our collective inquiry into action. The type of research and inquiry in which we engage is directional. At some point, in the words of Elphaba from the musical Wicked, we have to “trust our instincts, close our eyes, and leap.” In our world, “instinct” refers to the collective and deep subject-matter expertise that we have amassed at the colleges, married with a deep process of inquiry into the data and evidence. In taking the leap, we add to our collective knowledge-base—and quite often, we learn more when our initiatives relatively fail than when they succeed.

Please feel free to contact me directly at rjohnstone@rpgroup.org with any comments or questions.

Rob Johnstone is senior research fellow, Research & Planning Group for California Community Colleges and dean of research and planning, Skyline College

Adding It Up

2011-11-01T14:57:00.001-04:00

In yesterday’s Community College Week, Paul Bradley’s cover story was all about developmental math. Bradley highlights a number of Achieving the Dream colleges that are working hard to solve the developmental math puzzle—and seeing promising results. Of particular interest is the description of the Montgomery County Community College redesign of the lowest-level developmental math course curriculum. Rather than the traditional topical approach to arithmetic instruction, MCCC’s new course, “Concepts of Numbers,” begins with an introduction to the history of math; students then focus more on understanding concepts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), rather than memorizing and doing drills (the dreaded “plug and chug!”) Students solve problems together—and they’re succeeding at much higher rates. In spring 2010, seven faculty taught the new course; their students’ success rate was 60 percent, compared with 40 percent in the traditional course. This year at MCCC all introductory courses are using the new curriculum. While there are still challenges, like aligning the new curriculum with subsequent courses, it looks like this new approach to instruction is going to stick at MCCC.

Guest Post: The Michigan Center for Student Success--Accelerating Innovation

2011-10-28T16:05:00.000-04:00

Today, it’s all about state policy connections. Chris Baldwin, executive director of the Michigan Center for Student Success, describes how statewide approaches can work—even in decentralized systems.

Mounting evidence leaves little doubt that a postsecondary credential will be a prerequisite for a majority of jobs in the future. Policymakers, experts, and foundations across the country are responding with calls to dramatically increase educational attainment. Michigan is not immune from these pressures and community colleges across the state have responded by intensifying efforts to improve student outcomes through initiatives like Achieving the Dream. The challenge, given the decentralized nature of higher education in Michigan, has been that college innovations often occur in isolation leaving each college to re-invent the wheel with limited or no support.

To address this disconnect and provide greater opportunities for colleges to collaborate, the Michigan Community College Association established the Center for Student Success through a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation. This Center provides state-level support to Michigan’s 28 community colleges by serving as a hub connecting leaders, administrators, faculty, and staff in their emerging and ongoing efforts to improve student outcomes. By deliberately linking practice, research, and policy the Center will help to shorten the time it takes colleges to implement practices that work. Center activities are guided by four overarching goals:

To enhance existing and establish new student success communities of practice through the regular exchange of information at convenings and professional development opportunities
To promote innovation and continuous improvement through the appropriate collection and use of data and performance metrics
To develop a sustained student-success research agenda based on the needs of Michigan community colleges and key issues correlated with improved student outcomes
To identify areas where collective, state-level policy action is warranted to enhance collaborative college efforts to innovate toward improved student outcomes

The Michigan Center for Student Success is an emerging model for other states to consider. By connecting college practitioners around effective practices, supporting colleges’ efforts to share data with key faculty and staff, establishing a robust statewide student success research agenda, and identifying crucial issues to advance as a student success policy agenda, this new Center provides critical state-level capacity to support colleges efforts to move the needle on student outcomes.

Chris Baldwin is executive director of the Michigan Center for Student Success (cbaldwin@mcca.org)

Hot Off the Presses!

2011-10-26T10:29:00.001-04:00

Back in the early days of Accelerating Achievement, we featured a guest post from Julian Alssid of the Workforce Strategy Center (WSC) outlining their response to giving lower-skill/lower-wage workers the boost they need to get the educational credentials necessary for higher-skill/higher-wage jobs. This week, WSC released a new report, What Works: BridgeConnect Stories from the Field, that showcases for successful programs that help low-income adults connect to postsecondary credentials. From the WSC release:

This report breaks new ground for WSC in that it features numerous video clips of practitioners and participants, who share first-hand the positive impacts of these programs. Viewers can see powerful examples of how these programs-- in North Carolina, Chicago, and New York City-- move people from hopelessness to stable employment.

WSC has also scheduled an interactive webinar on November 15th for practitioners interested in learning more about these programs. Check it out!

New JFF publication on Virginia Dev Ed Redesign

2011-10-20T13:26:00.000-04:00

Want to see a DEI state policy team in action? Yesterday, Jobs for the Future released a new publication detailing the Virginia Community College System’s developmental education redesign. From the JFF release:

Innovation at Scale—written by Rose Asera for Jobs for the Future—describes Virginia’s process of redesigning developmental education to increase college readiness and student success across the state’s 23 community colleges and 40 campuses. Innovation at Scale was released today to the Chancellor of the Virginia Community College System's Advisory Council of Presidents.

You can download the report here.

Linky, Linky!

2011-10-19T15:44:00.004-04:00

Jay Matthews in the WaPo returns to community college placement and remediation with a follow-up to his commentary on Sarah Headden’s call for an entirely new approach.

We know some of you were on the debate team. Relive your glory days and hone your arguments with this NPR coverage of a debate about whether too many high school grads go to college.

Jamie Merisotis, president of Lumina Foundation, and Charles Kolb, president of Committee on Economic Development, make it clear where they stand on that debate. In their piece earlier this month for CSM, they argue for increased training and education partnerships between employers and higher education.

