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.

Guest Post: A Closer Look at Accelerating Opportunity

Today, Rachel Pleasants, senior project manager at Jobs for the Future, shares the inside scoop on a national effort to restructure adult basic education, another part of the postsecondary pipeline that shares some characteristics—and students—with developmental education programs.

Accelerating Opportunity, an initiative managed by Jobs for the Future, has ambitious goals: to change the way adult basic education (ABE) is structured and delivered at the state and college levels so that substantially more low-skilled adults get the education and credentials they need to access family-supporting careers. Building on Washington’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) program and the Breaking Through initiative, Accelerating Opportunity promotes the development of integrated pathway models that combine ABE with career and technical training.

It’s clear that postsecondary credentials are essential for accessing jobs that pay a living wage, but these credentials are out of reach for many adults without a high school diploma or GED. Low-skilled adults seeking to advance their education and career face numerous barriers to success, including a lack of career guidance and disconnected educational systems. Like developmental education students, ABE students often find themselves in long remedial sequences, with very few ultimately transitioning to postsecondary credit-bearing programs.

Through Accelerating Opportunity, JFF and our partners and funders aim to address the systemic barriers that prevent low-skilled adults from achieving their goals. We believe that in order for this to happen, states and their colleges have to focus on three areas: developing career pathways, shifting their culture to one that views ABE as an important part of the postsecondary pipeline, and building in plans for scale and sustainability. This is a major undertaking that includes changes in policy as well as practice. And not only are we asking states and colleges to engage in systems change, we are asking them to do it at scale: each implementation state in the initiative (five so far) has committed to awarding at least 3,600 credentials to students in the target population within three years.

The initiative began with a one-year design phase; in November 2011, the leadership team selected Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina to move into the implementation phase. In May 2012, we added Louisiana as a fifth state. Across these five states more than forty colleges are developing and implementing integrated pathways.

Far from being deterred from the ambitious goals set out by Jobs for the Future along with its funders and partners, the states have embraced the Accelerating Opportunity vision and are already producing results. Less than a year into the implementation work, nearly all the participating colleges have pathway programs in place, enrolling a total of more than 800 students. Students and faculty are beginning to see the benefits of an integrated pathway approach and the team teaching model. Partnerships between ABE, career and technical education, the workforce system, and TANF agencies are being developed and strengthened. Some states have even begun to move toward policy changes. In Illinois, for example, ABE outcomes, including transition to postsecondary, is now part of the state’s performance funding formula. In Kansas, the eligibility criteria of a state scholarship fund have been revamped to better target AO students.

There are still many challenges ahead for the five states, including funding (especially given the loss of Pell’s Ability to Benefit provision), recruitment, professional development, and stakeholder engagement.  But we see a remarkable commitment on the part of state and college leaders to developing the types of pathways and structures that will enable many more low skilled-adults to access and succeed in postsecondary training. For example, the governors in many of the implementation states have supported JFF and other national organizations in advocating for the inclusion of an exception to the Ability to Benefit change for students enrolled in career pathway programs.

There is a growing national emphasis on career pathway development and an increasing awareness of the importance of postsecondary education, and the goals of Accelerating Opportunity are aligned with these national trends. JFF and our partners and funders believe that Accelerating Opportunity has the potential to raise the profile of adult basic education, ensure its inclusion in the college completion agenda, and ultimately provide thousands of adults with access to economic opportunity. In all this work, there is shared commitment with other national initiatives like Achieving the Dream and DEI as well as collaboration and peer learning toward a shared goal: accelerating progress for all students toward postsecondary credentials.

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.

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.

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.

Many Happy Returns

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.

Guest Post: Coordinating State Policy for Completion

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 detailed how states are investing resources in that innovation. The final installment, below, makes the case for a continuous improvement cycle focused on strengthening policy supports.

Only twenty-five out of one hundred students who take developmental education ever earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, a fact that is unlikely to change without more strategic use of state policy. Many community colleges are working to improve completion rates, but successful innovation typically happens in isolation. The lack of coordinated effort reflects that local, state, and national infrastructure for systemic improvement is not up to the challenge of graduating academically underprepared students. This is why the third component of the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Strategy is policy supports.

Policy supports, admittedly, is a “catch all” term. In the Developmental Education Initiative, we broadly define this area of work as state-level policies that establish the necessary conditions for community colleges to redesign their approach to serving academically underprepared students. Focusing on policy supports can do three specific things to dramatically increase completion rates for developmental education students:

• 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.

