|
From Ann Coles, Director, Pathways to College Network
and
Sr. Vice President, College Access, The
Education Resources Institute (TERI)
Dear Colleagues:
 Twelve months have passed since the standing-room-only event at the
National Press Club when the Pathways to College Network released A Shared Agenda: A
Leadership Challenge to Improve College Access and Success. The
consensus report was a major milestone for the Network, representing three years
of unprecedented collaborative effort between 34 influential education
organizations, professional associations, higher education systems, and
education funders around the country to improve college access and success for
underserved students.
 Demand for the printed version of the reports was so high that we
quickly depleted our first 5,000 copies and printed 10,000 more. In addition,
the Network has distributed 7,500 copies of the executive summary and 4,000
copies of the CD-ROM version. Many people requested just one copy, and then
wrote asking for more to share with their colleagues, their boards, and other
organizations. Due in large part to the popularity of A Shared Agenda,
our website has grown to an average of 3,500 unique visitors each month, with
nearly 25% visiting more than once. We take this as a good sign that visitors
find the resources useful and valuable.
Nearly every week, we hear from
people who have used A Shared Agenda in different ways to inform and
improve their work. A few examples:
- Colorado and Montana incorporated the principles and recommendations of
A Shared Agenda into special statewide initiatives to improve K-16
alignment.
- A group of Latino high school youth in California used the report to guide a
discussion with educators about what they feel they need in order to improve
their academic achievement.
- The California State Univ. Center for the Advancement of Reading used A
Shared Agenda and portions of the College Readiness for All Toolbox to
train leaders of a statewide professional development effort.
- In Idaho, the J.A and Kathryn Albertson Foundation used A Shared
Agenda to help shape a possible new funding initiative focused entirely on
college access.
- The Academy for Educational Development and the Nellie Mae Education
Foundation incorporated the principles of A Shared Agenda into RFPs for
new funding initiatives.
A Shared Agenda also served as our
jumping-off point for articulating the task we had before us—to share what we
had learned with people in the right places to push for change, to build the
public will to implement our research-based recommendations, and to devise tools
and resources to help leaders manage the implementation
effectively.
An action plan for 2004-2006
One of the challenges
we faced was how to transform the broad spectrum of recommendations in A
Shared Agenda into manageable short-term goals for implementation, without
compromising any part of the P-16 approach that is one of the Network’s key
strengths. The Network’s executive committee responded by identifying five
strategic focus areas of action from A Shared Agenda where
implementation of changes would have the greatest positive impact on students
and where the current state of the field indicated that the Network’s efforts
could find a foothold and exert the most leverage.
Research evidence
suggests that providing students with a college-prep high school curriculum—and
the social and academic support needed to undertake it—may be the most important
step we can take to improving their chances of college success. The first focus
area adopted by the Network reflects this priority: Encourage schools
to make a rigorous college-prep curriculum the standard course of study for
all students.
 The
second focus area we chose is: Improve college marketing access
campaigns that aim to influence the college-going behaviors of underserved
students. A Pathways-commissioned study found that though numerous
states and organizations around the country use marketing techniques to promote
college aspirations and attendance, significant gaps in many of these efforts
limit their impact. In December 2003, at the first-ever summit on college access
marketing, it became clear that this new and growing field has a real need for
resources, assistance, and information-sharing to make campaigns more
effective.
From A Shared Agenda, we also knew that an early
commitment of financial aid can provide a strong incentive to students to
prepare academically for college, but that there is a dearth of documentation on
the effectiveness of these programs and few well-described models. We chose our
third focus area—Encourage early financial aid and early notification
programs for underserved students—to address this need.
To
reflect the Network’s emphasis on success in college, as well as access to
college, our fourth focus area is: Persuade postsecondary leaders to
take steps to improve the retention of underserved students.
Research has underscored the role of supportive campus cultures in underserved
students’ college success and degree completion. A useful starting point for
many institutions is to disaggregate their retention data by race and income to
accurately assess what the issues are.
A solid grounding in data and
research is fundamental to all aspects of our work. Therefore, the Network’s
fifth focus area involves actively pursuing an ongoing research agenda that can
reliably inform effective policies, practices, and programs.
|
New Partners
ACPA: College Student Educators International
American Conference of Academic Deans
Center for
State Scholars
Council of Chief State School
Officers
Forum for Youth Investment
NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in
Higher
Education
National Association of Student Financial
Aid
Administrators
Social Science Research
Council
Southern Regional Education Board
New Funder
Arthur M. Blank
Family Foundation | The right team
The
strength and impact of the Pathways Network is in the knowledge, commitment, and
capacity of our partners and funders. In order to provide strong leadership in
our focus area work, we recognized that we would most likely need the assistance
of different partners than those who had led the research compilation and
synthesis of the first three years. We recruited some important players such as
the Council for Chief State School Officers, NASPA: Student Affairs
Administrators in Higher Education and the Social Science Research Council.
Others, such as the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators
and the Southern Regional Education Board, came to us wanting to get involved
with our college access marketing work. We also welcomed a new funder—the Arthur
M. Blank Family Foundation—whose Pathways to Success initiative matches well
with the Network’s priorities.
