The Toolbox Revisited is a data essay that follows a nationally representative cohort of students from high school into postsecondary education, and asks what aspects of their formal schooling contribute to completing a bachelor's degree by their mid-20s. The universe of students is confined to those who attended a four-year college at any time, thus including students who started out in other types of institutions, particularly community colleges.
This book focuses on one of the key questions in education: What determines a student’s success?Based on twenty years of work on student success, Ray Padilla here presents two related models he has developed that both provide a framework for understanding success and indicate how it can be enhanced and replicated. The research and theory that inform his models are covered in detail.He defines student success simply as progress through a program of study, such that the student and others expect him or her to complete it and be promoted to the next level or graduate. Rather than focusing on the reasons for failure or drop out, his approach focuses on understanding the factors that account for student success and that enable many students, some of them under the most challenging circumstances, to complete all program requirements and graduate. The models provide schools and colleges with an analytical tool to uncover the reasons for student success so that they can develop strategies and practices that will enable more students to emulate their successful peers. They address the characteristics of the students—such as motivation and engagement, the ability to surmount barriers, and persistence—and similarly surface the characteristics of teachers, the educational institution, its resources, and the contexts in which they interact. The process provides administrators with a clear and appropriate strategy for action at the level of each individual unit or subpopulation. Recognizing the need to develop general models of student success that also can be applied locally to specific situations and contexts, the book presents Padilla’s Expertise Model of Student Success (EMSS) that can be applied to general populations, as well as the Local Student Success Model (LSSM) that can be used to drive local institutional strategies to improve student success.The book demonstrates how the models have been applied in settings as diverse as a minority high school, a community college, and an Hispanic Serving Institution, and for such purposes as comparing a high-performing and a non high-performing elementary school. Contributors:* Kimberly S. Barker is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, System Center San Antonio. She is currently working in the College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction.* Mary J. Miller is the Instructional Compliance Director for the Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. Prior to this appointment, she served as an elementary school principal for ten years.* George E. Norton is the Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs for Admissions, Orientation & Transition Services at The University of Texas at San Antonio.* Ralph Mario Wirth is an administrator and director of educational planning at The San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity, as well as lead researcher for the Democratic Schools Research Institute, Inc.
Student Success in College describes policies, programs, and practices that a diverse set of institutions have used to enhance student achievement. This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.
In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.
In this hard-hitting history of "the gospel of education," W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson reveal the allure, and the fallacy, of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people is the remedy for all our social and economic problems--and that the central purpose of education is workplace preparation. But do increasing levels of education accurately represent the demands of today's jobs? Grubb and Lazerson argue that the abilities developed in schools and universities and the competencies required in work are often mismatched--since many Americans are under-educated for serious work while at least a third are over-educated for the jobs they hold. The ongoing race for personal advancement and the focus on worker preparation have squeezed out civic education and learning for its own sake. Paradoxically, the focus on schooling as a mechanism of equity has reinforced social inequality. The challenge now, the authors show, is to create environments for learning that incorporate both economic and civic goals, and to prevent the further descent of education into a preoccupation with narrow work skills and empty credentials.
The book analyses and evaluates several key community college reform programs that emerged after the Recession of 2008 and as a result of major initiatives in California, New York, Tennessee, Florida, Connecticut and Wisconsin. Because of the economic downturn in the early 21st Century, an already eroding financial base for public higher education saw even further losses. At the same time, enrollments were booming, particularly in the two-year sector where many students who would have traditionally forgone a college education, were now enrolling to ensure their competitiveness in a harsh labor market. Chapters in this book examine the development and implementation of initiatives and accountability measures imposed across the states by the Obama administration, and consider their effectiveness in reducing the impact of the loss of students, and their role in improving courses. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers exploring the history of education in the United States, as well as academic administrators, faculty, and policy-makers with an interest in reform-based practices that have been successfully implemented in community colleges.