New JFF publication on Virginia Dev Ed Redesign

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.

This Just In!

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Up with DEI: Connecticut

Connecticut State Policy Blog Post
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of DEI’s state policy and college accomplishments. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. We’re leading off with Connecticut, the Constitution State!

The Connecticut Community College (CCC) system Chancellor’s Office serves as the state team lead for Connecticut’s ATD/DEI state policy work. Two of the state’s 12 community colleges participate in DEI (Housatonic and Norwalk), but the system has made great efforts to leverage ATD/DEI data collection, learning, and progress across all twelve institutions. In the last year, Connecticut has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• A business intelligence tool is in beta testing for state-wide implementation; training is underway for a launch at all 12 Connecticut Community College system institutions.
• The system contributed data collection and analysis in a Connecticut Association for Human Services report: Developmental Education at Connecticut Community Colleges: The Key to Economic Recovery in February 2011.

Investment in Innovation

• A CCC’s Chancellor incentive funding program announced in 2010-2011 included:
• $50,000 per college devoted to developmental education initiatives
• $1.24M in incentive funding for improvements in intermediate benchmarks and developmental education outcomes
• $5,000 per college to support faculty involvement and professional development in curriculum redesign efforts.
• A professional development fund to support faculty participation at developmental education conferences to encourage utilization and dissemination of best practices throughout the system.

All 12 colleges will be invited to submit proposals for participation in the fund. 

Policy Supports

• Further support for longitudinal tracking system has been secured with an agreement between the State Department of Education and higher education units, and new legislation requiring unique identifiers on high school transcripts to facilitate data analysis on student success in college and the state’s workforce.
• The System also led a series of developmental education convenings in the last year:
• A Developmental Education Forum including the chancellor, presidents, academic deans, and deans of students.
• A Developmental Education Task Force; the task force submitted policy recommendations to the Council of Presidents in June 2011.

For more details on DEI state policy accomplishments, check out Jobs For the Future’s latest DEI publication Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education Outcomes.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

Guest Post: You’ve Got a Friend—Supportive State Policy for Dev Ed Innovation

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 Framework. In the first of a three-part series about the framework, Michael shows how collecting the right data can inform state policy that can accelerate dev ed innovation across a system—and introduces a new JFF publication that details how states are doing just that.

There is a lot of talk about fixing developmental education these days. In most people’s mind, this looks like a teacher in a classroom who is teaching better—and thus, students are learning better. That’s not a bad thing. Better teaching is an important part of the solution. For all the energy devoted to technological innovation in instructional delivery, the classroom continues to hold its own as the most widely used venue to serve academically underprepared students. Teaching and learning are central to improving outcomes in developmental education.

State policy, on the other hand, does not come to mind when thinking about improving outcomes in developmental education. But policy can make a big difference in identifying and spreading effective teaching practices, which can contribute to deeper and more sustained learning.

Now, teaching and learning is a somewhat private enterprise between a teacher and a student—behind closed classroom doors. Smartly designed state policy can open these doors. For example, states—particularly those with community college systems—can use their data and performance measurement systems to identify institutions that consistently do the best job of accelerating students through developmental education, through math and English gatekeeper courses, and on to programs that are tied to credentials and degrees. The hypothesis is that analyzing student outcomes will lead to conversations with high performing colleges, which will lead to a better understanding about effective practices—including good teaching.

States can go further to document and disseminate effective teaching practices once identified. This might include the development and maintenance of a central repository of teaching resources or an innovators network where faculty are convened on a systematic basis to share proven-practices and serve as resources to each other. Optimally, it might be both.

State policy can go a long way to support better teaching and learning. Currently, there are few examples of states using their data and performance measurement systems in a robust way to identify and spread successful practices. The six states participating in the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) are changing this. They are implementing a three-part change strategy featuring data-driven improvement, investment in innovation, and policy supports.

Under the first component of the strategy—data-driven improvement—the states are actively fashioning their data and performance measurement systems so that they can identify high performing colleges and begin to pinpoint effective strategies as described above. You can find out more about their progress by checking out Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education here.

