April 2008

Pathways Publishes Latest College Access Marketing Brief: Creating a Strategy for Community Engagement
Pathways has released the latest in its series of college access marketing briefs: Creating A Strategy for Community Engagement. This brief provides information on how to engage the target audience of your college access marketing campaign and provides current campaign examples. It also discusses how to create a database of community and audience specific contacts and determine appropriate channels to perform audience outreach.
[Read the brief]

Pathways Announces New Project Manager
Pathways is pleased to welcome Jessica Krywosa as our new Project Manager. Jessica joined TERI in February 2007 as College Access Marketing Manager, and she has worked closely with the Pathways to College Network on several projects. She will play a lead role in our Communications Campaign and the college access marketing work while providing support for many other Pathways activities and its subcommittees. Prior to joining TERI, Jessica was a Project Coordinator in the Commissioner’s Office of the Massachusetts Department of Education and a Communications Coordinator for the Massachusetts Parent Information and Resource Center (PIRC). She holds a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communication from Emerson College and a BS degree in Radio and Television Production from Northeastern University. Jessica can be reached at 617.535.6851 or Krywosa@teri.org.

Institute of Higher Education Policy Summer Academy
The Institute for Higher Education Policy will hold its 2008 Summer Academy: Cultivating Student Access and Success on July 20-24 in Birmingham, Alabama. For for more information, visit http://www.ihep.org/events/event-detail.cfm?id=6.
Please direct inquiries to summeracademy2008@ihep.org.

The National College Access Network Announces New Leadership
The National College Access Network (NCAN) has recently named Kim Kiely as its new Executive Director. Kim has been with NCAN since 1999 and serves on the College Goal Sunday Advisory Committee and the External Advisory Committee for the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs. She also served as the Interim Executive Director of the Ohio College Access Network during the summer of 2004.

Trends in Undergraduate Borrowing II: Federal Student Loans In 1995-96, 1999-2000, and 2003-04
This report from the National Center for Education Statistics updates earlier work using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study to provide an analysis of undergraduate borrowing through the federal Stafford loan programs. Findings compare borrowing by type of Stafford loan, dependency status, and income level.
[Read the report]

Beating the Odds: The Real Challenges Behind the Math Achievement Gap—And What High-Achieving Schools Can Teach Us About How to Close It
This report from Jobs for the Future features academically rigorous small schools that are bringing the highest-need students to high levels of math achievement. Prepared for the Carnegie-IAS Commission on Mathematics and Science Education, Beating the Odds documents how these schools address the deep-rooted instructional and organizational flaws of traditional school design to close the gap in math achievement. Suggestions on new areas of research focus on the need for additional information concerning what makes these exceptional schools work and what it will take to implement these practices on a large scale.
[Read the report]

The Digest of Education Statistics, 2007
The Digest, now available from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, is a compilation of statistical information from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. It includes data from many sources, both government and private. Information in the Digest includes data on the number of schools and colleges, teachers, enrollments, and graduates, in addition to educational attainment, finances, federal funds for education, libraries, and international education. Supplemental information on population trends, attitudes on education, education characteristics of the labor force, government finances, and economic trends provides background for evaluating education data.
[Read the report]

State High School Exit Exams: Students with Disabilities
The brief from the Center on Education Policy reports that states with mandated high school exit exams consistently report low pass rates for students with disabilities. These low pass rates have led educators to implement various intervention and remediation programs. Yet these gaps persist until the end of 12th grade, even though students have had multiple opportunities to retake the exam. The brief highlights some of the most common alternative paths to graduation for student with disabilities in states that require students to achieve passing scores on exit exams to receive a high school diploma.
[Read the report]

Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation
A new report from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center looks at the performance of America’s largest cities and surrounding metropolitan areas on high school completion. Cities in Crisis finds that graduation rates “are considerably lower in the nation’s largest cities than they are in the average urban locale.” The report notes that only about 52 percent of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma.
[Read the report]

The Chafee Education and Training Voucher (ETV) Program: Six States’ Experiences
This report from Casey Family Programs examines how the Chaffee educational and training vouchers and other state-based supports for higher education have been serving college students in foster care. The National Foster Care Coalition (NFCC) worked closely with California, Maine, Montana, New York, North Carolina, and Wyoming to examine the implementation of the Chafee ETV Program since its inception in 2003. These states were selected to provide a diverse view of ETV program implementation, including state- and county-administered child welfare programs, urban and rural programs, and programs serving either very large or very small populations of youth. This publication documents a select number of young people’s experiences with the ETV program and shares recommendations from constituents and other stakeholders on how to improve this postsecondary education and training program.
[Read the report]