Get Ready! A new MDRC study, Getting Ready for College, looks at the early impacts of developmental summer bridge programs in Texas. The final report on these programs won’t be released until next year, but preliminary results show promise.

Joanne Jacobs links to a John Locke Foundation study which shows that “as North Carolina’s high school graduation rate rose by 2.3 percent from 2006 to 2009, the community college remediation rate increased by 7 percent.”The report goes one to call out “low academic standards and expectations” as “one of a number of factors that provide marginal students an easier path to graduation.” We’d like to point out that the increase in remediation is also due to an influx of workers dislocated by the recession who haven’t been in school for years. The issue is more about alignment of standards between high school exit and college entrance than it is about lowering standards. North Carolina is already hard at work on this issue; the state was an early adopter of the Common Core Standards and one of the N.C. DEI State Policy team’s policy priorities is the alignment of standards for high school graduation, aiming to reduce the need for developmental education for recent high school graduates.

There’s a lot of different ways to approach the readiness question, of course. Check out this EdWeek article about a pilot program seeking to restructure high schools for college readiness.

Guest Post: Saving for Completion

2011-10-14T09:06:00.000-04:00

Today, Dan Broun, a program director at MDC, puts a finer point on the difference between financial literacy and financial capability—and what that difference can make for student retention and completion.

While developmental education can be a key to helping students reach their educational goals, the reasons so many community college students drop out before completion often have nothing to do with academics. Indeed, a recent Public Agenda study found that 54 percent of students who stopped school cited “having to work and make money” as the primary reason for leaving before attaining a credential, and 60 percent described the cost of non-tuition fees as a major barrier to completion.

And it is not just the lack of money that is making it hard for students to finish: it also can be a fundamental lack of understanding on how to manage one’s finances. In 2008, Jump$tart Coalition found that among high school students the level of financial literacy was only 48 percent; among college students the figure was 62 percent.

With these disturbing trends in mind, many colleges are addressing students’ “financial capability” as way to increase student success. The term “financial capability” is actually not just a turn of phrase with limited meaning—it is the idea that mere financial literacy, the term of choice for many years, is not enough. Whereas literacy implies just giving students information about basic finances, financial capability equips students with the tools to change long-term behavior. While no standard definition of financial capability exists, this one from the Center for Financial Services Innovation captures the standard elements:

Being able to cover monthly expenses with income
Tracking spending
Planning ahead and saving for the future
Selecting and managing financial products and services
Gaining and exercising financial knowledge.”

While financial literacy instruction may help students learn the differences between credit and debit cards, savings and checking accounts, and loans and grants, building financial capabilities affects students’ behavior over the long term by helping them learn how to apply financial management knowledge.

So how can a community college begin to build financial capability among its students? Many colleges are finding that using an integrated service delivery approach is the best way. Using the Center for Working Families approach, colleges provide students with access to financial coaching, college and community-based support services, and assistance in applying for public benefits such as food and nutrition programs, financial aid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. (This model has appeared on Accelerating Achievement before.) In some cases, students use online systems, to apply for multiple types of benefits with one application. Students also may receive assistance obtaining traditional financial services, such as savings and checking accounts. At Central New Mexico Community College, students have access to a financial coach, financial workshops, and other supports to help them establish a checking, savings, and matched savings program. In this CWF example, financial coaches provide one-on-one help with budgeting, setting financial goals, and identifying additional financial resources.

The impact of financial capability programs such as the CWF on students and institutions can be profound, especially when measured by retention. At Des Moines Area Community College, students participating in financial education programs boast an 80 percent retention rate, far surpassing the college’s overall rate of 57 percent. At Central New Mexico Community College, an integrated service delivery approach to build financial capability has had a significant impact – 61 percent of students who received multiple services through their program reached a short-term goal such as receiving a scholarship or staying in school, compared to 16 percent of students who only received one service.

With the growing realization that community colleges can play a significant role in the nation’s economic recovery and success, they are being asked to sharpen their focus on accelerating student progress all the way to completion. That makes the importance of increasing student financial capability no small matter. Academic skills and financial aid are not enough. In order for students to make it all the way through, they must be able to understand and manage their finances. Acquiring and applying financial tools, skills, and knowledge, and building financial capability, leads to financial empowerment, a path students need to establish in order to ensure a promising future for themselves and their families.

Dan Broun is a program director at MDC.

To learn more about CWFs, download this Annie E. Casey Foundation report: An Integrated Approach for Fostering Family Success: How Three Model Sites Are Implementing the Center for Working Families Approach.

Guest Post: Supplemental Instruction Leaders Don't Do Optional Either

2011-10-12T11:18:00.000-04:00

In the first of our in-depth look at each of the seven SCALERS drivers, staffing, Ruth Silon of Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) delves into staffing a supplemental instruction (SI) program. The SCALERS staffing driver calls for effective use of resources to meet personnel needs, from administration to faculty to student services to student employees. In this candid post, Ruth describes the ups and downs of Tri-C’s approach to training student SI leaders in a one-credit special topics course.

“Students don’t do optional.”

Where have we heard this before? It certainly applies to many developmental students’ use of the tutoring labs, optional orientations, and attendance at Supplemental Instruction (SI) sessions.

But what about the SI leaders themselves? Although we at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), have a well thought out hiring and training process, I have found that if we do not have a very concrete way to manage and observe our SI leaders, they, too, will not do optional.

In June 2010, I attended the International Conference on Supplemental Instruction, and listened to Joyce Zaritsky from LaGuardia Community College discuss her one credit class for SI leaders. This approach seemed to make sense. The students could not be leaders unless they attended a weekly SI course. Here was the place where leaders could share and debrief and experience ongoing training.

