Link Link Link

• Just in case you missed The New York Times piece on CUNY’s New Community College, you can read about efforts to build a community college from scratch here. Dean Dad provided some commentary this week on his Inside Higher Ed blog.

• MDRC released two studies about learning communities this week: The Effects of Learning Communities for Students in Developmental Education: A Synthesis of Findings from Six Community Colleges and Commencement Day: Six-Year Effects of a Freshman Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College. You can read a summary of both reports here, along with MDRC’s take on what this research suggests about implementing and scaling up this approach at community colleges. 

• More webinar fun next week, this time from the Tennessee College Access and Success Network. They’ve got two offerings focused on adult learners coming up. On July 30 at 10am CDT, you can dial in for a presentation about Roane State’s H20 Program, which connects adult learners with opportunities in both higher education and the workforce. The presenters will also lead a discussion about the importance of connecting workforce needs with learning among adult learners.Sign up here. On July 31 at 9am CDT, Dr. Doyle Brinson of East Tennessee State University weighs in on integrating instructional resources and student services for adult learners. Sign up here.

Reporting for Duty

There’s always a long list of reports you could be reading, but here’s a few we think are worth downloading. C’mon—you’ve at least got time for the executive summary!

• Our colleagues here at MDC have just released a report examining the recent experiences of community colleges across the United States that are implementing the Center for Working Families (CWF) approach to help low-income families attain financial stability and move up the economic ladder. The approach combines what community colleges do so well—provide individuals with training that connects them to dynamic careers—with the financial support necessary to complete education and connect with a career path. “Center for Working Families at Community Colleges: Clearing the Financial Barriers to Student Success” takes a closer look at the emerging CWF Community College learning network and shows how the individual colleges provide their CWF services, whom they seek to serve, how the CWF fits and adapts within local college contexts, what outcomes they are accomplishing, and provides the answers to other key learning questions.

• The Lumina Foundation and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) share lessons learned from their "Non-traditional No More" project in “Going the Distance in Adult College Completion: Lessons from the Non-traditional No More Project.” The report includes suggestions for improving policies and practices that will increase college completion among adults who have earned college credits but did not graduate. 

• MDRC has two new evaluations focused on developmental education at community colleges. “What Can a Multifaceted Program Do for Community College Students?  Early Results from an Evaluation of Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) for Developmental Education Students” looks at preliminary results from the ASAP program at three CUNY community colleges. “Bridging the Gap: An Impact Study of Eight Developmental Summer Bridge Programs in Texas” reports findings about student outcomes for eight Texas community colleges, including two DEI colleges, El Paso Community College and South Texas College.

• The Center for Law and Social Policy recently released a summary of a jointly sponsored national survey of adult education state directors conducted during February 2012. “Sinking or Swimming: Findings from a Survey of State Adult Education Tuition and Financing Policies” digs into the policies that govern the way adult education is funded, including the costs borne by local districts, community colleges, and other providers and by the states, the federal government, and students.

• Jack Rotman, over at Developmental Math Revival, has been sharing a thoughtful exploration and critique of recent developmental ed press and research.

Let's Try This Again: Links!

• On June 21-22, the National Center for Postsecondary Research at Columbia University hosted a conference, Strengthening Developmental Education: What Have We Learned and What’s Next, featuring dev ed experts from across the country, including some from our own DEI colleges and states. You can check out an overview of the conference and download materials here. Jennifer Gonzales at the Chronicle of Higher Ed gave this recap of a conference keynote address from U.S. undersecretary of education, Martha Kanter: “Rather than abolish remedial education, Ms. Kanter implored the scholars to continue their work to reform and improve it.” Hear! Hear!

• Last month, Jobs for the Future published a new policy brief about financial aid that needs to be on your reading list. Aid and Innovation identifies financial aid rules and regulations that block innovations meant to help low-income students; describes how policy leaders and financial aid experts in several states are building work-arounds to those issues; and recommends how states can work together to better meet students’ financial aid needs. You can download it here.

