Achieving the Dream had an important influence on most of the Round 1 colleges’ sys- temic institutional improvement processes, with the initiative influencing over 80 percent of these schools to at least a moderate degree (see Figure 6.2). For some schools, Achieving the Dream brought about a strong shift in focus, moving them more toward an evidence-based, student success-driven management process. Achieving the Dream also helped a number of colleges refine their systems for monitoring student success, such as developing institutional scorecards for measuring progress toward their institutional goals or further focusing their strategic planning on evidence-based practices for increasing student success. Additionally, a number of colleges attributed their revised committee structures to their work in Achieving the Dream. Indeed, only four colleges felt no real effects from Achieving the Dream on their strategic planning and management. These schools tended to have weaker strategic manage- ment systems in general, and were continuing to work at developing more coordinated systems to oversee their various projects.
Similarly, over two-thirds of the Round 1 colleges noted that they devoted a significant proportion of their Achieving the Dream funding to their professional development activities. Many reported that their Achieving the Dream grants were integral to this work, with several colleges using this grant as their central mechanism for funding professional development. Those that depended most heavily on their Achieving the Dream grants tended to be smaller colleges with limited financial supports. While larger colleges also found the grant helpful, they were also able to use their institutional funds to support faculty and staff professional development.
While Achieving the Dream had an important influence on nearly all of the Round 1 colleges, the initiative was only one of a multitude of forces pushing many colleges toward more systematic management and monitoring. For instance, a majority of schools discussed their accreditation process or their presidents’ own vision as driving forces behind their man- agement and planning systems. Others noted that they had made only modest changes to their
Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count Figure 6.2
Influence of Achieving the Dream on Systemic Institutional Improvement Processes in Round 1 Colleges 0 5 10 15 20 25
Influence of Achieving the Dream
N u m b er o f co ll eg es Strong Moderate Low/none
SOURCE: Information collected from faculty, staff, and administrators during two rounds of implementation research across all 26 Round 1 colleges, cross-referenced against reports submitted by college representatives, Achieving the Dream coaches, and data facilitators.
management structures as a result of Achieving the Dream, reporting that some of those changes were already in progress when they began in the initiative. Such comments reveal that Achieving the Dream was one of a number of factors pushing colleges to monitor and improve their students’ achievement.
Summary
Overall, the Round 1 colleges made important strides in developing more systemic ef- forts to increase students’ achievement. A majority of the Round 1 colleges had strategic planning mechanisms in place, which established goals for their work, and had established task forces to monitor those efforts and take actionable steps to realize their goals. Similarly, most schools offered some form of professional development for their faculty and staff, and they had
integrated their Achieving the Dream work with other institutional reform efforts, such as accreditation and fund-raising. However, these systems needed further strengthening at a number of schools, as they were limited in their development of actionable goals and bench- marks for student improvement, and in their use of data to monitor their efforts. Additionally, they had yet to effectively connect their funding strategies with evidence of program effective- ness, making it more difficult to successfully scale up promising programmatic interventions. Such findings reveal that Achieving the Dream schools may need additional time to institu- tionalize their reform practices.
Given these challenges, Achieving the Dream might need to give participating colleges more time to fully integrate their reforms within the larger structure of the college and streng- then those capacities that may be hindering the development of more data-driven systems. As noted in previous chapters, most colleges were still heavily engaged in strategy development and learning how to evaluate the effects of their reforms on students’ achievement. Similarly, a number of schools were still struggling to ramp up their institutional research capacity to meet the demands of the initiative. As such, Achieving the Dream might look toward helping colleges take on more sophisticated data analyses that would allow them to build the infrastruc- ture to use data regularly within their strategic management and budgeting processes.
Achieving the Dream might also encourage colleges to develop more systematized pro- fessional development opportunities for their faculty and staff that support their efforts to continuously improve student achievement. While conferences and workshops may help expose faculty and staff to new ideas, more concrete efforts are needed to help these individuals bring such reforms into their everyday practice. The systems developed by Patrick Henry, Tallahas- see, and Central New Mexico community colleges represent three models for providing more sustained growth and development of faculty and staff skills. Achieving the Dream might look to efforts such as these to further encourage these individuals’ engagement in colleges’ reforms and provide an even stronger foundation for colleges’ efforts to improve students’ achievement.
Finally, as colleges seek to implement these broader changes, they are also likely to spend greater amounts of institutional funds. Findings from the Achieving the Dream cost study reveal that colleges are much more likely to spend high levels of institutional funds should they seek to develop the types of intensive professional development and engagement structures recommended by the initiative. Given the likelihood that colleges will invest heavily in this work, Achieving the Dream might wish to help them consider how to balance these expenses with their other existing commitments and priorities. Providing sound advice that allows colleges to plan for their investments and consider the longer-term impact of their reforms may help these schools to sustain the changes that they are making on the ground today.
Chapter 7