During fall 2010, faculty and SI staff met to design the course and it was first implemented in spring 2011 as a special topics course – one session at each campus. The course would meet once a week for one credit.

First Problem: The students had to pay for the course, which at that time cost $84.00.

Solution: Pay SI leaders for an extra hour and hope that is enough to offset the
cost of the course.

Second Problem: One of our leaders had already graduated.

Solution: She still had to attend the class in order to be an SI leader.

Third Problem: There was not a common time available for all the leaders to take the course.

No good solution here: Not all the leaders attended, but about 80 percent
did participate.

Meeting every week was a great experience, both for me, the teacher, and the leaders. I got to know almost everything that was going on in the SI-supported classes and the related sessions. I learned firsthand about the struggles leaders were having with their students and also with the classroom teachers. The class was more like a support group for the leaders than an academic class. This learning is really important as we are asking students to perform tasks that may be well out of their comfort zone. If we talk to each other about our students and our pedagogy, shouldn’t SI leaders be afforded that same experience?

This was a course, so the students had to complete certain tasks to get a grade. I asked them to turn in weekly journals, telling me what happened in their sessions. (This could be the basis of our conversations each week.) They also had to visit each other’s classes and write up an observation. At the end of the semester, they wrote an essay to a new SI leader, explaining the high and low points of the job and offering the new leader advice. The end result was twofold: a deeper understanding of what goes on in SI for both me and the leaders, and a very supportive environment to help the leaders do a better job.

Even though the course went well, we decided not to offer it this semester. Why not? I did not want to make SI leaders pay for the course again. I did not want to ask for more money for the SI leaders. And I thought “Last semester’s meetings went well. Of course this semester’s leaders will come to a weekly session, even if it’s not for credit!”

I was wrong. Sadly, I forgot that students, SI leaders included, may not do optional! Just like in any other class, some student leaders come every week, some attend occasionally, and others never show up at all. I am sorry to have to have learned the same lesson again: accountability is everything. But I have learned the lesson, so next semester we’ll be offering the course for our SI leaders again.

Ruth Silon is an associate professor of English and DEI project director at Cuyahoga Community College.

S-C-A-L-E-R-S: Round 2

2011-10-06T14:46:00.001-04:00

One of our favorite topics here on Accelerating Achievement is scaling up. Regular readers will remember our multi-week SCALERS series. Originally created by Paul Bloom, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. In the Accelerating Achievement SCALERS blog series, we translated the model for application at community colleges.

Next week, we’ll launch a new SCALERS series. Each month, we’ll have a guest post from a DEI college about how a particular SCALERS driver has contributed to their scaling efforts. A little less conversation, a little more action! Today, we’re applying all seven SCALERS to a program from Chaffey College that has successfully scaled up. Thanks to Ricardo Diaz at Chaffey sharing his story with us!

The goal of Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, C.A., is to move students off of academic probation and back into good standing with the college. Participants 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. Chaffey defined scale as an institutionalized program that, when fully implemented, would serve all students on academic probation college-wide; by this definition, the program is, in fact, scaled up. According to Ricardo Diaz, ODE coordinator, the successful expansion of the program has required attention to all seven SCALERS drivers:

Staffing. Since there are 300 to 400 students in the program each semester, Diaz is able to meet with each student only once prior to enrolling in the student success course. To address the need for continuous student follow-up, ODE is staffed by counselor apprentices. These counselors are paid graduate students from local universities who use the experience to complete required clinical hours for their program of study. Chaffey’s Human Resources department provides structure and support for hiring the apprentices; program leadership and coordination functions have been integrated into existing staff workloads.

Communicating. To expand ODE, Chaffey embarked on a strategic planning process that drew together key parties from across the college. The plan they constructed involved integrating services into existing programs, rather than creating a program with a stand-alone structure. During program development, the core planning committee held regular discussions with governance departments.

Alliance-Building. As mentioned above, ODE was developed with input from college-wide representatives. The program had the support of the president and board of trustees from the beginning. A crucial alliance for ODE was the purposeful collaboration between academic affairs and student services.

Lobbying/Demonstrating Impact. Chaffey’s Institutional Research department collaborated with MDRC to establish outcomes and evaluate ODE as part of MDRC’s Opening Doors project. When MDRC concluded their study, Chaffey’s institutional research continued. The strength of the evaluation allowed the program to obtain additional resources, recognition, and support for expansion.

Earnings Generation/Resource Generation. The initial MDRC funding for the program was matched by college funding commitments. With future expansion in mind, Chaffey integrated the core expenditures for the program into the college’s general fund. The MDRC grant was used as start-up money, funding program development, paraprofessional staff, books, supplies, travel, and training.

Replicating Impact. As the program grew, the core planning committee developed a continuous improvement process. Student learning outcomes and focus group feedback were used to refine program design. The committee encouraged regular sharing of practices among instructors along with professional development activities.

Stimulating Market Forces/Sustaining Engagement. Because ODE was integrated into the college’s core operational components from the beginning, it quickly became a regular function of how the college operates. Students embraced the program because enrollment incentives were put into place. The MDRC study allowed for easy dissemination of the model to other colleges. This gained national recognition for Chaffey, which ensured continued buy-in from leadership and the campus community.

What’s next? Chaffey has created a solution to their initial problem: ODE moves students from academic probation back into good standing. However, an MDRC study looking at ODE’s impact on moving students to completion revealed that the intervention does not result in increased rates of graduation or certificate attainment. While not the original intent of this intervention, it is none the less a critical objective that presents a new challenge in program development and scaling. Now that Chaffey has a broad strategy that reaches the entire target population, it’s time to look at ways to scale the depth of the program’s impact, intensifying the intervention to amplify the impact or reach a new aim. The college intends to reconvene the core planning committee to explore strategies that can improve the likelihood that students who overcome their probationary standing also complete a degree and/or certificate.