• In addition to that policy brief, JFF also released another edition of Achieving Success, the newsletter all about Achieving the Dream and Developmental Education Initiative state policy. This one’s got more on the Virginia Community College System dev math redesign, Florida legislation that is strengthening community college transfer pathways, and more. Download it here.

• Recently, the MDC-led Financial Empowerment for Student Success Learning Network hosted an enlightening discussion on how to use a college’s student success course to teach students about financial literacy and management, with speakers from two Achieving the Dream institutions. The presentations from Debby King of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas and Sonya Caesar of the Community College of Baltimore County answered questions about how they have effectively made financial capability an integral part of course curriculum. They shared many lessons, including some important advice on how to involve administration and how to get student input to develop the most effective course of study. You can link to a recording of the webinar here. (Go ahead and follow the registration instructions—that will set you up to view the recording!) 

• Just can’t get enough of webinars? Inside Higher Ed is hosting one next Tuesday, July 10 at 1pm Eastern to share results from a new study of faculty perspectives on online education. “Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education 2012” will feature Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim, director of learning and technology, Master of Health Care Delivery Science program, Dartmouth College, and blogger at Inside Higher Ed; Steve Kolowich, technology reporter at Inside Higher Ed; and Jeff Seaman, co-director, Babson Survey Research Group. Register here.

You Can't Handle the Links

• College strategic plans for increasing student success are by nature long-term efforts, so concrete measures of progress often take years to appear. What do you do when your work to “move the needle” is slow going, or when initiative fatigue sets in at your institution? According to Inside Higher Ed, Monroe Community College has “started a series of modest but tangible 100-day projects to improve the college.” These projects are intended as small steps toward larger goals, but they also foster broad engagement and keep motivation high. Their first project is to “streamline the application and enrollment process so that prospective students have to create one password instead of three.” As blogger Dean Dad points out, this idea requires widespread institutional buy-in. If people don’t take it seriously, it won’t work. Wondering how to get that buy-in? Nick Bekas of Valencia Colleges offers his advice on building alliances in an Accelerating Achievement post earlier this year. 
• A substantial portion of our nation’s workforce is unemployed or underemployed, but many companies can’t find the workers they need to fill high-skill jobs. Why are we struggling to train workers for existing positions when so many are in need of work? Maureen Conway of the Aspen Institute says that workforce training and education programs don’t do enough to address the real-world challenges adult students face. She sees a need for increased funding and budgetary flexibility for integrated student support services. Check out Colin Austin’s guest post on an approach that weaves together education and training, income supports, and financial services. Another reason that we can’t fill those open positions? It isn’t readily apparent to students or colleges what employers are looking for. Jobs for the Future’s Credentials that Work initiative uses real-time labor market information to help students choose credentials that will get them jobs, and to help institutions craft programs with local labor market value.  
• Last week in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, developmental English professor Brian Hall of Cuyahoga Community College (a DEI Institution) shared some insight into “What Really Matters to Working Students.” Frustrated by students’ seemingly constant absence and inattention, Hall asked one of his developmental English classes to explain why so few students are successful. The biggest reason his students gave: the difficulty of balancing academics with life. Between work schedules and family responsibilities, many students feel that their motivation to do well in class is eclipsed by unforeseen hurdles. While developmental educators can’t eliminate these hurdles (see the previous bullet for what colleges can do), Hall and his students recommend ways professors can keep students on track, and caution against behavior that could knock them off course permanently. They propose that professors should make expectations and rules apparent from the start, treat students with the respect they require in return, make class work relevant and engaging, and show students that it is ok to make mistakes if you learn from them. 
• The College Board has released a new “web based tool that provides quick and easy access to national, state and initiative-level data that describe the progress and success of community college students.” The Completion Arch establishes indicators for five areas: enrollment, developmental education placement, progress, transfer and completion, and workforce preparation and employment outcomes. You can filter the indicators by data source, state, and student characteristics. The site is easy to navigate, so check it out for yourself! 
• The Hartford Courant ran an op-ed from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University last week on Connecticut’s recent developmental education legislation. Tom Bailey, Katherine Hughes, and Shana Smith Jaggers expressed their concerns over the potential negative impact that the legislation could have on students in need of significant skill development before they are ready for college-level coursework. They also noted their concerns about buy-in from college faculty and staff: “A policy that gives community college practitioners flexibility and support to try out new models — and that includes accountability measures to accelerate real change — would make them far more likely to embrace reforms on an institutional and state level.”

