Imagine Success

Imagine Success presents preliminary findings from the 2008 field test of the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), including emerging strategies for engaging entering students, and encourages readers to consider not only how to promote greater achievement, but how institutions would have to adapt current “ways of doing education” if they succeed. The report asserts that attaining significantly better outcomes requires transformational change in institutional culture - with an affirmation of values and beliefs that place student success as the highest priority. It asks readers to imagine a college where the conditions for success are thoughtfully, purposefully set up in the first three weeks of each student’s college life, and then imagine what could be done in week four, in week 10, and for the rest of the year, and next year, and the year following.

The American Association of Community Colleges and the Association of Community College Trustees, in partnership with the College Board, have launched an effort to develop a Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) for Community Colleges to ensure that the effectiveness and contributions of colleges focusing on institutional accountability are properly measured. Performance Accountability Systems for Community Colleges discusses the results of a study commissioned by the College Board to

1. identify the performance measures that states are already using for their community colleges;
2. explore how well those measures articulate with the data demanded by IPEDS and the regional accrediting associations; and
3. shed light on the experiences of state higher education officials and local community college leaders with the collection and use of state performance data.

About a week into any class at Rio Salado College, officials can make a pretty good guess as to which students will succeed and which ones will not. The college, where more than half of the 64,000 students pursue their degrees online, has devised a system of predictive modeling that officials believe can forecast, with 70% accuracy, how likely it is that a student will achieve a "C" grade or higher (the threshold for transferable credits) in a given course. The tool is intended to help identify at-risk students early enough that instructors can intervene. “We’re trying to really understand the true behavior of the student based on reality,” says Adam Lange, the programmer analyst at Rio Salado who designed the system, “and then use that information to be able to make informed, data-driven decisions about how we can help students.” Other colleges are experimenting with similar systems.

This issue of ECS’ The Progress of Education Reform, Transfer and Articulation: Paving the Way to Degree Completion, looks at recent research on transfer and articulation in light of the new movement to increase degree attainment by addressing the following questions.

1. Do articulation agreements ease the transfer process and lead to degree attainment
2. What are the factors that facilitate or impede transfer; and
3. How can four-year, baccalaureate-degree-granting institutions ensure that transfer students succeed?

When educators returned to Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, they decided to rebuild the schools not as they once were - traditional educational environments with very little technology overall - but as a place to empower learners to thrive in the 21st century. With a grant from Cisco Systems, the district turned 16 of its schools into models of Education 3.0, with updated data centers, wireless connectivity, network upgrades, advanced classroom technology, and more. The Education 3.0 concept focuses on creating schools where technology isn't just layered on top of traditional processes, but is woven seamlessly through all aspects of education, interconnecting all facets of school life, and truly revolutionizing the education experience. The success of Jefferson Parish has attracted the attention of other districts around the United States, providing educators with a view into a new educational model: teaching 21st-century skills to an increasingly tech-literate student population in a way that is engaging, efficient, and deeply educational.

Many school factors contribute to student learning and can help prepare students for their lives beyond school. But many studies have shown that the single most important factor within a school's control in promoting student learning is the quality of instruction. To create the conditions for improved teaching, one must first define good teaching. Many schools and districts (as well as some states and a few countries) have adopted the Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2007) as their definition of good teaching. The Framework is a research-based set of instructional components that are grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching and aligned to the 10 principles of the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. It describes those aspects of a teacher's practice that have been demonstrated to promote student learning, and divides the complex work of teaching into four major domains: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.

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Schools Need a Culture Shift

Despite the involvement of new people in Washington, we are grasping at old, limited ideology to the detriment of the breadth, richness, and creativity we need. How do we bridge the gap between the culture of our classrooms and that of our best work environments, and prepare students to enter cutting-edge business environments? Surely not in the current classroom milieu, fostered by an overreliance on narrow measures of achievement based on standardized tests that do not measure the skills and competencies needed to thrive in today’s world - teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Instead, let us take lessons from the individual teachers and schools in the traditional public school arena, as well as in magnet and charter schools, that are succeeding wonderfully in bringing these essential qualities, and high test scores, to their students’ education. Because they deserve to grow into extraordinary individuals, not just a record of test scores, we must expand and implement this culture for all our students. If we don’t do this now, our nation will pay for it soon, and for a very long time.