Coming Soon: Publications Highlight Lessons Learned from the Developmental Education Initiative

The three-year Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) is drawing to a close. While the participating colleges and states are moving ahead with many of their expanded developmental education efforts, this also is a time to reflect on what we’ve learned over the last three years. We wanted to alert you to four upcoming publications from DEI partners that will delve into questions about success, challenges, and insights into where college, state, and funder priorities ought to be going forward. These publications, summarized below, will be released over the next three months. We’ll alert you when they hit the streets! We hope you’ll read them, share them, and make connections to your own work and learning.
 
Bringing Developmental Education to Scale: Lessons from the Developmental Education Initiative
Janet C. Quint, Shanna S. Jaggars, D. Crystal Byndloss, and Asya Magazinnik, MDRC and Community College Research Center
This second and final report from the official evaluation of the DEI colleges examines the degree to which the institutions scaled up their chosen developmental education reforms to serve more students, the factors that affected their ability to expand these programs and practices, and the extent to which these strategies were associated with improved student outcomes. It also considers ways that participation in DEI influenced the colleges more broadly. For these reasons, it may be of interest to other colleges looking to scale-up reforms, especially those related to instruction and the provision of student supports, as well as to funders concerned about how best to help community colleges bring promising ideas to scale. The evaluation, conducted by MDRC and its partner, the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, draws on both qualitative data (primarily interviews with key personnel at all 15 institutions) and quantitative data (information on participation and on student outcomes that the colleges regularly collected).
 
Ahead of the Curve: State Success in the Developmental Education Initiative
David Altstadt for Jobs for the Future
Building on their work through Achieving the Dream, six states and 15 community colleges joined the Developmental Education Initiative in 2009 to take on the daunting challenge of improving the success of students who enter the community college academically underprepared. Teams from the six DEI states— Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia —working with Jobs for the Future, which has managed the DEI state policy effort, co-developed an ambitious, evidence-based state policy framework to guide large-scale, multi-faceted reforms in how community colleges provide underprepared students with the skills they need to succeed in college courses. Three years later, with the initiative winding down, these states have made significant progress in adopting the DEI policy recommendations and, as a result, they have augmented, accelerated, and spread developmental education systems change across their community colleges. Ahead of the Curve spotlights the major policy accomplishments of the Developmental Education Initiative by profiling specific innovations in each of the six states and by documenting the degree to which these states have pursued common strategies and policy levers contained in the initiative’s systems-change framework.
 
Presidential Reflections: What DEI Taught Us
Edited by Madeline Patton for MDC
The Developmental Education Initiative asked 15 college leaders to take what they’d learned in early Achieving the Dream efforts and apply that to the challenge of scaling up: what resources, policies, and practices are essential to scaling up effective developmental education efforts? Finding ways to move more students through developmental education more quickly—or bypass it altogether—while maintaining successful student outcomes required leadership and commitment from every level of the organization. In this essay collection, the presidents of the 15 DEI colleges reflect on what they learned about building, embedding, and maintaining systemic change in their institutions—particularly in the difficult field of developmental education— through work with their trustees, students, faculty, staff, and community. They discuss how they and their colleges took on identifying successful innovations and scaling them up in the midst of leadership transitions, serious reductions in financial resources, and major changes in organizational structure.

What We Know: A Synthesis of DEI College Learning
Abby Parcell, MDC, and Cynthia Ferrell, Community College Leadership Program
In February 2012, MDC convened DEI college teams composed of faculty, administrators, and presidents. We mixed them up—different colleges, different states, different roles—and asked them to create the ideal path for underprepared students to get from college entry to credential completion. Drawing on their collective knowledge, particularly what they’d learned during DEI, the teams considered four points of interaction with students or potential students: early intervention and access, advising and support services, developmental education instruction, and alignment with credential and degree programs. Six teams and six hours later, we had six designs that displayed a remarkable amount of consensus about the programs, policies, and institutional supports needed to help any student be successful on the path from college enrollment to credential completion. What We Know is a synthesis of our DEI experts’ recommended best program bets, and related critical institutional policies for helping all students succeed at what they set out to accomplish in community college.

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.

Linky, Linky!

• 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.

Where in the News is Developmental Education?

1. Last month, MDRC released a report that analyzes the current research available on developmental education. In Unlocking the Gate: What We Know About Improving Developmental Education, MDRC “identifies the most promising approaches for revising the structure, curriculum, or delivery of developmental education and suggests areas for future innovations in developmental education practice and research.” 
2. A recent Hechinger Report article, “Two years after Obama’s college graduation initiative, major obstacles remain,” examines progress made towards the American Graduation Initiative’s goal of drastically improving the proportion of young people with college degrees.
3. Mark your calendars! On August 4th, Jobs for the Future and Getting Past Go are hosting an online jam. The title and topic of the real-time, online discussion will be “Ending the Failure of Severely Under-Prepared Adults in Higher Education in a Time of Fiscal Restraint.” 
4. Over at Completion Matters, you can view a video of Steven Johnson, president of one of our DEI institutions, Sinclair Community College. President Johnson discusses the role of student supports in developmental education and student success.
5. Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed ran an article from Bruce Vandal and Jane Wellman on the “5 Myths of Remedial Ed.” The authors effectively debunk five insidious, but surprisingly common, myths about developmental education:
• Myth 1: Remedial Education is K-12’s problem;
• Myth 2: Remedial Education is a Short-Term Problem;
• Myth 3: Colleges Effectively Determine College Readiness;
• Myth 4: Remedial Education is Bankrupting the System;
• Myth 5: Maybe Some Students are Just Not College Material

Scaling Up is Hard to Do

In May, MDRC released an evaluation of our 15 colleges’ first year of the Developmental Education Initiative. The evaluation examined the progress that DEI colleges are making as they work to scale up successful developmental education strategies. To structure their analysis of the factors that obstruct and reinforce college scaling efforts, MDRC used the SCALERS model that we’ve been blogging about. The evaluators found that three of the SCALERS drivers were especially important: staffing, communicating, and alliance-building. “In particular,” they write, “scaling-up was more likely to proceed smoothly when the right people could readily be found to put the strategies in place, when there was ample communication with faculty members, when the necessary parties were engaged in alliances, and when the colleges could capitalize on preexisting working relationships.”

The MDRC evaluators also distilled six lessons for colleges as they seek to scale up their strategies:

• Make sure that the best available data are used in intervention planning.
• Find numerous occasions for the college president to express early and public support for the intervention.
• Recognize that involving adjunct staff is likely to be critical for going to scale.
• Consider making staff participation in professional development activities mandatory.
• Actively market new strategies to students.
• Anticipate complexities in scheduling and arranging space.

You can download the full report here.