The Early College Movement: An Interview with Nancy Hoffman

by Sadya Khan

UPDATE: Many of our readers are familiar with Jobs for the Future, but some may not be. Could you summarize what the organization does and some of the many programs and initiatives that it offers?

Dr. Hoffman:  Jobs for the Future (JFF) is a national policy and advocacy nonprofit located in Boston, established in 1983. JFF works across the country on education and workforce development issues with a goal of doubling the number of low-income young people and adults who complete a postsecondary credential and attain a family-supporting career. JFF has satellite offices in Washington, DC and in Worcester, MA where we have a very successful school that serves low-income students. This school functions as a clinical site, the University Park Campus School Institute, where we bring practitioners to learn about preparing all students for success in college.

JFF’s vision is:

• That all young people make a successful transition to adulthood by obtaining a strong high school education and an advanced educational credential.
• That all adults have the education and skills they need to get and keep a job—and to advance in family-supporting careers.
• That our nation has a workforce that meets the demands of a changing global economy.

Major initiatives of JFF include Achieving the Dream: Community College Counts, a national initiative that promotes change to improve student success at community colleges; Breaking Through: Helping Low-Skilled Adults Enter and Succeed in College and Careers, a collaboration between JFF, the National Council for Workforce Education (NCWE), and the Mott Foundation; and the Early College High School Initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. JFF also works on new models and polices to support the success of older adolescents who have dropped out of high school or are not progressing at an appropriate rate.

UPDATE:  The Early College High School (ECHS) Initiative is a very innovative program, taking the idea of dual enrollment and expanding it much further. What is the idea behind the program, and how does it work?

Dr. Hoffman:  JFF is lead coordinator and policy advocate for the ECHS Initiative that has created more than 200 small high schools nationwide—with more schools in the pipeline. They currently serve 42,000 students. (For more detail, see JFF’s Early College High School Web site: http://www.earlycolleges.org/) ECHS blends high school and college in a rigorous, yet supportive program, compacting the time it takes to complete high school and the first two years of college. The schools are designed so that low-income youth, first-generation college students, English language learners, students of color, and other young people underrepresented in higher education can simultaneously earn a high school diploma and an Associate’s degree or up to two years of credit toward a Bachelor’s degree—tuition free. From the beginning, the goal of ECHS has been to accelerate rather than remediate young people who were not prepared for postsecondary education. This idea was a hard sell at first because this idea seemed counter-intuitive. As we moved along, however, the results were positive and people began to believe it could be done.

In terms of how ECHS schools operate, a mix of schools and colleges can be involved, including charter schools, two-year colleges, and four-year universities. Thirteen intermediaries such as the Center for Native Education (http://www.centerfornativeed.org/), and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (http://www.woodrow.org/fellowships/), and public private partnerships between nonprofits and the state such as the North Carolina New Schools Project and the Texas High School Project take the lead in starting early college schools. All schools adhere to a set of core principles developed by the intermediaries. JFF acts as the glue to the network as well as its advocate in developing national and state policy to support the early college movement. JFF and its intermediary partners play an integral role in guiding the vision, mission, and overall strategy for the ECHS Initiative nationwide.

This interview comes at a great moment for the schools. We have been carefully gathering data on what we call “the early college movement” and finally, we have a graduating class big enough to make us confident that this movement—regarded with great skepticism by many (“How can underprepared students accelerate when they need remediation?” “You must be taking only the most gifted kids”)—is producing terrific results. Of our first 2258 graduates who have been in high school just four years, 40% graduated with more than a year of college credit, 11% graduated with a high school diploma and an Associate’s degree, and 81% immediately enrolled in additional postsecondary education (two- and four-year college/university). The schools have an eye-catching 92% graduation rate (calculated using the US DOE cohort methodology.)

UPDATE:  What are the biggest challenges facing underserved populations when it comes to accessing college? What promising practices help to reach these populations?

Dr. Hoffman: The students we’re dealing with need three major things: a rigorous academic program; a promise by middle school or at latest 9th grade that financial aid is available for college; and a supportive community, family, and school. Our schools are small, so they provide most of these elements.

The fact that ECHS offers up to two years of free college and support to accelerate students’ educational experiences from secondary to postsecondary is motivating. Students attending an ECHS are encouraged to develop their academic identity early on, so they begin to see themselves as college students. Attending a College 101 course, having a college ID, and engaging in activities on a college campus and meeting professors helps to demystify the college-going process for students. Interestingly, some ECHS students who take courses at college campuses don’t want professors to know they’re high school students—and they often do better than regular college students!

A major challenge for this population is that students are often two, three, or even four years below grade level when they enter early college schools. They require extensive catch up work in reading, writing, math, and other fundamentals. More and more of our schools are starting in 6th or 7th grade and using the middle years for intensive catch up—this is the model of our clinical site at University Park. A positive feature of small schools, such as those affiliated with ECHS, is the strong interpersonal relationships that students form with professionals. These relationships often lead to a level of maturity that is needed for students to be successful at the college level.

UPDATE:  In Illinois, we are in the second year of implementation of pilot projects associated with the College and Career Readiness (CCR) Act. A key assumption underlying the CCR Act is that high schools and colleges share responsibility for making sure that students transition seamlessly from high school to college. In your article, College Credit in High School: Increasing College Attainment Rates for Underrepresented Students, you discuss student transition. Based on your research and experience, what should educators and policy makers in Illinois and elsewhere do to create successful transition programs?

