In "America's Hidden Economic Engines," editors Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson spotlight community and technical colleges as institutions uniquely equipped to foster more equitable economic growth across America's regions. As Schwartz and Lipson show, these colleges are the best-placed institutions to reverse the decades-long rise…

Background: Early Colleges (ECs) are a type of rapidly growing dual enrollment program proven to be successful in helping underrepresented students get a jumpstart on their postsecondary education. To date, the most rigorous evidence on the impact of ECs has come from two lottery-based natural experiments conducted by the SERVE Center (Edmunds et…

Building upon the prior development of a model of turnaround principal competencies, we investigated the extent to which the identified principal competencies correlate with student achievement. Participants met rigorous selection criteria for having effectively turned around their schools during their first 2 years as principal. We conducted…

Increasing costs and decreasing numbers of university Extension faculty have made it difficult to provide quality turfgrass short course education. In response, faculty from nine institutions collaborated to develop the Great Lakes School of Turfgrass Science. This 12-week online course provides students with unique learning experiences through a…

Ohio's decision to let community colleges award four-year degrees is part of a growing national trend. When this article went to press, more than 90 community colleges across 19 states offered active four-year degree programs. Counting New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, which technically is a community college, but offers degrees as high…

The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (Perkins V) places a strong emphasis on the alignment of Career Technical Education (CTE) programs of study with state, regional and local economies. Specifically, the legislation requires Perkins-funded programs to prepare students for "high-skill, high-wage, or…

Though scholars agree that professional development (PD) is a key mechanism for implementing education policies that call for teacher change, and that PD generally needs to be content-focused, active, collaborative, coherent, and sustained, the application of this framework has yielded mixed results. In this qualitative study, we employed…

This "Issues in Prevention" focuses on statewide coalitions and state systems. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Statewide Coalitions for Prevention; (2) Louisiana Higher Education Coalition; (3) Statewide Initiative Grantees; (4) The Ohio College Initiative; and (5) Higher Education Center Resources.

Jobs for the Future (JFF) set out a little over a year ago to create such models for bridging the secondary-postsecondary divide, developing strategies for high schools and colleges to build paths from the 12th grade through critical milestones of success in the first year of college. These partnerships of school districts and community colleges…

Postsecondary institutions are under increasing scrutiny to provide evidence of student learning. Despite efforts to increase the number and frequency of assessments of student learning, many colleges and universities need help to make good use of assessment results for the improvement of teaching and learning. To address this need, in February…

Teachers dedicate their lives to working with students, but also in learning from each other. In programs around the Spokane, Washington area of the U.S., teachers have been meeting with the intention of strengthen connections and smooth transitions between K-12 schools and institutions of higher education in alignment with expectations for the…

There's an emerging trend in the national college completion movement. A group of small but powerful Student Success Centers is creating statewide impact in states traditionally devoid of a strong centralized tradition of community college governance. Growing directly out of a decade of hard work to dramatically boost student completion rates in…

"Student Success Center Toolkit" is a compilation of materials organized to assist Student Success Center directors as they staff, launch, operate, and sustain Centers. The toolkit features materials created and used by existing Centers, such as staffing and budgeting templates, launch materials, sample meeting agendas, and fundraising…

Across the 50 states, career and technical education (CTE) programs at the K-12 and postsecondary levels have seen enormous policy action - 2013 alone saw at least 78 substantive policy changes via legislation, state board rules and executive orders specific to CTE and workforce development. What are the drivers behind this sudden policymaker…

The Association Supporting Computer Users in Education (ASCUE) initiated a refereed track for paper submissions to the conference in 2008. In fact, at the 2008 business meeting, the membership approved three different presentation tracks: refereed with 3 blind reviews for each paper, session with paper where the author submits a paper but it is…