We’ll take up the second strategy, investment in innovation, next time! Until then…

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

We Heart Wonks: A Friday DEI State Policy Review

• Jobs for the Future just released their latest edition of Achieving Success, the state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative, which highlights and profiles new state-level innovations, policy supports, and data-driven improvements. This issue features Florida’s new student success dashboard, Connecticut’s dev ed redesign task force, and Arkansas’ plans for developmental educator professional development. You can find it on the DEI website’s Resources page under “State Policy.”
• In other news, it was a banner week for developmental education bills in the Texas Legislature. We posted in April about the impact that the DEI state policy team in Texas was having on the content of two House bills. This week, both bills passed the Texas House and Senate. Cynthia Ferrell, director of the Texas Developmental Education Initiative state policy team, tells us, “After learning about the Community College Research Center work on the ineffectiveness of online developmental education offerings, the language in HB 1244 and SB 1564 was changed from mandating online DE to include support for ‘a range of developmental coursework or instructional support that includes the integration of technology to efficiently address the particular developmental needs of the student.’“ The bills also address the need for new research-based and diagnostic assessment, encourage the use of course and non-course based dev ed, establishes alternative dev ed funding structures, and promotes professional development for developmental educators.

Heads Up

Happy Friday, all! We wanted to alert you to a few good reads before the weekend.

Yesterday, our friends at Jobs for the Future released a revamped Achieving Success newsletter. The new version is going to be published bimonthly and will be chock full of updates about how the ATD/DEI State Policy Teams are advancing dev ed reform. In the latest edition, we learned about the Center for Student Success in Michigan, developmental math redesign in North Carolina, and ABLE/Dev Ed integration in Ohio. The newsletter is not available online, but you can subscribe to future editions.

Today, Dean Dad wrote about developmental education on his “Confessions of a Community College Dean” blog over at Inside Higher Ed. Based on research suggesting that students likelihood of success decreases as they spend more time in dev ed, he ponders ideas getting students through these courses more quickly or letting them bypass them altogether. Looks like he thinks we need to escape the weight of history, too.

Guest Post: ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting Recap

Greetings from the Jobs for the Future ATD/DEI team! On February 8-9, 2011, we convened our state policy leaders and advocates in Indianapolis for our semi-annual ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting. During our two days together – and with an eye on student success – we applauded our recent achievements, revisited our initiative goals, and discussed how best to make progress given the current state policy environment.

As conversations with our states unfolded, we took care to recognize that the ongoing fiscal crisis and limited evidence on effective interventions pose serious challenges. We created a space in which our state policy leads could learn and share – and we worked with them to be well positioned to make smart choices over the next year and a half of work.

Highlights included:

• Engaging and spirited dialogue during our plenary sessions on data-driven improvement, investments in innovation, and policy supports – followed by concurrent breakout sessions led by guest presenters, state policy team leaders, and JFF staff.
• Presentations from higher education experts such as Kevin Dougherty and Shanna Smith Jaggars of the Community College Research Center, providing us with insight on the latest research evidence and its implications for policy.
• A rousing lunchtime keynote from Uri Treisman of The University of Texas at Austin in which he targeted faculty development, well-executed modularization, and student surveys as proactive methods for improving student completion. 
• Participation in a hands-on data exercise hosted by JFF’s Keith Brown, and Florida Department of Education’s John Hughes, spurring such questions as: How and why are some institutions more successful than others? How can we train staff and faculty to better understand and analyze data? And finally, how do we create a common language around data?
• The emergence of topics that warrant increased attention at the state and institutional levels – including new approaches to performance funding, methods of better engaging faculty, and taking the data-use conversation to the next level.

Over the next 18 months, the DEI states are poised and ready to continue making great strides. We look forward to continuing these discussions at our summer convening in Miami from July 26-27, 2011. See you there!

Katrina Reichert is a project manager at Jobs for the Future.

Read All About It!

We can always count on our colleagues at Jobs for the Future for the latest news. At yesterday's ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting, I learned about a few recent publications that might interest you:

• Michael Collins, Program Director at JFF, contributed to the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Developmental Education. Michael's piece, "Bridging the Evidence Gap in Developmental Education," looks at conflicting perspectives on current developmental education research, examines the rigor of that research, and proposes an expanded research agenda. You can download the issue table of contents and the full abstract. The Journal of Developmental Education is published by the National Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University and is the official publication of the National Association of Developmental Education. 
• The Community College Research Center released two new pieces in their Assessment of Evidence Series: "Assessing Developmental Assessment in Community Colleges" by Kathrine Hughes and Judith Scott-Clayton and "Reforming Mathematics Pedagogy: Evidence-Based Findings and Recommendations for the Developmental Math Classroom" by Michelle Hodara. You can read an introduction to this series here.

We'll be diving deeper into these publications--and some of the other great information shared at the ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting--in the coming weeks.


Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

Guest Post: Levers for Change

Institutional change can be even more transformative (and sustainable) when it’s backed by supportive state policy. That’s why the Developmental Education Initiative—with leadership from Jobs for the Future (JFF)--also includes six state policy teams.They’re tackling questions like: In which policy areas should states concentrate their efforts to improve outcomes for students who test into developmental education? And how do those areas interact to accelerate change? They’re already well on their way to answering them, using the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Framework and Strategy. 

The Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) builds on the foundation of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. After collaborating with DEI state leads, consulting the research literature, and receiving advice from national experts, JFF identified six priority state policy levers:

• Aligned expectations (P-16)
• Assessment and placement
• Data performance and measurement
• Developmental education innovation and redesign
• Integration of academic and student services,
• Finance

But developing consensus on policy levers is not sufficient to improve student success.  Thus, we developed the DEI State Policy Strategy, a state-level developmental education improvement strategy that incorporates the above levers into three innovation-focused action priorities:

• A Data-Driven Improvement Process that ensures the right conditions for innovation. This includes data and performance measurement activities, specifically identifying the right success measures (including intermediate measures that indicate if a student is on track for success) and protocols for systematic sharing of results as a part of state-level processes for continuous improvement.
• A State-Level Innovation Investment Strategy that helps states align and coordinate support from multiple sources to provide incentives for the development, testing, and scaling up of effective models for helping underprepared students succeed.
• Policy Supports that provide a foundation for improved outcomes for underprepared students, facilitate the implementation of effective and promising models, and encourage the spread of successful practices.

Here’s an example of how one state policy team is employing these strategy: The Connecticut Community College System (CCCS) has two DEI colleges, but has leveraged its support for improved outcomes across the other 10 community colleges in the system. CCCS secured resources to provide $50,000 seed money for innovation initiatives in all 12 of the System’s colleges. This investment in innovation, in combination with additional funding for performance, is designed to accelerate institutional innovation across the state.

When the elements of this framework are combined with support for a state-level network of institutional innovators, assisted by strong state-level technical assistance services, we believe states will accelerate the creation of solutions and pathways that improve outcomes for students who test into developmental education.

Michael Collins is a Program Director at Jobs for the Future

For more information see the DEI State Policy Framework and Strategy, available on the Resources page under "State Policy."

Welcome!

Welcome to the new DEI website and blog! Our updated, more outwardly focused website will accommodate a growing number of requests from practitioners outside of the initiative to share in what we’re learning. The majority of our resources are now available on the public side of the website. Here at the “Accelerating Achievement” blog you’ll find posts about current news, learning, and research as well as highlights of the work that’s being done in DEI colleges and states. We’ll share our viewpoint on how this learning can be taken up on other campuses and states—and we hope you’ll share your perspective, too.

We’ll update weekly—and as inspiration strikes. But just to show you all of the impressive happenings, we’ll be posting even more frequently for the next two weeks. Our blog entries will focus on eight main topics:

• Statewise. DEI’s state policy teams, coordinated by Jobs For the Future, are pushing state community college systems and legislatures to change outdated and cumbersome rules, funding, and incentive structures that stand in the way of innovation. Look here for examples of how policy teams and front-line innovators are working together.
• Talking About Dev Ed. Varied definitions and passionate opinions can make conversations about developmental education tricky, so we’re developing messaging strategies that practitioners, college leaders, and policymakers can use to garner support. We’ll share them here.
• In the News. We’ll keep an eye on media coverage of developmental education—and spice it up with a little analysis and conversation starters.
• Scaling Up. MDC is harvesting the latest thinking on scaling from the social innovation and enterprise field. We’ll serve it up here, calling attention to tools and resources that can help colleges and states increase the impact of their innovation.
• Innovation Highlight. Colleges inside and outside the Initiative are developing new strategies to get students through dev ed successfully. In this section, we’ll get the inside scoop on all that innovation.
• Tales of Technical Assistance. Our colleges are making use of the DEI Technical Assistance Providers to overcome barriers to expanding effective programs. We’ll spotlight some successes on the loop of continuous improvement.
• DEI Dispatches. There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. We’ll be highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas here. 

If you have any feedback or ideas about how we can make this blog more informative or interesting, please be in touch. We’re excited. Can you tell? If you’ve got recommendations about people, innovations, or anything else we need to know about, send us an email.

Maggie Shelton is MDC's Senior Program Director for the Developmental Education Initiative.