Crowdsourcing the Placement Test Dilemma

On Monday, the Inside Higher Ed blog Confessions of a Community College Dean, was all about how you know a student needs remediation. Blogger Dean Dad gives a succinct overview of the often frustrating process: cutoff scores, preparing (or not preparing) students for a high-stakes test, and mandated tests that have little predictive value for a student’s performance. And then there’s “thousands of new students showing up in a compressed timeframe, ranging in age from fresh out of high school to retirement, and you need to place them all quickly.” He includes a few possible responses—using high school GPA and other diagnostics, embedded remediation, or the “let them fail” approach.

He then tosses the ball to his readers, requesting examples of efficient methods for placing a lot of students in the right place in a relative short time. While it’s often dangerous to read comments on blog posts, there are some interesting suggestions in the mix—from software solutions to diagnostic tests that are directly tied to instructional modules. We’ve covered some of these approaches that are happening in DEI colleges and states here on Accelerating Achievement:

• El Paso Community College’s Pre-testing Retesting Educational Preparation (PREP) program that gives students a chance to prepare for—and retake, if necessary—the placement test
• Florida’s new diagnostic tests that are tied to a more closely aligned high school and college curricula
• Guilford Technical Community College’s face-to-face and online COMPASS reviews that include video instruction and retest opportunities

What’s working on your campus? Obviously, there are a lot of inquiring minds that want to know!

Closing Doors

The title of a Kevin Carey article in The New Republic is a question we’ve all been pondering for the past few years: “Why Are Community Colleges Being Treated Worst When They’re Needed Most?” Since the recession began, community colleges have been increasingly looked to as engines of economic recovery and to provide training for unemployed and low-income workers. Last week, President Obama once again touted their value during a speech at Lorain County Community College, an Achieving the Dream institution, in Ohio:

“When you take classes at a community college like this one and you learn the skills that you need to get a job right away, that does not just benefit you; it benefits the company that ends up hiring and profiting from your skills. It makes the entire region stronger economically. It makes this country stronger economically.”

Carey outlines at least three facets of a community college mission: “continuing education for adults, job training for local labor markets, and the first two years of a baccalaureate education.” Shining a spotlight on that mission and asking colleges to increase their productivity and flexibility isn’t a bad thing, but it has been accompanied by unprecedented resource cuts in state legislatures across the country. Calls for community colleges to do a better job are matched with slashed budgets, rather than with the investment and support that are needed for successful reform.

For decades, we’ve been working to expand access to higher education, while simultaneously trying to improve student success rates. Rising costs and reduced public investment are now threatening to reverse hard-won progress in higher education access and success. A new report by Gary Rhoades of the Center for the Future of Higher Education reveals that as enrollment caps expand and the number of educational programs narrow, many lower-income students and students of color are losing access points to postsecondary education. Rhoades explains:

“In a complicated ‘cascade effect,’ higher tuition and enrollment limitations at four-year institutions have pushed middle-class and upper middle-class students toward community colleges. This, in turn, increases competition for seats in community college classrooms at a time when funding for community colleges is being slashed and fees are increasing. As community colleges draw more affluent students, opportunity is being rationed and lower-income students (many of whom are students of color) are being denied access to higher education.”

