Last week MDRC, jointly with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College–Columbia University, released a report on its ongoing evaluation of Lumina Foundation for Education’s ambitious Achieving the Dream project at 26 community colleges. The analysts found that the program had, as intended, introduced important elements of a “culture of evidence” at the participating colleges, but that, so far at least, there was little evidence that these changes in practice were yielding improved outcomes for students, including those in developmental courses, who were a major focus. Perhaps only in our frenetically impatient culture would the absence of decisive results five years into a massive effort to change the culture of institutions be a cause for worry. Still, the results were certainly reported in the press as disappointing, and no doubt, at least at this early juncture, the outcomes fall short of what Lumina, the participating colleges, and all those concerned with college success had hoped for.
And yet at the heart of this story is an admirable, and all too rare, achievement for an American foundation. The Lumina Foundation itself paid for this study of its program, and it sought out organizations that Lumina knew would report the findings, favorable or unfavorable, clearly and publicly. This kind of public, independent evaluation of foundation work by the foundation itself is not an everyday event. The leaders of Lumina Foundation, including its President Jamie Merisotis, deserve praise for stepping up in this way.
It may well turn out, as the project and its evaluation continue, that we’ll start to see the kind of outcomes Achieving the Dream was designed to generate. But maybe that won’t happen and the project will turn out to have been a “failure.” Even in that event, though, we will have the huge advantage of knowing that new solutions are required and, thanks to the thorough work being done by the evaluators to track the development and implementation of the project, we will be left with instructive clues about what didn’t work and why.
It’s far too early, we emphasize, to give up on the programs and practices incorporated in Achieving the Dream. Still, foundations are supposed to take risks, and inherent in risk-taking is the possibility of failure. But a failure only becomes a mistake if you don’t learn from it. And thanks to Lumina’s decision to subject its work to independent and public evaluation, we are sure to learn from their efforts.
