This chapter summarizes major findings from the national evaluation of TAACCCT pertaining to systems and organizational changes made by community colleges. These results are integrated with other findings presented in this volume to highlight lessons learned about the implementation of TAACCCT and its legacy for long-term changes in the community…

This chapter describes the challenges and practical barriers community colleges face when implementing comprehensive reform, exploring how reforms are leading to some improvements but not often scaled improvements.

This chapter tells a story of course reform, describing in a fresh and candid way the steps taken toward change and the results achieved. The authors emphasize that instructors need considerable support in order to teach differently, as well as underscore the need to consider scalability of reform even at the pilot stage.

Transfer education centering on the liberal arts declined relatively beginning in the late 1960s with the expansion of vocational education. But the distinctions blurred as courses that matched university programs in business and health fields grew. By the 1970s more than half all associate degrees awarded were to students from occupational…

In 2010, California's then-governor Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1440, called the "Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act" (Padilla, 2010), into law. This bill mandated that the state's 112 community colleges (CCCs) develop a new type of associate degree, an "associate degree for transfer," that specifically prepares a…

From 1998 to 2008, the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) offered its employees a variety of options for formation, a type of reflective practice. The district encompasses 10 locations, seven of them independently accredited colleges. Formation is based primarily on Parker Palmer's model for Circles of Trust as described in "A…

Describes the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum (MNTC), a statewide agenda for improving student transfer that inspired general education reform. Reviews the Minnesota Community College System, elements of the statewide reform movement, key principles of the MNTC and issues related to its implementation, and future challenges to education reform in…

Argues for a new organizational culture of collaboration in the community college, one defined by student-centered goals. Discusses several projects that employ this new partnership model, specifically Santa Ana College's (California) Summer Scholars Transfer Institute, which developed from a collaborative assessment by the internal and external…