Pushing low-income students out of the educational pipeline can only further entrench an increasingly immobile class system. A New York Times column from last month assembled some alarming data on the relationship between education and inequality. In 1970, 6.2 percent of students from low-income families attained a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24, compared to 40.2 percent of students from high-income families. By 2009, 82.4 of students from high-income families had completed a bachelor’s by age 24, but only 8.3 percent of students from low-income families were able to do so. Given that workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 82.8 percent more annually than workers with only a high school diploma, low-income youth are increasingly fated to remain low-income for their entire lives.

Remember, the Truman Commission warned us about this in 1947. When education is “prerequisite to occupational and social advance,” but is available only to the affluent, it will “become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”

With just over half of all entering community college students requiring developmental education courses, dev ed remains a main point of access to higher education. As we continue our push to improve the outcomes for students in these programs, we must not allow these programs to be rationed or slashed. Well-structured reforms can lead developmental education programs to 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 Carey explains, “opening the doors of higher education to ever more Americans is a perpetually unfinished project. But it’s a tragedy that we are simply choosing to watch some of those doors swing shut.”

Burning Bridges

A new report released this week by Complete College America (CCA) drawing on recent Community College Research Center studies and data from CCA states, is recommending major changes to developmental education programs at two- and four-year colleges to secure better outcomes—in both cost and credentials—for students. From administering assessments in high school, to using multiple diagnostics for placement, to instituting co-requisite models that place students in college-level courses with built-in support, the report highlights promising practices from across the country. The title, REMEDIATION: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere, is provocative, to be sure, and the recommendations are bold—and boldness is certainly required when so few students who begin their postsecondary journey in developmental education actually complete it. However, that “bridge to nowhere” language undervalues the successes of reformers cheered in the report who are making the system work for their students—and doesn’t fully appreciate the hard work of students who are doing the best they can with the options they’ve got. We know sometimes the truth hurts, that sometimes someone has to schedule An Intervention, and sometimes feelings are going to be hurt before you can see the hard work that really has to be done. But if we’re going to burn this “bridge to nowhere,” we’re going to need some help rebuilding it. This new report has solid recommendations for the pieces of the structure, but this isn’t a “no assembly required” kind of project. Colleges and universities will need equally solid support for the execution of these new approaches.

Maybe what we’ve got is not so much a bridge to nowhere as a rickety one-lane bridge that needs to be an eight-lane superhighway (or maybe a track for a bullet train, or an easily accessible and frequently used bike path if we want to be carbon neutral). Whatever the path, it needs to lead to credentials that set students up for family-sustaining employment and career advancement, a point noted in the report, particular regarding getting students into career-tracked programs of study as soon as possible. While CCA encourages the critical commitment of state-level government in “Governors Who Get It,” and of state legislators, reform can’t be driven only from that arena. And it can’t be driven without any gas in the tank—the resources (financial and human) to implement them. We tend to agree with Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of SUNY, in Insider Higher Ed last week. Responding to legislation in Connecticut to end most remedial education in public higher education, Zimpher said, “I applaud Connecticut’s intent to abolish remediation, but this is not a legislative issue. It’s a community issue….” Mandates like the one proposed in Connecticut (which would eliminate traditional dev ed and replace it with embedded support in credit-bearing course and require college readiness bridge programs), while drawing on practices that are showing positive preliminary results, also must consider the complexity of this kind of change in a higher ed institution—especially given increasing resource constraints. Knowing what to do doesn’t mean you know how to do it, or that your current funding allocations can support it. Such reform must take into consideration the extensive professional development that will be required to ensure that new programs are delivered effectively, as well of the cost of that training. Also essential to successful implementation will be federal, state, and institutional policy changes that align funding with new models of instruction, among other structural changes. Finally, bringing faculty along in the process (or leaving them out) can have significant impact on the success of new initiatives and the students who participate. (Katie Hern of the California Acceleration Project, one of the reformers lifted up in the CCA report—and deservedly so!—wrote about the necessity of faculty engagement in reform efforts here.) Changing the delivery mechanism probably won’t be much more effective if those doing the delivery feel like they haven’t been part of the decision-making process and feel that they don’t have the support they need to be successful.

