Bridges initiative fuses adult education, training
By GARRY BOULARD, Published March 28, 2008

More than five years after the launch of the Ford Foundation’s ambitious Bridges to Opportunity initiative, Barbara Endel is convinced that it has turned out to be not only a strong unifier of community colleges in Ohio but also the sole reason why a notoriously disparate state adult education program transformed into a single operating entity.

Traditionally, all adult education and career education programs are under the direction of the Ohio Department of Education, said Endel, a consultant to the Knowledge Works Foundation. But the state’s community college system is housed under a separate agency, the Ohio Board of Regents, which makes for an “inefficient and cumbersome way of doing business,” she said.

But some $3 million in funding from Bridges to Opportunity helped spur a dialogue between the different adult and career education entities in Ohio as well as bring the two- and four-year systems under the Board of Regents.

“We were finally able to transition our adult basic and career technical education programs into one agency in order to better coordinate things,” Endel said. “And if you know anything at all about how slow government can work sometimes, you would know that this is a very big change.” 

Similarly, in Washington state, community college and adult education leaders, among others, came together to address integrating their missions, a challenge that Tina Bloomer thinks ultimately prompted educators to tackle an old problem in a new way.

“We had up and running adult basic education, workforce education and transfer education as part of our mission here,” said Bloomer, director of student achievement projects with the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). “But what we wanted to do was look at how we could move people all the way from adult education to getting an applied baccalaureate, which is something we had not done before.”

Through a series of planning and implementation grants through Bridges to Opportunity, Bloomer, who has also served as the state project director for the initiative, said the system led a pilot effort called Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (IBST), which allowed community colleges to bring their many different efforts together. Basically, IBST fuses occupational training with adult basic education, allowing for a more seamless overall educational experience.

An example might be someone who is in a special technical program, such as welding, truck driving or health care, and wants to advance into management, said Suzy Ames, director of communications at SBCTC. The integrated offerings allow students to layer courses such as management, human resources and accounting on top of their career technical degree education and training, she said.

Such innovations are what Bridges to Opportunity was designed to inspire, said Kay McClenney, an adjunct faculty member at the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The Ford Foundation had as its vision working with community colleges in terms of institutional practices, and state entities in terms of state policies, to see what could be done to ensure that more low-income adults make it to and through postsecondary education and onto further education or family-supporting jobs,” said McClenney, who served on the leadership team for the initiative.

Through a series of multi-year grants targeting six states—Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio and Washington—the program was designed not only to spur the integration of various services but also to research new ways for community colleges to expand educational and economic opportunities for disadvantaged students.

“It has been a very wide-ranging effort from the start, and it has also been successful from the start,” said Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University (New York), who tracks Bridges to Opportunities projects.

The program essentially tests a theory that community colleges are well-situated to serve low-income students because of the institutions’ missions—they offer remediation, which many low-skilled, low-income adults need, and they also offer programs that lead toward certificates, degrees and jobs, Jenkins said.

But many colleges don’t link such programs, which makes it hard for students to work toward a degree, he said.

“There are linkage points and there are barriers that these students run up against as they try to go from remediation or adult literacy to a college-level program. So the idea has been to bring about changes in policy to facilitate more coherent pathways for students,” Jenkins said.

In New Mexico, that has meant funding through the initiative to support mini-grants to develop career pathways for students through the state. The business community, which is always looking for qualified skilled workers, is especially happy about this.

“For too many years we have been in the business of exporting our young people out of the state in search of jobs and career opportunities,” said Larry Langley, president and CEO of the New Mexico Business Roundtable for Educational Excellence.

The grants helped bring business and industry advisory councils together to focus on specific career clusters, such as the dairy, oil and health care industries, while also working with individual community colleges and the high schools in colleges’ districts, Langley said.

 “Any student will be able to tap into one of these business advisory councils through the different community colleges around the state,” Langley said. “That  could result in an internship or an externship, whatever the case may be, all with the idea of really giving student a chance to understand an industry right within their own college district.”

 Bridges to Opportunity, which launched in 2002, wasn’t designed as a permanent initiative, but rather to inspire permanent changes, said Joe Voeler, a spokesperson for the Ford Foundation.

“The initiative will be wrapping up everywhere over the course of the next year. But we’ve been funding community colleges for decades now, so that support will obviously continue in one form or another,” Voeler said.

Participating colleges said that many of the changes are permanent, thanks to the longevity of the initiative.

“With this effort, there was a very serious desire to make sure that the policy changes we made were institutionalized, so that they would outlast the people who are coming and going in and out of state government,” Endel said.