Category: Blog

After a national search, we’re excited to introduce our new Strong Start to Finish director, Dr. Maxine Roberts. Vice president Brian Sponsler sat down (virtually) with Maxine at our recent Learning Network Convening to discuss her ideas about the work ahead.

In this moment, as we mark the beginning of 2021, many of us are excited that advances in public health policy and vaccinations finally offer a path to take grasp of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that new federal administration and states’ leadership, including SStF systems leaders, legislators and governors, will offer opportunities to advance policy and benefit students at all levels – especially for those pursuing higher education.

We share what we learned from curricular mapping to help higher-education systems better understand the structural and institutional barriers created through policies that impact student success, and to suggest how they can be addressed.

As developmental education reforms gain momentum across the country, course pathway maps help policymakers improve the student experience by identifying roadblocks to math and English course completion and, ultimately, a college degree. Course pathway maps create a visual guide, connecting the dots between every class in a sequence ending with the first college-level math or English course applicable to a degree.

Amid unprecedented challenges to nearly every aspect of higher education, it’s been difficult to continue commitments to institutional and systemic change made before the pandemic. However, Strong Start to Finish (SStF) continues to push through these difficult times to advance developmental education and support the 4.8 million students that this work now impacts.

It is not often that an educational reform movement takes hold in both policy and practice. Yet, over the past decade the momentum to reform developmental education has intensified. Here are three reasons why.