DEI colleges and states have been hard at work on many of the CCA-recommended practices over the course of the initiative, and they’ve seen good results for their students. They’ve also experienced the sometimes labored process of building relationships across previously siloed departments, of responding at the system and institutional level to state-wide changes, and of fine-tuning messaging—repeatedly—for students, faculty, and staff so everyone really understands what is at stake and how they can benefit from doing things in a new way. We commend Complete College America for making the case for a new approach and declaring their vision for the best way forward; we hope that policy makers responding to these recommendations will carefully consider an approach to implementing these bold changes that draws on experience throughout a college, and that they’ll provide the resources—human, financial, and capital—to build a bridge to college completion that is long-lasting and gets individuals, institutions and our nation where we need to go.

For the Reading List

It’s a newsy week on Accelerating Achievement. Today, we’re highlighting recent releases from the Community College Research Center. And while we’ve not figured out how to provide a link that downloads directly to your brain, we hope that you’ll be able to find time to read the pieces that are relevant to your work.

• Predicting Success in College: The Importance of Placement Tests and High School Transcripts examines placement test and transcript validity in predicting course grades and college performance. Findings: while the placement tests aren’t very predictive, high school GPA is strongly associated with college GPA. You can read some additional commentary on this work on the JFF blog, in the New York Times, and in the Hartford Courant.  

• Student Success Courses and Educational Outcomes at Virginia Community Colleges looks at the relationship between student success course enrollment and short-term student outcomes. Findings: students enrolled in a success course in the first semester were more likely to earn college-level credit in the first year and more likely to persist to the second year. You might also like to check out these D.R.E.A.M. 2012 presentations on student success courses in Maryland, North Carolina and Texas.

• A National Center for Postsecondary Research paper, Learning Communities for Students in Developmental English: Impact Studies at Merced College and the Community College of Baltimore County, looks at the impact of semester-long learning communities linking developmental English with a variety of other courses. Findings at the two colleges were mixed.

State Policy Update

Our colleagues at Jobs for the Future have been compiling newsletters, writing reports, and posting blogs, all about developmental education, state policy, and every good thing. We wanted to be sure that you had the latest links to all this great material:

• The March 2012 edition of Achieving Success is available here. Achieving Success is the state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative, with features on all three elements of the DEI state policy framework. In data driven improvement, you'll find a synopsis of a recent convening on faculty engagement; in investment in innovation, there's a conversation with Shanna Smith Jaggers from CCRC discussing state policy implications of her recent work on the opposing forces that shape developmental education (she blogged about it here); and finally, in policy supports, you'll find viewpoints about placement polices from both SMARTER Balanced and PARCC common core assessment consortia.

•  JFF has also has released a new set of tools to help states design performance-based funding systems. You can download Tying Funding to Community College Outcomes: Models, Tools, and Recommendations for States here.

• Rachel Pleasants just completed a three-part series on the JFF blog about scaling up. The three posts, planning for scale, managing change, and ensuring that good programs make a strong impact, draw from a session at the recent ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting.

Are We Riding the Wave of the Future?

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:

1. Gadgets and blended learning: “Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime.”
2. 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.”
3. Open resources and classrooms: “Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever....”
4. 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.”
5. 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.

Links we like!

• 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!

Sir Linksalot

• 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

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!

Every birthday girl needs a network

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!

Lucky Links

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!

• 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: Understanding and Reconciling the Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Programming

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.

Fa-La-La-Links!

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 comments 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.

Linkums!

• 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.)

A Little of This; A Little of That

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.
 
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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.
 
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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.