Breaking Through

Helping Low-Skilled Adults Enter and Succeed in College and Careers

Breaking Through, a multiyear demonstration project, promotes and strengthens the efforts of innovative community colleges across the country to help low-literacy adults prepare for and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs. The goal is to strengthen postsecondary outcomes for low-income adults by focusing on strategies that create more effective pathways through pre-college and degree-level programs.

Breaking Through is a collaboration between Jobs for the Future, an organization committed to strengthening the success of community colleges with all low-income students, and the National Council for Workforce Education, an organization of community college-based workforce development leaders. JFF is a leading innovator in strategies to accelerate education and career advancement for both young people and adults. NCWE committed to this project in order to help its members develop effective pipelines for low-literacy adults into good technical programs.

Rationale

A postsecondary credential is key to jobs and careers that pay family-sustaining wages, yet almost 90 million adults in the United States lack the academic skills needed for admission to community college occupational/technical degree programs. Moreover, relatively few adults enroll in programs whose purpose is to increase academic skills, and very few of those who participate in these programs ever advance through the steps essential for postsecondary credentials. For example, each year, about 2.5 million adults enroll in Adult Education, the major federal program geared to low-skilled adults. A study in one state reports only 2 percent of adult education/ESL students obtained the GED, and only 3 percent of the GED completers earned a two-year college degree.

In 2004, Breaking Through research, funded by the C.S. Mott Foundation, identified four barriers that account for the lack of success among low-skilled adult students, as well as recommendations for overcoming those barriers:

• Because education and training programs for adults discourage all but the most determined from completing a path to college, reorganize colleges to establish links among programs so that low-income students can easily navigate them for advancement.
• Because most adult remedial programs proceed at a slow pace, without considering that many adults need to move quickly without sacrificing content, accelerate the pace of learning so that students complete programs more quickly.
• Because many adults with low literacy skills face multiple barriers to success, yet few pre-college programs provide support to overcome those barriers, provide comprehensive supports that help students develop realistic plans and remain enrolled in and attending school, particularly through difficult transition points.
• Because there are almost no financial incentives for low-skilled adults to invest the time needed to become eligible for college, assure a labor-market payoff by offering students intermediate credentials, jobs, and other quick economic rewards.

Through visits to dozens of colleges and adult programs across the United States, Breaking Through researchers learned that a small number of community colleges are committed to advancing low-skilled adults and have many of the program elements in place for clear pathways. A larger number of community colleges have implemented one or more of the program elements needed to support the advancement of low-skilled adults. However, no college had yet achieved full pathways, and all acknowledged that they lacked expertise in one or more key areas.

Moreover, most community colleges demonstrated little to no interest in serving low-skilled adults.

Finally, the research phase suggested that the primary source for expertise in advancing low-skilled adults was practitioners from the innovating colleges. Yet practitioners knew of no national forums in which they could exchange learning.

The Breaking Through Demonstration Initiative, 2005-08

To build upon the research findings, the C.S. Mott Foundation and the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation funded a three-year national demonstration initiative, led by JFF and NCWE. It had four elements:

• A framework of the four high-leverage strategies built upon the research recommendations;
• Multiyear grants to seven Leadership Colleges to implement full pathways to college-level professional/technical programs for low-skilled adults;
• Funds to support peer learning meetings of leading-edge practitioners;
• Funds to support Learning Colleges to participate in these peer learning meetings.

Breaking Through Today

In 2009, Breaking Through entered a new phase that combines documenting best practices at participating community colleges, documenting evidence that those practices make a difference in the lives of students, and scaling up the work in several sites.

The seven colleges that played leadership roles are demonstrating a strong, ongoing commitment to—and significant progress toward—the goal of advancing low-skilled adults. Many of these colleges receive funding and technical support to expand and institutionalize their approaches.