We are also collaborating with other
organizations whose interests align closely with ours, including the National
Postsecondary Education Cooperative, Federal Student Aid--Students Channel, the
Education Trust, Achieve, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial
Assistance, and the National Conference of State Legislatures.
One of the
ongoing challenges with collaboration among such a large group is keeping all
the partners engaged, especially with the small size of the central office
housed at TERI, the Network’s managing partner. We recognized the wisdom of
delegating the leadership in each focus area to partners with strong experience,
expertise, and interest in the issues; this would significantly increase our
capacity and enable us to keep more partners engaged in the work. Partners also
provide leadership through serving on focus area steering committees that
oversee and guide the activities in each area.
Forward progress—what
we’ve accomplished
 Our approach in the college readiness focus area is two-pronged—to
build momentum for change and to provide practical help in implementing it. The
launch of the online College
Readiness for All Toolbox in October gives practitioners a practical
resource for planning, implementing, and evaluating change in their schools. In
the next few months, we will be piloting the Toolbox in selected states and
school districts. We also are working to build broad-based support for the
college-prep curriculum through an Action Network that brings together
grassroots advocates to share ideas, resources, and success stories.
- As lead outreach partner for Roundtable’s The College Track documentary, the
Network is featured prominently in the series’ supporting literature, and A
Shared Agenda was widely distributed to participants in the program's
National Awareness Initiative. The College Track has aired in 40 states 940
times, with 76% U.S. television household coverage. More than 100 communities
participated in the Community Connections Campaign, with over 130 new coalitions
created. These organizations will be the basis of the Action Network for the
college readiness focus area.
- Thanks to a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, we are currently
distributing 500 copies of The College Track documentary without charge to
selected organizations to use in their efforts to promote the college-readiness
issue.
 The online Pathways College Access Marketing Toolbox is scheduled to
be released in the spring of 2005. The Toolbox is a resource for college access
marketing practitioners to use in designing, evaluating, and improving
campaigns. It will feature an extensive gallery of examples of media materials
(including print, audio, and video formats) and descriptions of campaign
programmatic components. Once the Toolbox is live, we will identify states and
systems with which to pilot it.
- A Pathways study to identify and describe existing early commitment programs
and assess what has been learned about their effectiveness is due to be
completed and disseminated in the summer of 2005. The paper will also suggest
guidelines for establishing other such programs.
- The College Success Toolbox will link our research-based recommendations
with the everyday work of campus leaders. Elements of the Toolbox will focus on
institutional leadership, connecting academic and out-of-classroom learning, and
using data to identify and analyze student needs. The Using Data component will
be completed first, building on some excellent resources we have already
identified.
|
Six Areas of Ongoing Research
1.
Transitions Policies and Practices
2. How High Schools
Matter
3. Outreach Programs and
Interventions
4. Family and Community
Involvement
5. Financial Aid/College
Affordability
6. Improving Postsecondary
Achievement |
- The Network’s new research program was launched at a meeting in Chicago with
a discussion among partners, funders, and researchers about the possibility of
bringing together our various college success research agendas into one common
agenda. Over the next four months, six research teams (each led by a different
Network partner) will be developing plans for research projects and exploring
possible avenues of funding.
- In 2004, Network partners and funders gave 30 presentations at national and
regional conferences, sharing our research findings and presenting our tools and
resources to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.
- In early December, the National Association for College Admission Counseling
took the lead in convening a group of Network partners and others to discuss the
feasibility of advancing a common national college access agenda based on the
guiding principles of A Shared Agenda. 15 national organizations
participated and committed to finding a way to join policy
efforts.
Looking ahead
Since the release of A Shared Agenda, several
of the Network's partners and collaborators have issued reports that underscore
the importance of the focus areas where we have chosen to concentrate our
work.
- ACT, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, National High
School Alliance, American Youth Policy Forum, and Achieve have documented the
work that needs to be done in high schools if we are to graduate students who
are "college-ready." (Many of these studies were funded by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.) Expansion of the College Board's AP program also
indicates the growing interest of high schools in offering more rigorous
coursework.
- The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance recently issued its
recommendations for reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, including the
need for improved college access marketing and the value of early aid
commitments.
- The Council for Opportunity in Education, the Lumina Foundation for
Education, and the Education Trust have spotlighted the persistent gaps in
college retention and completion rates between underserved students and other
students and effective institutional strategies for addressing these gaps.
These reports and others demonstrate the collective momentum and
urgency that is building to make college access and success for underserved
students a reality. They also point to the necessity for broad-based
collaborative action to bring about the large-scale policy and practice changes
required to close the achievement gap at all levels of education. [Read
the reports]
In his foreword to A Shared Agenda, former
Secretary of Education Richard Riley wrote—"Working in partnership, we can close
the gap, and grow and sustain college-going opportunities for the many, many
young people still left behind." We look forward to continuing our collaborative
efforts with all of you to achieve this goal.
Best regards,
Ann Coles, coles@teri.org |
