In January, the College Board’s National Commission on Community Colleges released a report, Winning the Skills Race and Strengthening America’s Middle Class: An Action Agenda for Community Colleges, that called for the national expansion of Achieving the Dream: Community College Count.

Can community colleges make better use of data to improve student outcomes? That’s the fundamental idea behind Achieving the Dream, an initiative launched in 2003 by Lumina Foundation for Education to help community college students succeed. Currently including 83 colleges in 15 states, the initiative is particularly concerned about student groups that traditionally have faced the most significant barriers to success, including low-income students and students of color. MDRC is one of many partner organizations involved in the initiative.

Achieving the Dream works on multiple fronts, including changes in the institutional practices and policies at participating colleges; research into effective practices at community colleges; public policy work; and outreach to communities, businesses, and the public.

The National Commission on Community Colleges praised Achieving the Dream’s focus on building “a culture of evidence” in community colleges:

Unless institutions are able to develop and sustain the institutional data systems required to create a culture of evidence, they will experience great difficulty holding up their commitment to transform themselves into institutions emphasizing access, success, and excellence. Without these systems and training in the uses (and abuses) of data analysis, community colleges will not be able to monitor their own progress or assess outcomes.

 

Achieving the Dream has brought together the resources and developed the strategies and protocols to help community colleges create student success strategies and build a culture of evidence in which decisions are based on data about student achievement. Given the promise of this effort, the Commission recommends that Congress include in the Community College Competitiveness Act of 2008 an appropriation sufficient to bring the initiative to scale across the country.