Statement by Achieving the Dream President and CEO William E. Trueheart on the Hiring of Rachel Singer as Vice President for Community College Relations and Applied Research

Silver Spring, MD (February 9, 2012) – We are pleased to announce Rachel Singer as our new Vice President for Community College Relations and Applied Research, effective February 1, 2012.

Rachel is a strategic and highly accomplished executive with a strong record of developing and delivering a wide range of student success interventions. Her 25 years of community college experience and her in-depth knowledge of institutional research and reform; developmental education; creating successful, sustainable learning communities; peer coaching; professional development; scaling; and grants management will serve Achieving the Dream and our national reform network well.

Working most closely with leaders from Achieving the Dream Leader Colleges, Rachel will launch a new program (soon-to-be-announced), in which cadres of peers at every level will be trained to help all Achieving the Dream Institutions refine and enhance their student success efforts. She will work closely with Achieving the Dream Investors to design and direct our growing re-granting programs, through which selected Founding Partners and exemplar institutions will receive support to participate in college-to-college peer assistance to ensure the creation, implementation, and scaling of successful innovations throughout our national reform network. And Rachel will play a vital role in the design and direction of Achieving the Dream’s knowledge development work, incorporating cutting-edge research into all our policies and practices.

Prior to joining Achieving the Dream, Rachel was the Director of Academic Affairs at Kingsborough Community College. Her supervision of Kingsborough’s Opening Doors and Career Focused Learning Communities, serving over 1,000 students each semester, resulted in significantly improved student retention, persistence, and graduation rates. She has led training and professional development seminars on how to replicate successful learning communities for faculty and staff in community colleges across the country. Rachel was the co-architect of a U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant program that supported peer coaching of Kingsborough’s faculty and staff to help four institutions across the country improve retention and graduation rates of their students.

Read more about Rachel Singer here, and please join me in giving her a warm welcome!