Leadership in the 21st century will require new insights and a new paradigm. With nearly 100 years of combined experience in community college teaching and administration, the authors of this chapter blend theory and experience into a design for engaging the "new normal."

Realization of a multiracial democracy is challenged like never before by a new era of color-blind politics and postracial supposition, fueled in part by the election of our first black President in 2008, but contradicted by the chronic persistence of racial segregation and social inequality.

Prevailing research tends to narrow the starting view of most authors, including those who write about community colleges and their governing boards in common terms of organizational structure, management style, roles and responsibilities, personality issues, and so forth. But this essay focuses more on one particular topic: the unique…

This chapter describes a movement to significantly increase student attainment in community and technical colleges. The observations of Leadership Coaches in Achieving the Dream, developed over a nine-year period of involvement, provide insight into the leadership required to transform institutional culture.

Urban community colleges face a myriad of convergent challenges, including the loss of state funding and local property tax support, increased demands for better performance and greater accountability, and record-high enrollment by the most underprepared students in higher education. Sometimes to make sense of it all, it helps to think of an onion.

The term "community college business and finance model" is unlikely to evoke a positive response from educators who resist labeling students as "customers," do not want to call the college's offerings "products," and don't like to hear the college referred to as a "business." Faculty and staff tend…

The goal of multiracial equity is not just a phrase in mission statements, but a top-down strategic necessity for community colleges founded on and dedicated to the principles of social justice. At a system like Maricopa with more than 200,000 diverse credit and noncredit students at ten colleges--including six classified as urban--in the greater…

In the first chapter of this sourcebook, one of the scenarios presented for the future urban community college was that of a "workforce development college." In this scenario, the college of the future is the primary provider of a highly educated and talented community workforce in alignment with regional employment and economic…

The completion agenda is in full force at the nation's community colleges. To maximize the impact colleges can have on improving completion, colleges must organize around using student progress and outcome data to monitor and track their efforts. Unfortunately, colleges are struggling to identify relevant data and to mobilize staff to review…

In this chapter, we describe efforts by growing number of colleges and universities to redesign academic programs and support services to create "guided pathways" designed to increase the rate at which students enter and complete a program of study.

Content standards have been identified in America as a solution to the declining rate of student success in the public education system. But content standards are not a "silver bullet," for a number of reasons. This chapter presents an intersegmental approach to vertical curriculum alignment that returns questions of student readiness to…

In California, public financial aid aimed at low-income students is not reaching some of the poorest students enrolled in community colleges. Outreach efforts to students are important, but high schools and community colleges must also make financial aid receipt a priority.

The college completion agenda, in concert with recent research, has brought scrutiny to the shortcomings of community college remedial programs. Remedial, or developmental, education has come to be seen as a hindrance to student progress and attainment rather than as a support. In this chapter, the authors describe new approaches to help students…

The Obama administration and the Lumina Foundation have been the principal drivers focusing the nation on increasing the number of high-quality degrees and credentials. Tuning, a faculty-driven process for defining clear student learning outcomes--what a student should know, understand, and be able to do--is one of the ways to support this goal.

Jane Knight is most often credited with establishing the term "internationalization" as a process in higher education. Her seminal works in the 1990s established internationalization not as a state to be achieved, but as an ongoing process by which colleges could strive to increase the global learning of students (Knight, 1993, 1994). Many…