Although a young program, the North Carolina A&T Honors Program illustrates how quickly and successfully honors can achieve its goals of providing a quality education to its high-achieving students, and how these students can benefit academically and personally from the experiences that honors provides for them. This article provides a brief…

Following World War II, North Carolina created public junior colleges and industrial education centers to meet the educational demands of veterans and expand the technical skills of the state's workforce. Despite the creation of these campuses, in the early 1960s North Carolina ranked 47th in the number of citizens in college, and 66 counties in…

As community colleges across the country look for ways to promote student success, the need for scaling effective approaches is critical. This guide builds on a framework of four phases of scaling developed in Job For the Future's (JFF's) previous publication, "Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College…

The purpose of this research was to determine how teachers and administrators in a successful North Carolina district perceived the purpose and value of a school improvement plan (SIP) and the planning process. The SIP is the accepted best practice for school-wide improvement, and the perceptions of the purpose and value of the process…

In difficult budget times, especially at state colleges and universities, honors programs might seem too easy for budget-cutters to reduce, cut, or lose in the shuffle of administrative reorganization. Recent years have been financially perilous and hardly an easy time for honors programs or colleges to increase budgets. Using Western Carolina…

The evolution of community colleges from their origins as junior colleges to institutions with dual missions to provide both academic and workforce preparation raises questions about the impact of a college's mission focus on their students' labor market success. We examine this question using the 58 colleges in the North Carolina Community…

The Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The overarching goal of the Plus 50…

The evolution of community colleges from their origins as junior colleges to institutions with dual missions to provide both academic and workforce preparation raises questions about the impact of a college's mission focus on its students' labor market success. We examine this question using data from the 58 colleges in the North Carolina…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative (2008-2011), funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies, was created to build the capacity of community colleges nationwide to develop programming that engages the plus 50 learner. The Initiative supported a pilot group of 13 two-year institutions to develop or expand college…

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools' consistently positive impacts on student achievement (detailed in Volume I of this report) have prompted efforts to scale up the KIPP model to serve more students. According to the KIPP model, highly qualified and autonomous principals, supported by national and regional staff, drive the…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

The purpose of this report is to document evidence of institutional change in teacher preparation among universities participating in the Teachers for a New Era (TNE) Learning Network. The report is based upon a cross-case analysis of individual case studies of nine universities, conducted by Academy for Educational Development (AED) researchers.…

It is widely acknowledged that charter schools tend to have less experienced teachers and higher teacher turnover, but to date, little effort has been made to identify the contribution of faculty experience and retention to overall charter effectiveness. I do so using a twelve-year panel of charter and mainstream student achievement in North…

In 2012, the country's land-grant colleges and universities will celebrate their sesquicentennial. This anniversary provides a good opportunity to consider how these distinctively American institutions have evolved over the past 150 years and how well they are doing today in preparing students for the 21st century. Resilience will be a key…