DEI: What We Know
1/30/2013
States and colleges in the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) completed their grant program last December. While they are all moving ahead with many of their expanded developmental education efforts, we took some time to look back on what we’ve...
Y'all Have Been Busy!
12/13/2012
We want to make sure you know about three new publications that have come out in the last few weeks, all courtesy of our DEI state policy partner, Jobs for the Future (and some of their esteemed colleagues):
In Ahead of the Curve: State Success in t...
Coming Soon: Publications Highlight Lessons Learned from the Developmental Education Initiative
11/1/2012
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 lear...
New Workshop Helps Peer Leaders Keep Students On Course!
9/26/2012
Today’s post comes from Ruth Silon, executive director of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges’ Student Success Center and former DEI director and English faculty member at Cuyahoga Community College (CCC). Ruth describes how CCC combined what...
A President's Reflection: Scaling with Fidelity
9/4/2012
Last week, we discussed different ways to describe the return on investment from a particular program. A convincing ROI can go a long way in generating support for a scaling strategy. In today’s post, Sanford C. “Sandy” Shugart, president of Valenci...
R to the O to the I
8/23/2012
In March, we released More to Most: Scaling Up Effective Community College Practices, a guidebook that lays out a process for identifying promising practices and developing an expansion plan so that good programs reach as many students as possible. ...
Is it worth it?
8/21/2012
In March, we released More to Most: Scaling Up Effective Community College Practices, a guidebook that lays out a process for identifying promising practices and developing an expansion plan so that good programs reach as many students as possible. C...
Guest Post: A Closer Look at Accelerating Opportunity
8/8/2012
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 ...
Improving Student Success at Sinclair CC: Lessons from Three Initiatives
7/31/2012
In today’s post, Kathleen Cleary, associate provost for student success at Sinclair Community College, recaps her presentation from the June 2012 Conference on Developmental Education sponsored by the National Center for Postsecondary Research. Kathl...
Link Link Link
7/27/2012
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 tw...
Reporting for Duty
7/13/2012
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 exper...
Let's Try This Again: Links!
7/6/2012
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 f...
Scaling Social Impact: NYC Edition
7/3/2012
Earlier this month, we attended the Social Impact Exchange’s annual Symposium on Scaling Social Impact. The Symposium brought together nonprofit organizations, funders, consultants, and evaluators to share knowledge about bringing social solutions to...
You Can't Handle the Links
5/25/2012
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...
Patrick Henry Community College: Predicting Success
5/23/2012
We’re indebted to Greg Hodges, dean of developmental education and transitional programs, and Kevin Shropshire, director of institutional research, at Patrick Henry Community College for their contributions to this post.
In 2009, at the beginning of...
The Blog is Back in Town
5/16/2012
Accelerating Achievement has been a bit quiet for a couple of weeks. The elves have been called to other areas of the workshop, but they’re back in business now. Good thing our colleagues across the dev ed field have still been cranking out all sort...
Crowdsourcing the Placement Test Dilemma
4/25/2012
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 prepa...
Closing Doors
4/24/2012
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 i...
Burning Bridges
4/20/2012
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 ...
Replicating Impact
4/18/2012
Today, we’re returning to our “SCALERS: Round 2” series. Originally created by Paul Bloom, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-buil...
Come and Get It!
4/11/2012
Hey blog readers! There's some new material in the Resources section of the Developmental Education Initiative website. The DEI team at Cuyahoga Community College has agreed to share three pieces that they've developed as part of their DEI work. In t...
This Week in Links: Equity, Policy, Analytics, and Peeps!
4/5/2012
Sara Goldrick-Rab posted this week about the assault on community colleges (and, by extension, on equity): “That's right—students are showing up at ‘open door’ colleges and being effectively turned away. Welcome to the ‘new normal.’”
Getting Past ...
For the Reading List
3/29/2012
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 a...
State Policy Update
3/28/2012
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 mat...
OH - IO!
3/27/2012
Not only is the state representing in the Final Four, they're representing in developmental education reform. Last week in Community College Times, Madeline Patton featured three Ohio DEI colleges and three unique approaches to dev ed innovation. Pat...