This Just In!

2011-10-04T15:14:00.000-04:00

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!

Links!

2011-10-03T15:26:00.001-04:00

Last Monday, Inside Higher Ed ran an article about CUNY’s “Reimagining Community Colleges” event. Speakers encouraged colleges to “lean on innovation rather than waiting for better budgets to return.” Wise council. But it sure would be nice if those better budgets came back, too.
Over at Getting Past Go, Bruce Vandal is recapping August’s online jam “Turning Around Failure: System Triage for Severely Under-Prepared Adults in Higher Education,” which was hosted by the Education Commission of the States, Jobs For the Future, and Knowledge in the Public Interest. Check out the full report and the blog series based on the jam highlights.
Complete College America’s big news last week was the release of a report, Time is the Enemy, chock full of useful data and state profiles. Here’s some of that data, featured in the New York Times article on the report: “The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two-year degree on time; even after four years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a four-year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree.” CCA names five essential steps states should take to increase college completion including “transforming remediation so that students get into full-credit classes and on the graduation track as soon as possible.”

Guest Post: Ohio’s Developmental Education Policy Review

2011-09-27T08:54:00.000-04:00

This Statewise post comes from Ronald Abrams, president of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges. In this guest post, Ron describes how a task force conducted a comprehensive developmental education policy review at Ohio’s 23 community colleges and how their recommendations will help the colleges respond to a new performance-based funding system.

Per the request of Ohio’s 23 community college presidents, the Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) organized a task force to review institutional policies related to developmental education. The presidents’ request was necessitated by Ohio’s Success Points performance funding model, implemented in fiscal year 2010.

The main focus of the Success Points model is student progression and success (i.e., completion of coursework and moving through appropriate pathways). Community colleges often work with populations that are unprepared or underprepared for college work, which has lead to increased enrollment in developmental education coursework. The Success Points mirror this increase by assigning a higher point value to developmental education completion and transition to college-level coursework.

The OACC Developmental Education Policy Review Task Force, composed of community college administrators, faculty, and staff began working on recommendations about institutional developmental education policies in January 2011 and completed their work in June 2011. Their recommendations were submitted to the Ohio community college presidents for initial review and comment. The final document, Developmental Education Policy Recommendations, focuses on institutional policies that may increase success for students progressing through developmental education coursework and also offers recommendations for state-level consideration (i.e., developing state-wide assessment standards, cut scores, etc.).

The Developmental Education Policy Recommendations addresses the following institutional policies:

Introductory information for placement testing/assessment
Mandatory entry assessment
Mandatory Orientation
Mandatory developmental education course placement & continuous enrollment
Require that developmental education coursework take place first
No late registration for developmental education (also provide “flexible start” developmental education)—this policy may vary from campus to campus, but it ensures students are present for the first class meeting
Required math & English sequences
Implement interventions for repeated failure

The Developmental Education Policy Recommendations also addresses the following state-level policies:

Ohio should become an ACT state
The Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) should regularly review cut scores for college-level placement (“College-level” includes: transfer, certificates, and degrees)
Define ABLE (Adult Basic and Literacy Education) referral & cut scores and determine connection to the college
Define minimum standard of developmental education competency
Allow for alternative math curriculum & instruction

You can download the complete Developmental Education Policy Recommendations document from the OACC website here.

Prior Learning Assessment Event Next Week

2011-09-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

Does your institution offer credit for prior learning? Would you like to explore the option? The Center for American Progress is hosting “Prior Learning Assessments: College Strategies for the Success of 21st Century Students” next Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 10:00am – 12:00pm EDT. From the event description on their website:

There are upstart leaders in higher education who are blazing a trail in the effective use of PLAs that helps students succeed in college by rewarding learning wherever it occurs. Today’s session takes an in-depth look at these solutions at both the systemic and individual institution level. How did they get started? How are they demonstrating effectiveness? What models do they suggest for best practice replication?

If you’re planning on being in DC, they’d love to have you drop by. If not, you can link to the live stream from this site.

Guest Post: Alternative Forms of Data

2011-09-23T09:18:00.000-04:00

Today, Nick Bekas, professor of English at Valencia College, questions how far quantitative data can take us when we’re trying to understand what developmental education students need. He also suggests some qualitative methods that can make the picture more complete and thus improve decisions that affect individual students and entire institutions.

Every time I see a chart with a statistic, I immediately try to put it in context. I try to wrap it in details and identify its origin. And I don’t mean from a statistical perspective. What I think about are the people behind the stat:

•    Who are they?
•    What do they think?
•    What do they feel?

A number cannot capture these things.

Yet, for the most part, statistics are the primary source for decision making. This stems from tradition and an ingrained suspicion of qualitative data prevalent amongst researchers. Also, numerical data are easy. They are readily digestible and “clean.” How do you argue with 35 percent, beyond its method of collection? And when more sophisticated statistical analyses are shared, most people’s eyes glaze over because such studies are either beyond comprehension or simply not readable (meaning: not interesting).

The larger issue with such statistical studies is that they are rarely questioned to any great degree and are readily accepted as “truth” by policymakers. Alternative forms of data have developed as a reaction to the dominance of statistics, and because of a belief that statistics limit the complexity of things. Statistics should not be the only data point. In order for there to be an equilibrium of rigor and assurance, we have to present more than just statistical data. No one form should be the only lens through which we view the world. For this reason, at Valencia College, we use alternative forms of data to change the angle of repose on what we seek to understand. We incorporate methods such as:

•    focus groups
•    interviews
•    archival analysis
•    transcript analysis
•    journaling
•    video
•    film
•    photography
•    audio recordings

We have to move away from viewing the apparent—a statistic—as sufficient evidence of the problematic. When alternative methods are applied with rigor and consistency, they can provide a valid and reliable picture of the things we evaluate. For example, having students keep a video journal for a term and then analyzing the content of those videos can provide a deeper understanding of why so many developmental education students are not successful.

