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"The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board provides leadership and coordination for the Texas higher education system." Agency reports are available to download from the site.

Isn't this what MCHS and ECHS do with their students to ensure college readiness and success? Excerpt: "Some institutions do require students to participate in specific programs-and they've seen positive results. For instance, Brazosport College, in Lake Jackson, Tex., began to require first-time students to take a student-success course in 2007. It teaches time-management skills and proper study habits. As a result, the fall-to-spring retention rate for students who completed the course jumped to 89 percent, compared with the baseline rate of 66 percent. Those students passed remedial courses at a higher rate than before, and as a result were more likely to stay enrolled in college, the report says."

A regional organization of 15 Western states created to facilitate resource sharing among these states' higher education institutions. Offers student exchange programs, regional initiatives, and research and policy work.

By Kevin Carey in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue #15, Winter 2010. In this editorial, Carey (policy director of think tank Education Sector) argues that colleges are not fulfilling their mission to students: costs are rising and students are not learning (or even graduating). He argues for transparency and studies of the effectiveness of teaching and learning, and warns of the education-related lobbies that keep the rest of us in the dark about higher education.

"Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education." In addition to a daily e-mail, there are also a variety of RSS feeds.

Facebook usage in academic work is going up! Excerpt: "The idea of students wanting professors to integrate more technology use into the classroom was a common takeaway from the survey. After e-mail, learning-management systems and e-textbooks were the two technologies that students wanted instructors to use more frequently, according to the survey. Learning-management systems are used by 73 percent of students, and e-books or e-textbooks by 57 percent."

Repository of open education resources and online courses to support high school, advanced placement and higher education studies. This is the site with information about the repository.

An organization that promotes higher education opportunities for first-generation and other under-served college-bound students. A variety of initiatives and resources have been developed to achieve this goal, including the College-Bound Coalition, The College Access & Opportunity Guide; CSO College Center online clearinghouse of college programs and admissions information and the College Counseling Outreach Initiative

The Community College Research Center (CCRC) is part of the Insitute on Education and the Economy, Teacher's College, Columbia University. From their site: "CCRC"s mission is to conduct research on major issues affecting community colleges in the United States and to contribute to the development of practice and policy that expands access to higher education and promotes success for all students."

Organization that promotes and supports academic advising in institutions of higher education.

Research studies and other resources. Pathways To College Network is an "alliance of national organizations that advances college opportunity for underserved students by raising public awareness, supporting innovative research and promoting evidence-based policies and practices across the K-12 and higher education sectors."

"Corporations use TWO process form, BOTH missing entirely from dowdy lazy sloppy dishonest (Harvard) universities; a) process weaves----emediated process flows PUNCTUATED with mass workshop EVENTS b) pulsed systems---rhythms of engagement with disengagement, sameness with difference, local with global---so that mere addition of connectedness is not allowed to destroy all creativity. "

Sounds like EC and then some...the story of Perry County in Alabama and how they are succeeding at producing high school graduates at a much higher rate than everyone else in this demographic group PLUS they place 75% of their students in college. Reference is made also to students needing but one semester to get a nursing degree when they graduate from high school. They start the concentrated learning in kindergarten.

excerpt on teaching critical thinking "What are the right kinds of questions to ask? In figuring out what questions to ask, it's really helpful to look at Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's begins with a knowledge-based question such as, "Who was the first president of the United States?" To answer that question simply requires knowledge. That's just a first step. Next you want them to be able to evaluate. So I push teachers to look at the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy that involve the analysis and evaluation type of questions. That's when you're pushing kids' thinking. For instance, if you ask, "To what extent was George Washington successful as the first president of the United States?" that's a much higher-level question. It requires a student to evaluate, to create a set of criteria for what makes someone a great president, to possess knowledge about George Washington, and to evaluate his performance against that set of criteria. I suggest that teachers really think about questions that hit four specific criteria. Questions should be open-ended, with no right or wrong answer, which prompts exploration in different directions require synthesis of information, an understanding of how pieces fit together be "alive in their disciplines," which means perpetually arguable, with themes that will recur throughout a student's lifetime and always be relevant be age-appropriate

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

A membership organization that provides programs for K-12 and higher education institutions, and a path to college opportunities, including financial support and scholarships, for students. Serves the education community through research and advocacy on behalf of students, educators, schools and colleges.

A Resource Hub for Higher Education

Southern Regional Board works with 16 member states to improve public pre-K-12 and higher education. The organization works directly with state leaders, schools and educators to improve teaching, learning and student achievement.

The Foundation offers both teaching and higher education fellowships, and offers program and research in the areas of policy and practice.

Article by Rob Jenkins, August 16, 2011 on Improving Online Success for beginning college students. See excerpt below. Makes me think about how MCNC's SLI work has introduced? equipped? advanced? students' and teachers' online working skills, especially the push to use social media. And how all MCHSs and ECHSs should attend to this skill development for their students.