Community Colleges in 29 States to Pilot New Accountability System

/PRNewswire/ -- The nation's community colleges are taking a major step forward in redefining what "success" means for their institutions with the naming this week of 40 pilot colleges to test drive a new Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA), a national system designed to provide accurate data, operational transparency, and the ability for colleges to benchmark student progress and completion data against peer institutions.

The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), in collaboration with the Association of Community College Trustees and the College Board, is developing the VFA, with funding from Lumina Foundation for Education and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The pilot colleges include 37 institutions, two state-wide systems and one multi-college district in 29 states. (Complete list follows.) Starting in mid-January 2011, the VFA pilot colleges will test a series of custom metrics that community college professionals developed over the last several months. The project fills what community college advocates have seen as a void in measures appropriate to the unique two-year college mission.

"Many traditional measures of institutional effectiveness don't work well for community colleges," said Walter G. Bumphus, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). "For example, most are pegged to full-time students, and the majority of community college students attend part-time. Our overarching goal is to develop measures appropriate to our mission that clearly tell students and policy makers how we're doing."

VFA pilot colleges will work from a draft technical manual developed by four VFA working groups, a technical committee, and a national steering committee made up of veteran research experts and educators from within the college community. (See link to VFA website for a list of participants.) Project leaders are developing the VFA in stages so that they can release and test core measures for which there is broad consensus on technical definitions and available data. Additional measures will be proposed as the participants report outcomes and assess how well they gauge institutional effectiveness.

"Pilot testing is a critical part of developing the VFA," said Kent Phillippe, AACC's associate vice president of research and student success and director of the VFA initiative. "We want to learn from the pilots the utility of the measures and feasibility of reporting this data for all types of community colleges."

Late in January, AACC will make available all the resources provided to the pilots so that any institution will be able to calculate the proposed VFA measures, understand the pilot testing process and learn more about the VFA. Added to the pilot testing, AACC will develop mock-ups for what could be built as the VFA data collection and display tool, and share the preliminary designs during the AACC annual meeting and via virtual meetings in the second half of 2011.

Pending outcomes of the pilot testing, reaction to the VFA among AACC member institutions and future funding, a full-scale roll-out to the nation's close to 1,200 community, junior and technical colleges could take place starting in 2012.

"The Obama administration and others are focused on greater numbers of student completions and demonstrable measures for how we gauge student success. VFA is the community college response that says, 'We accept that challenge,'" Bumphus added.

Pilot colleges are: Baltimore City Community College (Baltimore, MD), Bevill State Community College (Jasper, AL), Bunker Hill Community College (Boston, MA), Burlington County College (Pemberton, NJ), Central Community College (Grand Island, NE), College of Lake County (Grayslake, IL), College of Western Idaho (Nampa, ID), Community College of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, PA), Dallas County Community College District (Dallas, TX), DeKalb Technical College (Clarkston, GA), Flathead Valley Community College (Kalispell, MT), Fox Valley Technical College (Appleton, WI), Genesee Community College (Batavia, NY), Greenville Technical College (Greenville, SC), Hudson County Community College (Jersey City, NJ), Independence Community College (Independence, KS), Jackson Community College (Jackson, MI), Kentucky Community and Technical College System (Versailles, KY), Lane Community College (Eugene, OR), Louisiana Community and Technical College System (Baton Rouge, LA), Mid-Plains Community College (North Platte, NE), Milwaukee Area Technical College (Milwaukee, WI), Montgomery College (Rockville, MD), Montgomery County Community College (Blue Bell, PA),Norwalk Community College (Norwalk, CT), Oklahoma City Community College (Oklahoma City, OK), Parkland College (Champaign, IL), Passaic County Community College (Paterson, NJ), Pima County Community College District (Tucson, AZ), Pitt Community College (Winterville, NC), Raritan Valley Community College (Somerville, NJ), Renton Technical College (Renton, WA), Rochester Community and Technical College (Rochester, MN), Salt Lake Community College (Salt Lake City, UT), Tidewater Community College (Norfolk, VA), Waubonsee Community College (Sugar Grove, IL), Wenatchee Valley College (Wenatchee, WA), Western Iowa Tech Community College (Sioux City, IA), Western Nebraska Community College (Scottsbluff, NE), and Western Wyoming Community College (Rock Springs, WY).

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National Report Gives Georgia Higher Education High Marks for Accountability

Georgia is one of only 10 states in the U.S. commended in a new education report for measuring how well its college students perform, using this tracking data to drive policy decisions and providing the information gathered in a useful format to students, their parents, the news media and others. Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank promoting education reform, analyzed educational accountability systems across the nation at the request of a number of respected education foundations and found varied results in its report, “Ready to Assemble: Grading State Higher Education Accountability Systems.”