Thirty two percent can tell us there is a problem, but it cannot tell us why.

Nick Bekas is DEI project director and professor of English at Valencia College.

For another example of employing multiple data sources, check out this recent MDRC study on performance-based scholarships at the University of New Mexico. Behind the Study rounds out early quantitative findings on credit completion and financial aid uptake with student perspectives gathered in focus groups.

It’s Not Easy Being Greendale

2011-09-22T14:01:00.000-04:00

A recent brief from the Community College Research Center reviewed the current community college student success literature and found four primary non-academic mechanisms of increasing student success at community colleges: creating social relationships, clarifying aspirations and enhancing commitment, developing college know-how, and making college life feasible.

We’ve been observing the student experience at Greendale Community College for two years now, and we think the administration should examine these non-academic mechanisms as they seek to improve student outcomes. Note: Greendale Community College is the fictional college campus setting for the NBC sitcom Community. Season Three premieres tonight on NBC. While it’s true that the author of this post is a big fan of the show, it also turns out that Greendale could learn a lot from some of the community colleges featured on Accelerating Achievement.

Creating social relationships. From the CCRC brief: “Meaningful social relationships promote persistence by helping students feel comfortable in college and by providing them access to important information. Promoting social relationships is particularly important for nontraditional students, who often have fewer opportunities to create them on their own due to competing demands on their time.”

Despite having hosted five school dances in one year, Greendale’s administration has done little to formally encourage social relationships. One study group formed spontaneously and has continued studying together for two years. While these students motivate each other and overcome hurdles together, they are also an exclusive clique, refusing to let others join on multiple occasions, even when offered delicious kettle corn. Greendale should examine ways to create social connections for all students that last for more than a semester. Many colleges offer learning communities to create bonds within cohorts of students and to integrate learning across courses. One notable model comes from Kingsborough Community College, where the learning community model incorporates Student Development Case Managers who “serve as advisors, counselors, instructors, and student advocates.” These managers provide an ongoing connection to the college for students.

Clarifying aspirations and enhancing commitment. From CCRC: “Helping students crystallize their goals and understand how college can help them achieve these goals may increase the likelihood that they will persist and earn a credential.”

Many Greendale students are lacking in a clear educational plan, and even those who are enrolled in a credential program are sometimes unclear about career opportunities. Greendale should enhance its advising system and provide opportunities for students to connect their academic studies with career-focused education. The I-BEST model in Washington provides structured pathways for students by combining basic skills instruction with workforce training.

Developing college know-how. From CCRC: “To navigate college, students must understand the unwritten rules of the postsecondary environment…In postsecondary education, this includes knowing how to ask for help, how to participate in class appropriately, and how to navigate bureaucratic systems to access resources, such as financial aid.”

Some students at Greendale are lacking in proper classroom decorum. We’ve seen students make impromptu speeches about personal relationships during class and get in verbal and physical confrontations with professors. Greendale should explore ways to familiarize students with expected behavior and campus resources when they first enroll. The Choice Scholars Summer Institute at Harper College “attempts to demystify college expectations, forge relationships among faculty and students, acclimate students to the campus, and help them transition seamlessly from high school to college during the critical first semester.”

Making college life feasible. From CCRC: “Community college students often experience unanticipated challenges involving conflicts between the demands of work, family, and school. Services that aid students in overcoming these challenges help ensure that students’ educational pursuits are not compromised.”

During her first year at Greendale, single mother-of-two and aspiring small-business-owner Shirley struggled to create a class schedule that would allow her to spend time with her children. While she was finally granted priority registration (at the conclusion of an epic campus-wide paintball game), Greendale could address similar needs by offering courses at a variety of times (no night classes are currently offered) and providing on-site daycare. Many community colleges integrate delivery of student services, including education and training, income supports, and financial services. A learning visit to Central New Mexico Community College, where “students who receive integrated 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”, would be a good starting point.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

Guest Post: Investing In Innovation

2011-09-20T11:13:00.000-04:00

Today’s post comes from Michael Collins, associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future. JFF leads DEI’s state policy initiative by supporting policy teams in CT, FL, NC, OH, TX, and VA, who are implementing the three-pronged Developmental Education Initiative State Policy strategy. The first of Michael’s three-part series showed how collecting the right data can inform state policy to accelerate dev ed innovation across a system. Part two, below, details how states are investing resources—both financial and otherwise—in that innovation.

According to Webster’s, investment is defined as “the action or process of investing money for profit or a material result.” Most of us would agree, however, that investment isn’t always about financial capital. We can be physically, psychologically, and emotionally invested in a particular result or outcome. For the second component of the DEI state policy strategy--Investment in Innovation--our experience has most certainly been both.

When Jobs for the Future and the DEI states developed the policy strategy, we were bullish. The $10 billion American Graduation Initiative (AGI) was barreling down the tracks, and we were intent on being on that train when it left the station. Our thinking was that states could for the first time in a long time have serious resources to support new approaches. It was a no brainer. So apropos of Webster’s definition of investment, we were banking on states having money to invest in new and smarter ways to serve students who were not ready for college-level work. But alas, the train never made it into the station. AGI was derailed by a political compromise for health care.