Dr. Hoffman: As far as aligning curriculum to improve transition, rigorous high school programs are essential. We particularly like David Conley’s work on college readiness which characterizes habits of mind needed for successful college work. We’ve been following Conley’s advice at University Park by modeling the senior year in high school more like a year in college. For example, students take classes three days a week instead of every day; they work from a college syllabus; they learn to take notes in lectures, and they audit or enroll in classes at Clark University, UPCS’s neighbor and partner. Lack of familiarity with these kinds of college expectations trip students up, so we simulate them so that they work toward improving their transition.

Other factors that contribute to a successful transition are a combination of rigorous high school programs and social supports. We help students understand what independence is about by providing supportive settings for learning. Across many urban communities, we still have a long way to go in helping students to not see college financing as a major barrier. Beginning in 9th grade, we help students understand what funding is available for college so they know that they will get support.

UPDATE:  A big component of ECHS is collaboration with higher education partners to develop an integrated academic program. Likewise, one of the main purposes of the CCR Act here in Illinois is curriculum alignment. Could you elaborate on what an integrated academic program of ECHS looks like? What steps should high school and postsecondary institutions take to ensure that curriculum alignment is as fruitful as possible?

Dr. Hoffman: One very good example of integrated curriculum is in the City University of New York (CUNY) network. The New York City public schools and CUNY are very well connected, and they have set up a very good long-term program. The CUNY early college network prepares students for college by providing college courses and pre-college courses in high school and earlier grades, and they have a very good understanding of how to do this. Students have a 7-year academic plan in which they complete all their Regents exams as well as the general education requirements for the first two years at CUNY. College and high school faculty work very closely together.

In some other sites in the ECHS network, high school teachers know what is required in college courses and some are co-teaching courses with college instructors so they understand college course requirements. But in all our schools, there is still much work to be done to ensure that courses are aligned, that students get the supports they need, and that college teachers have the opportunity to learn from high school teachers some of the pedagogical techniques that are particularly engaging and successful with 17- and 18-year-olds.

In general, people are concerned about math and English. Under dual enrollment, we are urging states to enable students to take the gatekeeper academic courses (e.g., math, English) because success in these courses is a predictor of future success in postsecondary education.

Math is relatively well aligned in most schools, but there is still the question of what is the correct math course—should it be statistics instead of algebra? An additional question is: are the college standards high enough? Some institutions appear to have “dumbed down” college math to lower the need for remediation. That is not a good thing.

English, on the other hand, is not well aligned—since the first college English course is usually English composition. But high schools focus on literature courses and have a long way to go to prepare students for expository writing and the demands of college texts. So there is still a great deal of work to be done there.

UPDATE:  Another core principle associated with ECHS relates to student supports, including the notion of a comprehensive network of supports. For a school that is lacking human and capital resources (as many high schools are), what supports are essential?

Dr. Hoffman: One of the most significant things to do is to make sure there are consistent reading, writing, and literacy practices offered throughout the school—in every classroom. These subjects can be taught in many different ways in different classrooms within the same school, which is very confusing for students. Schools need to make a decision about how to approach literacy, requiring every teacher to take responsibility for being consistent and avoiding a chaos of approaches.

UPDATE:  In a 2008 report entitled, On Ramp to College: A State Policymaker’s Guide to Dual Enrollment, you and your colleagues devote a section to the importance of developing state-wide data systems. Why are longitudinal data systems important? Can you think of any examples of states that have done a good job of creating and using data systems?

Dr. Hoffman: Without a data system, there is no feedback to help implement programs and improve students’ performances in high school and college. The high school/college divide is of particular concern since there are not many data systems linking secondary and postsecondary student-level data. Right now, we obtain data about early college graduates from the National Student Clearinghouse, but it is still difficult to match student identifiers across systems to tell us about success rates, persistence, etc. Florida has one of the best systems because its tracking system follows kids through high school, the postsecondary level, and even into the workforce. President Obama’s new economic stimulus package provides funding for states to build data systems, so it will be interesting to see what happens as a result.

UPDATE:  Finally, collaboration between partners is mentioned frequently in the core principles of ECHS. How important is collaboration, and how can partners achieve better collaboration at the local level?

Dr. Hoffman: Educators have been working on school/college partnerships for a long time, and there is not a great track record of success. A lot of good work is going on now. But often, it is happening at the individual faculty level rather than as an institutional commitment. So when the faculty project is over, the collaboration disappears. Of course, there are many exceptions, and they often occur in places where schools and colleges are dependent on each other because there are not many other options available. One is the closed-loop system in El Paso, Texas where El Paso Community College faculty trains the teachers who teach in the public schools. Then, the public schools send their graduates to the community college and the university so each sector has feedback about how well they have prepared students for the next step. El Paso also has strong and long-lasting leadership in higher education, the school system, and in the community.

Ultimately, an important lesson that we have learned is that if the postsecondary sector is vested in the process, the partnership is more likely to be sustainable. In other words, if a postsecondary institution is giving college credit to high school students, it has to be concerned about quality, grade point averages, money being used efficiently, and joint decision making. So, the ECHS model requires that postsecondary institutions be committed partners—they must have a real stake in the students’ outcomes that, in turn, affects their bottom line and reputation.

Nancy Hoffman is Vice President of Youth Transitions at JFF, and director of the Early College High School Initiative.  She can be reached at nhoffman@jff.org.  JFF’s Web site is: www.jff.org.