Changes to improve students’ success don’t happen over night
Community College Times, Feb. 2, 2007
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sanford “Sandy” Shugart, president of Valencia Community College (Florida), believes that his college was on the right track before it joined the Achieving the Dream: Community College Counts initiative.
All of the focus points that Achieving the Dream is dedicated to, such as increasing completion rates, changing the way institutions do business and using data better, are areas that the college started working on over a decade ago, said Shugart, who spoke at the Achieving the Dream: Community College Counts 2007 Strategy Institute last week.
“In many ways, we felt that when Achieving the Dream came around, they were joining us, rather than the other way around, and that made us feel good about all of the work we had been doing up to then,” Shugart said.
For that reason, embracing the tenets of Achieving the Dream and making them a part of Valencia has been less dramatic than it might have been, Shugart said.
“We have embraced it as a wholesale change in the culture of the institution that takes in what we care about, what we believe and how all of that gets fleshed out in the systems of the college, the actual software, the procedures, as well as the people,” he said.
Not all colleges have made the tenets of the initiative their own so quickly, said Christine McPhail, an Achieving the Dream coach and program coordinator of community college leadership at Morgan State University (Maryland).
“If anyone thought that by being a part of Achieving the Dream they were going to get rid of all of their problems overnight, they probably learned very early that that is impossible,” McPhail said. “The kind of changes we are talking about are systemic and in some instances not only require just doing things a new way, but also demand getting rid of some of the old ways of doing things.”
Fostering those kinds of changes requires a lot of persistence on the part of leadership, especially from presidents and top academic leaders, said Tom Gonzales, another Achieving the Dream coach and the former president of Front Range Community College (Colorado).
It takes a lot of work to build relationships within the organization through the faculty and student services in order to identify the goals and the barriers to student success, Gonzales said.
“When that change comes about it usually includes a combination of being truthful to yourself about what you are doing best and what you are not doing so well, and then changing that. And sometimes getting to that point can be difficult,” Gonzales said.
But it all stems from taking data and moving beyond simply including them in reports to using them to improve academics and student services, he said.
In some cases, those changes come about simply by looking at the same raw materials differently, noted Richard Rhodes, the president of El Paso Community College (EPCC) in Texas. For example, his college examined placement tests to determine how many students were placed in developmental classes—something officials hadn’t done before.
“We had the data, but we never looked at it that way,” Rhodes said.
The college found that 97 percent of new students who took the placement test—whether they recently finished high school, completed a GED or were out of school for a while—needed some help in math before they could do college-level math.
Knowing that, EPCC began to work more closely with district K-12 schools as well as the local community by creating the College Readiness Consortium. That group provided tests to area high school seniors to determine what type of early intervention strategies might lead to success at the community college.
“We just began to ask more and more questions of ourselves and then of everyone else,” Rhodes said. “And that led us to some new ways of thinking.”
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