So we were left with a strategy, but no money. Still, the DEI states were undeterred. They knew they needed to find resources over and above what colleges were receiving through their regular funding allocations. The states boldly embraced investing in innovation despite the lack of new money. Even without AGI, states found resources to help their institutions design and implement new ways to serve developmental education students.

Texas invested $5 million to encourage its colleges to deliver developmental education in new and different ways--one of the largest state-level investments. Connecticut seeded innovation through a $50,000 commitment to each of its colleges. Florida braided state funding, DEI resources, and College Access Challenge Grants to help its colleges pilot changes. And both Virginia and North Carolina are deep into redesigning developmental math and English for all of the colleges in their respective states. Ohio, taking a different approach, invited community colleges to pilot partnerships with Adult Basic Education (ABE) to align ABE and developmental education entrance and exit requirements. Surprisingly, all 23 Ohio colleges took on the challenge, even though there were no financial incentives attached.

There are multiple lessons here. First, even in the toughest economy it is possible to invest in developmental education innovation. Second, and probably most important, as we’ve learned from losing AGI, it’s not only about the money. Investing in innovation is, of course, in large part financial. But investment is also about being invested in change and finding creative ways to make change happen, just as the DEI states have done.

Michael Collins is associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future.

Linkity Link

2011-09-16T12:58:00.000-04:00

In the September/October 2011 edition of The Washington Monthly Susan Headden just comes right out and says that “the remedial placement process is ground zero for college non-completion in America.” (Jay Matthews of the Washington Post offers his take on the article on his Class Struggle blog here.) Headden criticizes colleges that don’t communicate the high-stakes nature of the tests and those that don’t encourage and make test preparation available. She argues for assessment systems that measure both cognitive and affective readiness and points to acceleration programs that allow students to complete credit-bearing courses with additional tutoring or support. (We’ve covered these sorts of programs on the blog before, in South Africa and Baltimore.) Many DEI colleges and states are making strides in developing new placement testing instruments and in accelerating student progress through the developmental sequence, but there’s certainly more work to be done.

How does your college set students up for placement test success? Do you conduct affective assessments? Tell us about it in the comments section. Or, if you’ve got a longer story, send an email to dei@mdcinc.org and let’s talk about an Accelerating Achievement guest post.

There’s more great developmental education commentary in the September 2011 Achieving Success, the Jobs for the Future ATD/DEI State Policy Newsletter. Read up on college completion continuous improvement networks in Arkansas and Michigan, new JFF publications on developmental education policy in Florida’s community colleges, performance funding in Hawai’i and much much more!

Guest Post: There's No "I" in Team

2011-09-09T09:52:00.000-04:00

We’ve featured the nuts and bolts of the DEI state policy work on Accelerating Achievement before. In the six DEI states, these nuts and bolts are assembled by state policy teams, with expert support from Jobs for the Future. Today’s post from Susan Wood, vice chancellor, academic services and research in the Virginia Community College System, describes how Virginia has leveraged the state policy team structure to advance their DEI work. You can read more about Virginia’s DEI efforts in this post.

Hello from Virginia’s DEI State Policy Team! Virginia’s team includes core members who have participated since the beginning of DEI and other members who have moved on and off of the team to support grant efforts. In light of Virginia’s centralized governance structure for their 23 community colleges, all but one of the initial core team members were from the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) office. The non-VCCS member is the statewide K-12 instructional leader for the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). Core members are Susan Wood, Donna Jovanovich, Jennifer Allman, Dan Lewis, Linda Wallinger (VDOE), and Gretchen Schmidt (formerly with VCCS, now with JFF). Core membership reflects expertise in the areas of policy, academics, student services, data/research, assessment, and connections with K-12.

Semiannual state policy meetings convened by JFF provide a strategic opportunity to add critical partners to the team. These partners, selected to align with the current focus of Virginia’s work, have included the executive vice president at our largest college (chair of the Developmental Education Task Force) and two faculty members (chairs of the faculty Curriculum Teams developing student learning outcomes for new courses). Bringing critical partners continues a practice begun in our Achieving the Dream efforts where Virginia’s secretary of education and the vice-chair of the State Board for Community Colleges (member of the VCCS Strategic Planning Task Force) participated in state policy meetings.

The team meets regularly to coordinate the launch of a system-wide developmental education redesign. This includes staffing the Developmental Education Task Force (whose recommendations determined the direction for overall redesign) and the Developmental Mathematics and English Redesign Teams. Recommendations are found in The Turning Point, The Critical Point, and The Focal Point (forthcoming). The VDOE representative’s role was critical as VDOE, collaborating with VCCS and Virginia’s State Council for Higher Education, led the College and Career Readiness Initiative supported by the Southern Regional Education Board through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. VDOE mathematics and English coordinators participated fully on redesign teams as a result of VDOE’s core team participation.

The state policy team structure solidifies and reaffirms Virginia’s developmental education redesign direction and purpose. State policy meetings provide a venue where objective analysis and essential team self-reflection occur, where the work of other state teams infuses our thinking, and where needed mid-course corrections can surface. Bringing the temporary members “into the fold” serves well to broaden the conversation about our DEI progress by adding a direct link to our colleges. In Virginia, the state policy team is an essential and effective component of work that has facilitated our progress thus far. Questions? Contact Susan Wood, vice chancellor, academic services and research, at swood@vccs.edu.

Guest Post: It's All in How You Say a Thing

2011-09-07T10:00:00.009-04:00

Today, Pamela Henney, an adjunct faculty member in the English department at DEI college North Central State College in Mansfield, Ohio, shares her perspective on how perception, language, and expectations can influence faculty-student interactions—and results in the classroom.

