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The Community College in the Twenty-first Century

The Community College in the Twenty-first Century
Author: Michael Scott Cain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1999
Genre: Education
ISBN:

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The Community College in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates that, while it is the most important institution in higher education, the community college is losing its way. The recent success of two year colleges has hidden the varied reasons for this loss of direction and energy. Michael Scott Cain uses a systems approach, rather than the typical linear perspective, to expose the weaknesses present in community colleges. He then discusses the strengths of community colleges, and suggests methods of utilizing those strengths to fortify these institutions as they enter the next century. He provides a specific and distinct plan, covering all the major aspects of a community college, that will lead not only its survival, but to its growth and potential achievement as an essential institution of education.


The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion
Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421442086

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To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.


Going to College

Going to College
Author: Don Hossler
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0801870348

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Going to College tells the powerful story of how high school students make choices about postsecondary education. Drawing on their unprecedented nine-year study of high school students, the authors explore how students and their parents negotiate these important decisions. Family background, finances, education, information—all influence students' plans after high school and the career paths they pursue, as do the more subtle messages delivered by parents and counselors which shape adolescents' self-expectations. For high school guidance counselors, college admissions counselors, parents and teachers, and public policy makers, this book is a valuable resource that explains the decision-making process and helps adults to help students make appropriate choices. The authors identify predisposition, search, and choice as the three stages in the student decision-making process. Predisposition refers to the plans students develop for education or work after they graduate from high school. The search stage involves students discovering and evaluating a variety of colleges and universities. In the choice stage, students choose a school to attend from among a list of institutions that are being seriously considered. Understanding exactly how students move through the predisposition, search, and choice stages of the college decision-making process can help students and parents prepare themselves for this process and consider a wider array of options. For education professionals, understanding this process can lead to new initiatives to guide students and families effectively—by providing better incentives for college savings, for example, or devising more effective early information programs about postsecondary education. Going to College is the first book to seriously study over an extended period the decisions that have a pervasive and lasting impact on individual careers, livelihoods, and lifestyles. The authors conclude with important recommendations for improving academic support, exploring various financial options, providing early encouragement—in other words, for recognizing the factors that influence students' decisions, and knowing when to pay attention to them.


Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges
Author: Thomas R. Bailey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2015-04-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674368282

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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.


The Contemporary Applications of a Systems Approach to Education

The Contemporary Applications of a Systems Approach to Education
Author: Kerry Dunn
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2007
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780761838272

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This work is written through an authentic systems perspective, by five coauthors with diverse expertise in a variety of areas. The contents include past and current roles in k-12 classroom teaching, special education, administration, college teaching, and state education administration. Concrete applications for use in the classrooms are presented, which utilize the systems approach and provides real life experiential strategies for implementing the concepts highlighted in the section. As readers are asked to translate theory into practice, the authors model this effort seamlessly and realistically. For example, the "Parent-Teacher Communication" chapter supplies an abundance of promising practices from the individual teacher level, to the school level, to the district-level involvement among the elements of the system. The "Technology" chapter discusses the best practices for teaching and learning through technology and highlights examples that are in use in schools today. In the "Cultural Diversity" chapter, educators are given case studies and exemplars on how other districts, schools, or individual teachers have integrated diversity in their settings. The text invites the reader to absorb the theoretical aspects and view these through real life applications. The reader easily becomes a participant in the process of creating applications in classrooms through the discussion questions for each chapter, and the vignettes interspersed throughout the book. Book jacket.


Systems for State Science Assessment

Systems for State Science Assessment
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2005-12-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0309165091

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In response to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), Systems for State Science Assessment explores the ideas and tools that are needed to assess science learning at the state level. This book provides a detailed examination of K-12 science assessment: looking specifically at what should be measured and how to measure it. Along with reading and mathematics, the testing of science is a key component of NCLBâ€"it is part of the national effort to establish challenging academic content standards and develop the tools to measure student progress toward higher achievement. The book will be a critical resource for states that are designing and implementing science assessments to meet the 2007-2008 requirements of NCLB. In addition to offering important information for states, Systems for State Science Assessment provides policy makers, local schools, teachers, scientists, and parents with a broad view of the role of testing and assessment in science education.