Interfaith America's 2023 Landscape Analysis explores the purpose, range of desired outcomes, promising models, challenges, and opportunities of bridgebuilding efforts across U.S. higher education. This article articulates the importance of bridgebuilding for the sector and summarizes key findings from the Landscape Analysis. It highlights…

How educational leaders initiate and sustain change is often hotly debated by those inside and outside of the system. Given the many reform initiatives of the past 30 years, and the resulting changes public educators have made lurching from initiative to initiative, one must ask if public education has truly improved. The answer to why public…

TransferBOOST (Bachelor's Opportunity Options that are Straightforward and Transparent) is a multi-year state-level initiative developed to provide students with affordable, quality, well-supported two- to four-year pathways. For every 100 students who enroll in community colleges, 31 students transfer to a four-year institution. Of those, only 15…

Given the positive impacts of the small, stand-alone early college model and the desire to provide those benefits to more students, organizations have begun efforts to scale up the early college model in a variety of settings. These efforts have been supported by the federal government, particularly by the Investing in Innovation (i3) program.…

This article examines the potential for creating an alternative learning context using digital tools in English classrooms to better support the identities and language practices of diverse learners. We explore the role language plays in the relationships between preservice teachers in central Illinois and their 10th-grade partners in Los Angeles.…

Based on a three-year collaboration with elementary school instructors, this paper discusses a creative approach to introducing younger students to the historical aspects and unique structure of the medieval book as a physical object. Through incremental activities, students learn to contextualize primary sources in both original and digital…

The Bradley PDS Partnership, about which we report in this article, was established in 1995 to promote academic and professional development for P-12 students, pre-professionals, practitioners, and professors. For twenty years, the partnership has been generously funded by the William T. Kemper Foundation-Commerce Bank, Trustee. In a grant…

As a result of policy changes following welfare reform in 1996 and the costs associated with providing high-quality early care and education for children of low-income working families, agency collaboration in the state of Illinois has become an increasingly salient feature of subsidized early care and education programs (SECE). The authors…

A startling number of students arrive at the doors of colleges and universities lacking the essential skills and knowledge required to succeed there. If given the proper tools and supports, the great majority of these students would be able to achieve their goals in and outside of the classroom. But most of them are shuttled off to developmental…

The Midwest Expansion of the Child-Parent Center Education Program (MCPC) is a pre-K to 3rd grade intervention program aimed at improving economically disadvantaged children's school success by enhancing continuity in instruction and increasing parental involvement. Opened in Chicago in the 1960s, this school reform model has undergone significant…

The faculty research residency (FRR) model was launched in 2010, with the goal of transforming coursework to improve the preparation of teachers for high-need schools. The FRR model leveraged school-university partnerships and situated university faculty in high-need schools to conduct research related to the university courses they taught. This…

The Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) sought to evaluate the implementation of the Early Childhood Educator Preparation Program Innovation (EPPI) grant. The grantees consisted of partnerships that included community colleges, four-year institutions, and in some cases community-based entities or schools, such as Head Start programs. The…

Barriers to classroom participation for postsecondary students with disabilities are often addressed through accommodations via disability resource offices. However, the use of individualized accommodations as the sole method for resolving access barriers in the classroom is neither sustainable nor equitable. Furthermore, this somewhat flawed…

In spring 2012, Sherry Kaufman, a consultant at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, was asked to support kindergarten teachers in deepening their practice of constructivism and exploring the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. Central to such an approach is the belief that all learning is socially constructed through interaction…

The main goals of this implementation study were to: (1) examine how the grant recipients were implementing the changes set forth in their grant proposals; (2) identify initial barriers to implementation of grant activities; (3) identify catalysts that aided in goal attainment and/or partnership development; and (4) consider the sustainability of…