Education Sector’s survey, released in June, determined that 38 states have little or no system for measuring learning outcomes, and 36 states have yet to develop a method for linking college funding to performance. Among the reputable major players in the education arena funding the survey were the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lumina Foundation for Education and KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

“To be clear, we did not evaluate state results in terms of their various higher-education outcomes, but rather the breadth, accuracy and strength of their systems designed to hold institutions accountable for results,” said Kevin Carey, policy director for Education Sector.
“Measuring educational outcomes and reporting the results is critical to improving educational attainment rates,” said Dr. Susan Herbst, the USG’s chief academic officer and executive vice chancellor. “The public cannot call for improvements if it does not clearly and easily know that improvements are needed.”

She added that “Georgia’s good standing in this report reflects all the efforts of the University System of Georgia (USG) and its partners in education, such as the Georgia Department of Education and the Office of Student Achievement (OSA). It really shows the effects of our work with the Alliance of Education Agency Heads (AEAH). We still have work to do, of course, but we’re pleased with our progress to date.”

“The Alliance’s number-one goal is to increase the high-school graduation rate, decrease the high-school dropout rate and increase postsecondary enrollment and success,” said AEAH Director Amy Mast. “Tracking college and career readiness is one of our primary strategies, and the Education Sector report reflects how important it is to report data clearly and ensure it is accessible to students, teachers, parents, board members, policymakers and the public. The strength of our partnership between all seven of the state's education agencies, the Governor's Office and business partners is to prioritize the importance of measuring and reporting education data to show where we are improving and where we need to continue focusing our efforts in Georgia.”

Education Sector measured states in 21 categories of accountability, analyzing any systems that might be in place to assess areas like affordability, degree production, research and scholarship. States that promote or require the use of assessment tools, and take steps to publicize the information, were given the highest marks. Those that had few tools for assessment and did little to spread information were graded lower on the three-grade scale. The highest grade, “Best Practice,” was given to 10 states with well-developed reporting mechanisms, including Georgia. The second ranking, “In Progress,” was given to 27 states that have less complete efforts underway. The lowest score, “Needs Improvement,” went to 13 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, where little is being done in the way of accountability, according to Education Sector.

In addition to giving Georgia an overall “Best Practice” ranking and another for gathering information overall, the report gives both the USG and Gov. Sonny Perdue’s Office of Student Achievement (OSA) high marks for measuring student progression and educational attainment. Georgia was one of only six states to earn the “Best Practice” designation in this category.
The report also commended the USG for measuring and making accessible to the public in a user-friendly way the number of degrees awarded by institution, academic discipline, race/ethnicity and gender, as well as the economic impact of the University System on the state.

In addition, the USG won notice in the report for having developed transparency measures, such as the information portal “USG by the Numbers,” that allow students and others to examine and evaluate these data. USG by the Numbers, along with the USG’s Information Digest, enrollment and degrees-conferred reports and other accountability documents, can be accessed at http://www.usg.edu/usg_stats/.

“Only three states — Texas, Minnesota and Georgia — earned our ‘best practice’ label for developing particularly user-friendly Web sites to transmit accountability information,” Education Sector’s Kevin Carey said. “Minnesota and Georgia have each constructed innovative ways to display information. Georgia’s looks like a scoreboard for a major sport and lets users compare results to state, regional and national averages.”

Georgia’s scorecard in the report contains four “Best Practice” and 12 “In Progress” rankings.

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State of Georgia Approves First IE2 Contract

Yesterday, the State Board of Education (SBOE) approved a five-year contract with Gwinnett County Public Schools that grants the school district greater flexibility in exchange for increased accountability. The contract was made possible by Governor Sonny Perdue’s Investing in Educational Excellence (IE2) legislation, which was passed and signed into law last year. IE2 allows for balanced local control, allowing officials closest to the students to make important decisions concerning their schools. Gwinnett, which educates 10 percent of the state’s students, is the first school system to accept the challenge of linking accountability with increased flexibility.

“I commend Superintendent Wilbanks and the Gwinnett County Board of Education for their willingness and courage to be held to a higher standard,” said Governor Perdue. “This contract fundamentally shifts the state-local relationship from being based on compliance to a true partnership focused on performance. IE2 is about increasing student achievement, and I am confident that Gwinnett will use its flexibility to deliver superior results and be a model district for the state.”

Under IE2 local school districts work with the Georgia Department of Education and the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement to create a strategic plan that clearly identifies the flexibility sought from Georgia education laws, the accountability goals in addition to federal NCLB requirements the district is willing to accept at the school level in exchange for the flexibility, and the consequences that will be imposed upon the district for schools that do not reach their accountability goals.

The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement will monitor Gwinnett County’s progress towards meeting annual goals and will report these findings to the SBOE each fall. In addition, Gwinnett will provide interventions and sanctions throughout the contract period to those schools that do not meet their annual IE2 accountability goals. Those schools that do not meet their IE2 accountability goals by the end of the contract period will be converted to charter schools.

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