Community College of Philadelphia has been selected as a participant in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative, a five year national initiative to improve success of community college students.
Achieving the Dream (AtD) is a long term effort funded nationally by the Lumina Foundation and locally by the Heinz Foundation. In Pennsylvania, Community College of Philadelphia is joined by Allegheny County, Beaver County, Delaware County, Montgomery County, Northampton County, and Westmorland County Community Colleges. (For more information on AtD, click the Achieving the Dream.) The work of AtD is particularly concerned with student groups that have faced the most significant barriers to success, including low-income students and students of color. It focuses colleges and others on understanding and making better use of data. It acts on multiple fronts, including efforts at community colleges and in research, public engagement and public policy.
Central to this initiative is development of a culture of evidence using data already collected and additional information to determine where gaps in student achievement may exist and to design interventions to improve success. Specifically, participating colleges have agreed to work toward increasing the percentage of student accomplishment in the following areas:
Participating colleges have made a commitment to improve the success of underserved students on their campuses, to use data to guide their decisions, and to share the information leading to student success with other institutions. In the Achieving the Dream model, every decision made at a college—from setting educational strategies and allocating resources to scheduling classes and organizing student services—is grounded in data-based student outcomes. Central to this work is setting measurable goals and making lasting, institutional change to achieve them.
The initiative also collects data from participating colleges (without any information that identifies individuals) and assembles it in the Achieving the Dream database—the only known database that allows researchers to assess the progress of community college students across institutions. By providing access to this database to all colleges, individual institutions will be able to establish common “talking points” that may add to increased student success throughout the country.
For the College, this means using our considerable data bank and developing additional data to identify cohorts of students who are more likely to experience difficulty meeting the rigors of collegiate level work and addressing those difficulties through a number of interventions. The College is well positioned to pursue this work, as our instructional strategies already include paired courses, learning communities, teaching circles, significant professional development opportunities, and a growing commitment of our faculty to address teaching/learning issues in the classroom. What Achieving the Dream offers Community College of Philadelphia is an opportunity in conjunction with state partners under the umbrella of a national initiative to assess student learning across a number of cohorts using data to determine where specific interventions are needed to improve student success. It offers faculty at the College the opportunity to talk across the institution about what works and what doesn’t and to engage in formal professional development in the service of improving student learning.
AtD has the potential of achieving over the next five years the often discussed but not yet realized transformation of our College into a leading institution in the exploration of student-centered learning using well-defined data to locate where student success needs to improve, to develop interventions that will affect improvement, and to demonstrate our accomplishments. If my assessment of our history is correct, this transformation will not come easily, if at all. For AtD is not specifically about continued development of excellent practice in various pockets and corners of the college. It is not about Teaching Circles, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning presentations,faculty book clubs, Teaching Center Workshops, and all the other excellent efforts and events that enrich the College. It is, as Associate Vice President Sharon Thompson said at a recent faculty meeting, about us, which I took to mean about us institutionally. About whether it is possible to have a collective academic voice and what that voice might sound like. It is about how we see our students, what we think they should be learning, how we assist in that learning, and how we know they have learned it.
I have long believed that for a public institution we are quite private in our practices. I recall when I first began running data from the College Achievement Partnership, I was questioned by more than one colleague about whether I really wanted to make the data public, given that a fair bit of it was less than encouraging. I understand that response. However, I thought then and I think now that it is the wrong one. I believe our primary responsibility is to know what is happening at our institution. Individual anecdote can certainly help us as I have great respect for my colleagues and their day-to-day experience. However, data can help make those experiences more institutionally coherent by projecting a portrait that can help us think collectively and creatively about issues that are central to our mission. As Sharon Thompson suggested, at this level it is not about our students, it is about us.
But having data (which, frankly, we are awash in) is not enough. Indeed, it is important to note that data solves nothing. What it does is to show if something needs to be addressed.
If, for instance, we know that students of color generally and consistently do not do as well as their white classmates, and if we know that fewer than a quarter of the students who begin in Math 016 and Math 017 are able to pass Math 118, and if we as an institution do not use this data to try to help them improve their performance, then we are doing more than failing our mission, we are failing our profession.
I wrote above about AtD having the potential to affect the often discussed but not yet realized transformation of our College into a leading institution in the exploration of student-centered learning. I don’t know that it will, but how sad if we lack the leadership and collective energy to try and make it so. As a participant over the next five years in the Achieving the Dream initiative, Community College of Philadelphia has the opportunity to become a leader in the national conversation about teaching/learning and improving student outcomes; and frankly, given the talent we have here and the work that we do, it would be about time. More importantly, however, we have the opportunity to establish a coherent context in which to carry on institutional conversations that address difficult issues using both data and experience to improve educational outcomes for our students. It is work that should engage the entire College community.
©Copyright 2007. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007