In 2007, the College Board's Community College Advisory Panel--a group of college presidents that advises the organization's membership on community college issues--asked these authors to write a paper describing effective remedial education programs. They never wrote the paper. The problem was not the lack of dedicated faculty and staff working in this field but the absence of sustained and carefully calibrated research independently assessing the effectiveness of remedial education practices. Since 2007 remedial education has gained increasing attention among powerful interests. Early in his administration, President Obama announced plans to devote significant resources to it; at the same time, philanthropic organizations such as the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching began to pour millions of dollars into new strategies to prepare students for college more effectively. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, long associated with high school reform, announced that it would devote $110 million to fund improvements to remedial education in community colleges. In spite of the substantial investment in remedial education, its effectiveness has never been clearly established, especially for the weakest students. Most studies draw generalizations based on single-institution data or surveys, do not control for student preparation levels, and lack information about indicators of effectiveness and/or the selection of institutional sites. Although the authors were unable to produce a report for CCAP, they kept notes on what they "wanted" to find in the research literature but did not. They offer, then, ten timely reminders to the Obama administration, the higher education research establishment, and the philanthropic community as they begin--and hopefully sustain--their search for ways to strengthen remedial education. (Contains 17 resources.)