Higher education is increasingly focused on developmental education initiatives, and definitely should be with 40 to 69 percent of high school graduates requiring at least one developmental course in college. We fund new developmental programs, devise new pedagogies, share our secrets of success, and warn of failures with others, encourage more studies of our students, and target varied groups of students for extra attention—all highly worthy endeavors. However, we might be missing one crucial point: perception.

Several speakers noted this perception issue almost in passing at this year’s Community College of Baltimore County Accelerated Learning Project’s 3rd Annual Conference on Acceleration in Developmental Education. Perception is vital to student success. If our students see themselves as capable of passing they tend to succeed. We may believe ourselves to be helpful, empathetic, and encouraging with our students, but then we fall into our academic jargon forgetting we are conversing with students.

We often find ourselves so entrenched in the new teaching approaches and prospects for students that we find ourselves believing students will understand the underlying philosophy and pedagogy exactly as we do. They do not often recognize this educational opportunity with the same vigor we offer it. Think about it: How often do we hear cries of glee from a student being told “You’ve placed in Basic Writing, a program to help you progress,” when the student confidently believed himself to be starting out in First Year Composition. How persuasive is it to tell our students this non-transferrable credit course will help “address deficiencies,” “relearn skills,” or even “catch up?”

In addition to creating effective developmental programs and devising new pedagogies all aimed at supporting student success, we need to consider how each element of a student success plan is perceived. If we want our students to have a successful, confident mindset, then we have to seamlessly illustrate our support. The phrase “we are placing you in Basic Writing” is often heard as “You aren’t ready for college English,” “You aren’t ready for college,” or simply “You can’t do this.” For some of our students, it is the same negative rhetoric they have been hearing all of their lives.

The rebuttal for this downward psychological spiral is inherent in accelerated developmental programs. Hearing “Your test score gives you the opportunity to take advantage of our accelerated program” right away translates in a student’s mind into “You can do this” – and not only do it, but do it faster and more efficiently than other students. It also connotes our expectation of student success.

True, this issue seems very simple and much like a sales technique, but students who recognize that other people—especially advisers and professors—believe they can succeed often tend to try to live up to those expectations, even internalizing a “can do” mindset. This apparently minor change should impact student perception of developmental programs and create a positive foundation which meets the criteria for continued success.

Guest Post: Mobilizing Faculty toward Dramatic Curricular Change

2011-08-31T09:30:00.001-04:00

Please welcome Katie Hern, Ed.D., an English Instructor at Chabot College, to Accelerating Achievement! Katie leads the California Acceleration Project, an initiative of the California Community Colleges’ Success Network (3CSN), with support from the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, LearningWorks, and the Community College Research Center. Bruce Vandal posted a great summary of the program and its results over at Getting Past Go yesterday; below, you can read what Katie has learned about motivating folks to take on the challenge of accelerated developmental education courses.

The California Acceleration Project has ambitious goals: getting the state’s 112 community colleges to shorten and redesign their developmental sequences in English and math.

The California community college system—if “system” is the right word—is among the most decentralized in the country. For those of us advocating change, this means we have to do more than provide good data to a group of high-level decision-makers. We have to convince individual faculty at all 112 individual colleges to pursue the change themselves.

On the face of it, this might seem a job for Sisyphus. And yet, faculty across California have begun doing exactly that.

The project is part of the California Community Colleges’ Success Network (3CSN), which provides professional development for the state’s Basic Skills Initiative. To date, more than 80 of California’s community colleges have participated in the project’s acceleration trainings, 19 colleges are working together on accelerated English and pre-statistics courses they will offer in 2011-12, and at least 12 more colleges are actively pursuing pilots for the following year.

Bringing acceleration to scale requires us to think about what motivates people to change. Inside 3CSN, we talk a lot about a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. Business writers Dan and Chip Heath stress that everyone has two competing drives influencing our decisions: “the rider,” or rational side, and the “elephant,” or emotional side. Mobilizing change requires engaging the rider holding the reins and the elephant that the rider is trying to steer. “Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose” (Switch, p. 7).

In making a case for acceleration, my co-leader Myra Snell and I ground our conversations in quantitative data. No one would listen if we didn’t show that acceleration can significantly increase the number of developmental students going on to pass college-level gatekeeper courses. But data are never enough. We also have to address the elephant. What is spooking faculty about acceleration? Where are the emotional sticking points? And what positive emotions can be harnessed so that faculty charge toward change, instead of sitting stubbornly by while would-be change agents seek “buy in”?

Sometimes teachers’ elephants don’t move because they literally can’t see the way ahead. In faculty workshops, we show two classroom videos, five minutes from my open-access accelerated English class, where students engage an excerpt from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and five minutes from Myra Snell’s open-access pre-statistics course where students grapple with a problem from a national statistics exam and prove that the exam’s answer key is incorrect. These videos give faculty a visceral, concrete sense of how developmental education might be different. They see that students who might have placed 2, 3, 4 levels below college in their own sequences have the capacity to do challenging intellectual work. They see that developmental education doesn’t have to be grammar workbooks or skill-and-drill math procedures. They get a vision of the possible, and their elephants respond. They want to be part of it.

The California Acceleration Project is not arguing for small-scale changes—tutoring, student success courses, mandatory placement testing. We’re arguing that developmental education is broken; that community colleges must shorten and redesign our long remedial sequences; that our placement system is profoundly flawed; and that students are capable of so much more than developmental classes often ask of them. It’s not an easy case to make, and there are many opportunities for our riders and our elephants to derail movement. Yet the good news from California is that, when faculty elephants and riders get going in the same direction, dramatic change becomes possible.

To see Katie Hern and Myra Snell make a case for acceleration and speak to both rider and elephant, check out their webinar “College Completion: Why Acceleration Developmental English and Math is the Essential First Step.” For more information about the California Acceleration Project, go to http://3csn.org/developmental-sequences.

