With the help of Labor Department grants, community colleges are accelerating job training programs aimed at adults and “stacking” workforce credentials, reports Inside Higher Ed. Working with employers, Massachusetts’ 15 community colleges have accelerated training for jobs in health care, advanced manufacturing, information technology, biotechnology, green energy and financial services. In addition to prior-learning assessment and [...]

A music lesson in Virani’s classroom When Neil Virani walked into his middle school special education classroom at Mulholland Middle School, part of the LA Unified School district, three years ago, he encountered a roomful of students with a range of cognitive, emotional and physical challenges. But the most toxic problem they had to combat [...]

Last month, the state of New York administered English Language Arts and mathematics assessments to students in grades 3-8. For the first time, the assessments were aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards for what students should know at each grade level in these subjects that 45 states across the country [...]

The community college Completion Agenda aims to double the number of students who complete a one-year certificate or an associate degree or who transfer to complete a credential, writes Terry O’Banion in Community College Times. College leaders have focused on orientation, advising, placement, financial aid — everything but teaching and learning. Key leaders involved in the Completion [...]

Community colleges and other broad-access institutions are under pressure to graduate more students while cutting costs, write Community College Research Center researchers Davis Jenkins and Olga Rodríguez in Access and Success with Less: Improving Productivity in Broad-Access Postsecondary Institutions. But completion-boosting strategies may not be cost effective and the most commonly used cost-cutting strategies, such as hiring adjuncts [...]

Student success depends on motivation as well as academic preparation. A new ETS test called  SuccessNavigator claims to measure students’ readiness to show up for class, ask question and persevere, reports Inside Higher Ed. Steven Robbins, director of research innovation at ETS, said the test can be used in tandem with conventional placement exams to find students [...]

Last month, the state of New York administered English Language Arts and mathematics assessments to students in grades 3-8. For the first time, the assessments were aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards for what students should know at each grade level in these subjects that 45 states across the country [...]

A music lesson in Virani’s classroom When Neil Virani walked into his middle school special education classroom at Mulholland Middle School, part of the LA Unified School district, three years ago, he encountered a roomful of students with a range of cognitive, emotional and physical challenges. But the most toxic problem they had to combat [...]

Lisa Dieker went around the room asking her middle-school students what they did over the weekend. CJ went to see the movie “Here Comes the Boom” with her boyfriend. Ed played in a basketball game and Kevin posted new dance videos to YouTube. “Did you work on any art projects?” Dieker asked Maria, a girl [...]

Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]

ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]

INGLEWOOD, Calif.—In the back of a tenth-grade geometry classroom on a recent morning at Washington Preparatory High School, nine miles southeast of Los Angeles, Landon Yurica and Alycia Jones bent over the papers in front of them. At 23 and 24, respectively, the two could almost blend in as students as they tried the assignment [...]