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Rationale
The evidence is clear: a postsecondary credential is the key to jobs and careers that pay family-sustaining wages. Yet almost 90 million adults in the United States lack the academic skills needed for admission to community college occupational or technical degree programs.

Moreover, relatively few adults enroll in programs whose purpose is to increase their academic skills, and very few adults in these programs ever advance through the steps essential for postsecondary credentials. For example, about 2 million adults annually do enroll in adult basic education, the major federal program geared to this population, but only 7 percent complete the GED. Even more troubling, about one-third of those who complete the GED enroll in college, and a mere 4 percent of GED completer's earn a two-year college degree.

Goal
The goal of Breaking Through is to strengthen postsecondary outcomes for low-income adults by focusing on strategies that create more effective pathways into and through pre-college and degree-level programs.

Breaking Through has four main components and four high leverage strategies to increase access to and success in college for low-literacy adults.

Breaking Through Components:

• Leadership Colleges: Seven colleges play leadership roles. Each Leadership College has demonstrated a strong commitment to, and significant progress toward, the goal of advancing low-skilled adults. These colleges receive funding and technical support to expand and institutionalize their approaches.
   
• Learning Colleges: Fifteen institutions have been designated as Learning Colleges. These colleges have begun to restructure their offerings to support the advancement of low-literacy students to degree programs, and they have demonstrated their commitment to doing more. They benefit from opportunities to learn from one another and also receive technical assistance from NCWE and JFF.
  
  North Carolina will take a “system-wide” approach to Breaking Through. Through the generosity of the N.C. GlaxoSmithKline Foundation and the commitment of the North Carolina Community College System, this will be a unique opportunity to introduce the initiative’s innovations to the community colleges in one state, as well as to draw on successes from other colleges in North Carolina.
   
• Community College Leaders: Breaking Through is expanding awareness among top community college staff of the growing need to serve low-literacy adults. It is also enhancing expertise about promising strategies for helping such students enter and succeed in postsecondary education.
   
• Policy and Advocacy: At the state level, Breaking Through identifies and disseminates information about public policies that support the advancement of low-literacy adults into and through college degree programs.
   

Breaking Through High Leverage Strategies:

• Reorganize Colleges: Establish links among programs so that low-income students can navigate them easily for advancement. Innovative community colleges are integrating adult education, workforce development, developmental education, and non-credit programs to create multiple paths for students with low basic skills or pre-college skills to enter and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs.
   
• Accelerate Learning: Help students learn more and faster and to complete programs more quickly. Creative instructional practices and program designs accelerate the pace of advancement to meaningful learning gains and program completion.
   
• Assure a Payoff: Offer students intermediate credentials, jobs, and other quick economic rewards. Promising strategies directly link education to meaningful economic payoffs. Deeply rooted in local labor markets, these strategies are driven by employer needs and economic development priorities.
   
• Provide Comprehensive Supports: Help students develop realistic plans and provide supports that keep them in school, particularly through difficult transition points. To help low-income adults succeed in college even when struggling to support their families, inventive institutions are implementing various approaches to providing comprehensive supports, either through their own departments or in partnership with other providers. Examples of supports include: career counseling, tutoring and other academic support, personal case management, and learning communities.
   

The work in each college may include some aspects of all four high leverage strategies in an synergistic approach.

Read On the Four Fronts of Breaking Through.  

Documenting Progress, Sharing Lessons, Measuring Impact:

An evaluation of Breaking Through will investigate outcomes for both individual student participants and for the institutions reshaping their programs to promote student progress. Equally important, the evaluation will analyze the process of implementing Breaking Through to help understand what policies and practices at the colleges, and in the initiative as a whole, contributed to change.

The evaluation is a vital part of Breaking Through. It will shed light on what works in the initiative and the barriers that are encountered. It will also be key to sharing the lessons of Breaking Through with funders, participants, and the field as a whole.

Debra Bragg, of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, is leading the evaluation, partnering with Elisabeth Barnett of Teachers College, Columbia University.

The Year-One Evaluation Results of Breaking Through were presented by Bragg and Barnett on April 26, 2007 in Portland, Oregon.