Snacktime!

2011-08-26T11:51:00.002-04:00

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.”

Guest Post: How Do You Think About Developmental Ed?

2011-08-25T13:15:00.005-04:00

Today, we welcome Andy Rusnak, assistant professor of English and assistant director of Accelerated Learning Program at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), to Accelerating Achievement. Andy introduces us to Peter Adams, the founder of CCBC’s ALP program, and invites dev ed skeptics to change the way they think about the whole enterprise—both assumptions about who dev ed students are and assumptions about the best way for those students to make their way to credit-bearing work.

How to think about developmental education? Should it be thought of as a gate, keeping out those not qualified for college work, the gathering convention of many universities? Or, should it be thought of as a pathway to success, the open-door policy of some community colleges that are now implementing more expeditious means to persistence?

One slide in the Community College of Baltimore County’s PowerPoint presentation on the history and success of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) pictures an austere, locked, wrought-iron gate between two Grecian-style columns. The gate protects everyone’s archetypal image of the ivory tower. One can almost envision a “No Trespassing” sign. The next slide is a pristine path through the woods, very promising, the mythological hero journey with ethereal rays of lambent light pointing the way.

ALP Founder and Director Peter Adams contemplated these two competing concepts before laying the foundation for the ALP program and giving it direction. He chose the path metaphor, one that leads directly to our liberally educated sensibilities, our ideas of fairness, and our desire to offer access and upward mobility to what may be economically disadvantaged students.

Makes perfect sense right? To think of developmental education in this way especially at community college? Political ideologues wielding the budget axe might not think so. “Why should we appropriate tax dollars for college-level developmental education?” they might ask. “If a student passes a state-mandated writing test before he or she graduates high school, why aren’t they ready for college-level work?” Their underlying assumptions would post guards at the gates of higher education after sending out hit squads to patrol the wooded paths. But the biggest assumption, that those who need developmental writing, math, and/or reading just graduated high school, turns out to be false. At many community colleges, the median student age is upper twenties. At CCBC it’s 29. And if you don’t use it, you lose it. The politicos might respond by saying, “Well, ok, but why does it take three-to-four semesters, three-to-four levels of developmental classes before a student is even eligible for credited work? This appears to be a self-serving enterprise, designed to enhance revenue, not a pathway to success.”

It might be hard to argue this point. Not to mention how daunting it must look to an aspiring and expeditious student who returns to school after a long absence to improve his or her life. Adams took all this into consideration when he conceived ALP at CCBC. And, I might add, did so in a cost-effective manner. ALP takes eight students who test out via the Accuplacer at developmental levels and places them into a credited freshman composition class with 12 students who passed the Accuplacer. After this English 101 class, the eight students then meet with the same instructor to satisfy developmental writing requirements. Both courses are conducted concurrently and the need for a two semester sequence is eliminated.

From the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, the Community College Research Center of Columbia University tracked 2,070 of CCBC’s traditional developmental writing students and 104 ALP students. Even though the sample for ALP is much smaller as it was still in a pilot phase, only 40 percent of the traditional, two-semester sequence students went on to pass English 101 the following semester, compared to 75 percent of ALP students who passed English 101 concurrently with their developmental course. CCBC’s own data reflect consistent English 101 pass rates for ALP students, 59 to 66 percent from the 2007 fall semester through spring semester, 2010. In the fall semester of 2006, traditional developmental writers who went on to take and pass English 101 shook out to only 27 percent.

ALP is an intriguing, innovative program. It’s a different animal and requires non-traditional, non-linear logic and approaches. Many community colleges that are now replicating versions of ALP must seek even greater imaginative and critical resources as entrenched cultures and bureaucratic challenges change from state-to-state and even campus-to-campus. Change is hard, but not impossible. At CCBC, administrators and professors involved in ALP oftentimes cite business models that replicate technologies within months to jump start discussions on what factors in community college culture inhibit similar expediency. There is a danger, of course, of institutions of higher learning assuming a strictly business model, but being able to respond quickly to change, to “self-evaluate” and to augment, streamline, or, if necessary, tear down and start over is the sign of a healthy, progressive institution, especially in today’s fast-paced, demanding, mutable climate. It pays to cultivate a proactive ethos, to challenge methods, processes, and systems, to welcome and support idea-generation. There is no “eureka” in sluggish, reactionary organizations.

Adams paints a nervous, good-natured figure. He rolls up his sleeves, projects the value of hard work. He is driven. His eyes dart from side-to-side to meet a world that is obviously a huge question mark. Beneath it all is a strong drive to champion the educational needs of those who may not have enjoyed the economic advantages of those in the upper middle class, but who can make important (maybe the most important) contributions to society. These are the students who fight our wars, fix our brakes, take our X-rays, make our music, and build our aircraft. And through CCBC’s ALP steering committee and inquiry network (ALPIN) the pedagogy most professors embrace is sympathetic to the ever-demanding lifestyles of today’s community college student—work, children, transportation, bills, studying. Sympathetic, but demanding. Principled and ideological, but ideology is not a bad word when it comes to making a better student, and it’s certainly not delusional when one looks at the very pragmatic success Adams has built via ALP. Ideology underlies many of our pedagogical pursuits. We’re fortunate that way. In higher education, more so than in other environments, there are more successful outcomes, more direct and positive results, that come from hard work—a cause and effect formula that adds value and is worth pursuing. For professors and students. Perhaps this is how we all should think about developmental education.

Andy Rusnak is an assistant professor of English and assistant director of the Accelerated Learning Program at the Community College of Baltimore County