Community college: Bridge to the Baccalaureate

Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education in the United States. An American Association of Community Colleges study, En Route to the Baccalaureate: Community College Student Outcomes, finds that almost half of the students who obtained a baccalaureate degree in 1999-2000 attended a community college at some point in their undergraduate career. The study examines how students incorporated community college attendance or courses into their undergraduate studies, and how the outcomes of community college students differed from or were similar to those who attended four-year institutions.


National Governors Association and Math/Science Education

National Governors Association chairwoman, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, will announce the formation of a national task force of education, business and government leaders aimed at readying America for the economy of the future. The hope is to inspire an educational renaissance in math and science that will produce students better able to compete with their counterparts worldwide. According to Napolitano, those students are “key” to building a workforce that helps the United States, and Arizona, generate technological breakthroughs and lure high-skill employers.


Community College Management Practices

What Community College Management Practices Are Effective in Promoting Student Success? is a Community College Resource Center (CCRC) study about community college management practices that promote full-time and part-time student success. Utilizing a rich set of longitudinal student unit record data to control for individual characteristics of students, the study compares colleges that have a high impact on student success with those that have a less positive impact, and student persistence in addition to completion and transfer. The study finds clear differences between high- and low-impact colleges in the area of ‘targeted support for minority students’, specifically ‘minority-inclusive campus environment’ and ‘specialized retention services for minority students’.

How to bring schools into 21st century

This article is not merely about whether a fraction of our children get "left behind", but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English. It is about the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce recommendations for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy, and whether our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial age factories, can make the necessary shifts. The skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools.


Much Too Early

In the words of Friedrich Froebel, the father of kindergarten, “The natural world is the infant’s and young child’s first curriculum, and it can only be learned by direct interaction with things.” This view of early childhood education has been echoed by all the giants of early-childhood development, supported by developmental theory, and borne out by longitudinal studies. Yet, as a result of our students’ poor performance in international comparisons of achievement, all too many early childhood educators are under pressure to provide early academic training. The author of this article questions, “why take the risky step of engaging in formal academic training of the young when we already know what works?"


Longitudinal Data

Longitudinal data make it possible to follow individual students' academic growth, determine the impact of specific programs, and identify consistently high-performing schools and systems, according to the Data Quality Campaign (DQC). The DQC has identified essential elements of a longitudinal data system and annually reports state progress in implementing each element:

• A unique statewide student identifier (42 states now report having this element, up from 36 last year);

• Student-level enrollment, demographic, and program participation information (46 states, up from 38 last year);

• The ability to match individual students' test records from year to year to measure academic growth (41 states, up from 32 last year);

• Information on untested students (30 states, up from 25 last year);

• A teacher identification system with the ability to match teachers to specific students (16 states, up from 13 last year);

• Student-level transcript information, including information on courses completed and grades earned (12 states, up from 7 last year);

• Student-level college readiness test scores (9 states, up from 7 last year);

• Student-level graduation and dropout data (40 states, up from 34 last year);

• The ability to match student records between the P-12 and postsecondary educational systems (18 states, up from 12 last year); and

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