Laboratories of achievement
IN MASSACHUSETTS, community colleges often double as punching bags. They get hit for having low graduation rates, for not doing enough to train the state's work force, for not being as good as their peers in California and North Carolina. But tongue lashings won't help the colleges find the ingredients for student success.
Happily, four of the state's 15 community colleges are getting good news. Bunker Hill Community College, Northern Essex Community College, Roxbury Community College, and Springfield Technical Community College have each been awarded private Achieving the Dream grants -- $450,000 over five years to find ways to drive student success.
The strategy is for the colleges to gather data on student performance, analyze it, see where students fail -- especially low-income and minority students -- and devise programs that help them achieve. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, the grants have been given to more than 80 colleges in 15 states, essentially creating a national, multi site laboratory for experiments in success.
Northern Essex has already started gathering data and debating what it means, according to the college's president, David Hartleb. He says his faculty is fully engaged and has "6 million" ideas about how to improve student success. Hartleb says that more important than the grant's funding is its technical assistance. Each college is assigned a coach and a data facilitator. Many of the coaches are themselves former community college presidents. The data facilitators help colleges use the data to set up new programs and to monitor and evaluate these programs.
Mary Fifield, the president of Bunker Hill, has been trying to get a dream grant for several years. Now the school can build on work that's being funded by a federal grant. Bunker Hill is in the planning stages of developing learning communities -- groups of "like-minded" students who would take classes together. Fifield also sent a team to study LaGuardia Community College in New York, especially its award-winning first-year academy. This program places freshmen in an academy based on their major. Students take remedial and content courses that are thematically linked, and they produce e-portfolios, web sites of their work that are essentially electronic chronicles of their college progress. LaGuardia officials say the program has improved retention and pass rates.
Roxbury Community College is haunted by a past filled with controversy and poor management. Asked about those years, President Terrence Gomes stays focused on the present, where he says he can actually do some good.
Among the current developments at the college are its faculty academies, a professional development effort. Building on this base, Gomes says that the dream grant can help faculty understand more about students' lives and academic needs as a means of designing more effective instructional strategies. Gomes is out to change attitudes about how much his college can accomplish.
Springfield president Ira Rubenzahl has been talking to colleagues in Connecticut, where three of that state's 12 community colleges are using Achieving the Dream grants to look at remedial courses, where dropout rates are high. (Rubenzahl was the former president of Capital Community College in Hartford.) One experiment is to speed up remedial math classes, getting students through in five weeks instead of 15 by setting up classes using Plato, an educational software program that lets students work at their own pace. Connecticut is also gathering data to push for policy reform in federal financial aid to help students taking remedial classes -- a move that could also help students in Massachusetts .
The final analysis of Achieving the Dream will be done in 2010 by MDRC, a nonprofit research organization in New York and Oakland. But MDRC and the Community College Research Center, part of Columbia University, already have issued a preliminary report with information that could help Massachusetts.
One popular tool colleges use is a success course -- particularly useful for first-generation and non traditional students who are unfamiliar with college life. Done well, these courses essentially hand students the campus keys. They can offer tips on picking courses, financial aid, computers, and study and time-management skills. Frequently offered, these courses aren't always required. Data could help decide if they should be.
The report also says that administrators face "two common obstacles to building a culture of evidence: difficulty retrieving and analyzing data from information technology systems and limited institutional research capacity." To succeed, community colleges need good computers and well-trained staff.
On some issues, however, there's no need for research. The solutions are clear. If community colleges had more money, they could hire more full-time faculty and counselors, the people who can breathe life and warmth into educational innovations.
To achieve the dream of education as a step up in life, students, campuses, and public-policy makers should unite in the pursuit of evidence-based strategies for success.
