'Culture of evidence' changes classrooms
By Madeline Patton, Published February 15, 2008

ATLANTA — Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count focuses on analyzing data to make decisions. But the national initiative to improve programs and services for disadvantaged students also needs an engaged faculty and staff to retain the changes when its funding ends.

At the annual Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute here last week, faculty and staff from 79 community colleges and four universities shared what they are learning from data analyses of their students’ progress and the outcomes from pilot programs developed to address the problems identified by the data.

The four-day meeting highlighted work in 15 states on the most intractable issues confronting higher education, from improving developmental education, to addressing structural inequity and recruiting and retaining African-American men.

Colleges participating in the initiative—who are paired with "coaches" from other institutions to help them implement changes—are starting to see results from their efforts and testing new ways to use data to improve the success of low-income and minority students.

Cuyahoga Community College (Ohio) has meshed Achieving the Dream with its accreditation process, and it uses the data for budgeting and planning, according to Jerry Sue Thornton, the college’s president. Faculty members on the college’s three campuses have come aboard the initiative, seeing that decisions are now based on facts rather than "best guesses," she said.

"People understand the common agenda, the collective vision that we have for the students who are coming to us," Thornton said.

It’s taken time, but faculty and staff are grasping the college’s goal of not only getting at-risk students into the college, but also keeping them there rather than having them drop out after a few classes, Thornton said.

"I’m just really passionate about completion," she said. "‘Some college’ is not acceptable."

The imperative Thornton expressed as the "urgency of now" is evident at Achieving the Dream colleges as they work to overcome institutional inertia, stay focused and deal with the difficulties involved in the cultural shift from just access to access plus student success.

David Levinson, president of Norwalk Community College (NCC) in Connecticut, noted that the achievement gap between poor, minority students and white, wealthy students is no longer anecdotal at his college. It now has data showing black youths in the city of Norwalk "have a better chance of going to jail than they have of going to college and succeeding," he said.

"What we are doing is really life-saving," he added.

Building "deliverables" into the initiative’s implementation at NCC draws the attention of faculty members and has prompted many of them to use the college’s internal research services to analyze their teaching practices, Levinson said.

Involving many faculty and staff in Achieving the Dream has also helped to incorporate the initiative’s goals in NCC’s eight collective bargaining agreements. He noted that additional stipends for nursing faculty have helped improve retention in the program without lowering academic standards.

William Law, president of Tallahassee Community College (Florida), said his college’s administration, faculty and staff agree that it is not acceptable for minority students to perform poorly relative to white students. The bar should be the same for everyone.

"My definition of student success is students finish what they started," he said.

To attain that goal, the college must ensure students return each semester, which begins with first ensuring that they finish their courses, Law said. To do that requires getting students the help they need, he said.

Sinclair Community College (Ohio) initially tried a short-lived, top-down approach to improving student success. But by switching gears and using a faculty-led effort, the college’s developmental writing and math courses have improved, said Linda Pastore, a math instructor and Sinclair’s Achieving the Dream program coordinator.

"We knew if we were going to work on student success, changes had to occur in classrooms," she said.

Faculty learning communities meet biweekly to discuss curriculum and students’ progress, Pastore said. Faculty teams interviewed students of instructors who have asked for help with their pedagogy. Last year, 85 faculty members requested the student interviews.

When data indicated math as the biggest hurdle for students, Valencia Community College (Florida) brought the math faculty from its four campuses and three centers together to talk and collaborate "as they never had before," said Julie Phelps, a math instructor and Valencia’s Achieving the Dream project director.

The discussions were critical to bringing in faculty members. The eight faculty members who volunteered to attend professional development programs together in 2005 to improve their courses continue to lead math supplemental learning efforts.

Based on their efforts, the college recently extended supplemental learning in English and government courses, Phelps said.