Gates Foundation to Spend Big on Community Colleges

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced plans to focus hundreds of millions of new dollars on college completion, particularly at community colleges. Melinda Gates notes that strides have been made in the areas of enrollment and access to post-secondary education, but that it is not enough. She states that the focus must shift from enrollment to completion of postsecondary degrees that help students get jobs with a family wage. The foundation plans two major efforts in the years ahead. One will focus on helping more disadvantaged students finish high school so that college is a possibility for them. The other will focus on college completion, with an emphasis on community colleges.

Foundations for Success

During most of the 20th century, the United States possessed peerless mathematical prowess, but without substantial and sustained changes to its educational system, America is losing its edge in the 21st century. Foundations for Success focuses on the actions that must be taken to strengthen the American people in this central area of learning. Key findings and recommendations by the National Mathematics Advisory Council are grouped into seven categories: curriculum content, learning processes, teachers and teacher education, instructional practices, instructional materials, assessment, and research policies and mechanisms.

Service Learning

A new paper by ECS’ National Center for Learning and Citizenship translates service-learning’s research-based evidence for education leaders by identifying practices and policies in alignment with the data that shows what works. This paper also provides a research-based service-learning framework encompassing the simultaneous renewal of five critical components shown to institutionalize and maximize service-learning effectiveness: vision and leadership, curriculum and assessment, community-school partnerships, professional development and continuous improvement.

Lasting Effects of Preschool Education

In recent years, participation in center-based preschool programs has become much more common, and public support for these programs has grown dramatically. Nevertheless, participation remains far from universal, and policies vary across states and program options. Since policy makers typically have more alternatives than money, they face key questions about the value of preschool education, whom it should serve or subsidize, and which program designs are best. This EPIC brief reviews the research regarding the short- and long-term effects of preschool education on young children’s learning and development, with particular attention given to what is known about influences on program effectiveness.

Education Projections

The National Center for Education Statistics' Projections of Education Statistics to 2017 is the 36 th edition of a series of reports begun in 1967. It includes statistics on elementary and secondary schools and degree-granting institutions. The report provides an outlook for key education statistics, including graduates, teachers, enrollment, K-12 expenditures, and postsecondary enrollment and degrees, to 2017. It is the first edition in this series to include projections of new teacher hires in public and private elementary and secondary schools. The projections in this report were produced to provide researchers, policy analysts, and others with state-level projections developed using a consistent methodology. They are not intended to supplant detailed projections prepared for individual states.

Preparing Creative and Critical Thinkers

Teachers can help students become 21st-century problem solvers by introducing them to a broad range of thinking tools. By helping students learn and apply the attitudes and practical tools of effective problem solvers, teachers can enhance student learning in powerful ways that extend beyond memorization and recall. Even with the need to place great emphasis on basic learning and doing well on standardized tests, it remains important to balance the emphasis between process and content in teaching and learning. Students who are competent in not only the basics of content areas but also the basics of productive and creative thinking will be lifelong learners, knowledge creators, and problem solvers who can live and work effectively in a world of constant change.