The Leadership Colleges are:

• Central New Mexico Community College, Albuquerque, NM;
• Community College of Denver, Denver, CO;
• Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland, OH;
• Durham Technical Community College, Durham, NC;
• Owensboro Community and Technical College, Owensboro, KY;
• Portland Community College, Portland, OR; and
• Southeast Arkansas College, Pine Bluff, AR.

The 25 institutions that were designated as Learning Colleges continue to restructure their offerings to support the advancement of low-literacy students to degree programs, and they have demonstrated their commitment to doing more. They benefit from opportunities to learn from one another and receive technical assistance from NCWE and JFF.

The Learning Colleges are:

• Cerritos College, Norwalk, CA;
• City College of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA;
• Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV;
• Davidson County Community College, Lexington, NC;
• Forsyth Technical Community College, Winston-Salem, NC;
• Grand Rapids Community College, Grand Rapids, MI;
• Henry Ford Community College, Dearborn, MI;
• Houston Community College, Houston, TX;
• LaGuardia Community College/City University of New York, New York, NY;
• Lake Michigan College, South Haven, MI;
• Macomb Community College, Warren, MI;
• Mott Community College, Flint, MI;
• North Shore Community College, Danvers, MA;
• Northampton Community College, Bethlehem, PA;
• Pamlico Community College, Grantsboro, NC;
• Piedmont Virginia Community College, Charlottesville, VA;
• Pitt Community College, Winterville, NC;
• South Piedmont Community College, Polkton, NC;
• South Seattle Community College, Seattle, WA;
• St. Clair County Community College, Port Huron, MI;
• St. Philip's College, San Antonio, TX;
• Tacoma Community College, Tacoma, WA;
• Tallahassee Community College, Tallahassee, FL;
• Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, MI; and
• York County Community College, Wells, ME.

Scale-Up Projects

In Denver and Portland, Oregon, Breaking Through is scaling up proven projects on a community-wide basis and spreading proven models and policies to the Lower Rio Grande Valley region. Breaking Through is also expanding its Michigan Network, enabling colleges throughout the state to share information and innovations, support one another’s research, and collaborate on state policy projects.

In summer 2009, five community colleges each received $40,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to scale up Breaking Through programs at their schools:

• Durham Technical Community College, Durham, NC;
• Lake Michigan College, Benton Harbor, MI;
• Owensboro Community & Technical College, Owensboro, KY;
• Pamlico Community College, Grantsboro, NC; and
• Tacoma Community College, Tacoma, WA.

Expanding Awareness

The initiative is reaching out to community college leaders about the growing need to serve low-literacy adults. It is also documenting promising strategies from participating colleges for national distribution, and continues to offer peer-learning meetings.

State Policy

The initiative identifies and disseminates information about state-level policies that support the advancement of low-literacy adults into and through college degree programs.

State-Level Networks of Colleges

A network of colleges in Michigan focuses on dislocated workers and innovative strategies to connect them with postsecondary training programs. In North Carolina, a network of colleges funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready for College initiative focuses on out-of-school youth and innovative strategies to connect them to GEDs and college.

Evaluation

Third-party evaluators have followed Breaking Through from its inception, investigating outcomes for both students and for the institutions reshaping their programs to promote student progress. Equally important, the evaluation is analyzing the process of implementing Breaking Through projects to help understand the impact of policies and practices at colleges and in the initiative as a whole.

Funders

Grants from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation have supported efforts to promote programs that help low-literacy adults prepare for and succeed in community college occupational and technical degree programs. The Mott Foundation continues to support start-up efforts in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and scale-up work in Michigan and elsewhere.

The Ford Foundation supports Breaking Through’s state policy efforts. This work focuses on researching, documenting, and testing state policies that help more low-skilled adults succeed in college and careers.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds data collection, documentation, scale-up efforts for successful projects at five Breaking Through community colleges, and peer-learning activities across the initiative.

For more information, contact:

Maria Flynn at JFF, mflynn@jff.org, 617.728.4446
Jim Jacobs at NCWE, jacobsj@macomb.edu, 586.445.7987