The CCA Blog

Yesterday's release of the Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education: A Joint Statement could be viewed as one of a long line of recent documents outlining the problem of remedial education and suggestions on how to reform it - but I do believe it is more, much more.

The Charles A. Dana Center, Education Commission of the States, Jobs for the Future and CCA worked for over a year on this statement for one compelling purpose - that we wanted the field to understand the unique and compelling set of reseach and practice that is showing the way toward a profound new direction on how to serve students who enter postsecondary education underprepared.  By making a joint statement - we hope that the new knowledge of the failings of remedial education and understanding of how to effectively reform it would rise above the white noise of education research and practice that we are inundated with online, at conferences and in our work. The issue is too important and the findings are so definitive that we can't afford to let the moment pass without proper notice, and more importantly large scale action.

In a crowded universe of innovation and research in higher education - it is often hard to discern which strategies hold the most promise.  Without a careful examination of the research and evidence based practice, we may either disregard a promising practice or invest in an unproven strategy.