Breaking Through | Helping low-skilled adults enter and succeed in college and careers.

Core Documents

The Accelerating Opportunity Virtual Academy
(2011)

The Virtual Academy includes a resource library, forums, and examples of pathway models from colleges across the country. Accelerating Opportunity keeps the Virtual Academy up to date, bringing you resources from the fields of Adult Basic Education and career pathways development.

Resource Library
The Resource Library is a compendium of tools and resources selected specifically for the Accelerating Opportunity initiative. You can navigate the Resource Library by topic or via the tag cloud.

Webinars
Accelerating Opportunity hosts periodic webinars on a range of topics, including model development and communications. These webinars are available to stream online or download.

Program Models and Examples
The models and examples draw on three main sources: JFF’s research and development in the Breaking Through initiative, colleges participating in Washington State’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I- BEST), and the “ideal” Accelerating Opportunity pathway that underlies this initiative.

Forums
Use this space to interact with the wide network of innovative practitioners and policymakers involved with the Accelerating Opportunity initiative. Share best practices, tap into the expertise of colleagues across the country, and actively participate in message board discussions.

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Achieving Ambitious Goals: Case Studies of Scaling-Up Programs for Advancing Low-Skilled Adults
Barbara Endel and Nate Anderson, with Jeremy Kelley (2011)

Community colleges must fundamentally change the way they deliver Adult Basic Education instruction in order to help all students earn credentials that hold value in today’s economy. Achieving Ambitious Goals highlights what five Breaking Through colleges are doing to not only advance adults’ skills and career prospects but also to scale up successful programs across campuses and state systems.

AchievingAmbGoals-050211.pdf

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The Breaking Through Practice Guide
JFF (2010)
JFF developed The Breaking Through Practice Guide to help practitioners serve adults who have low literacy and math levels and who want to succeed in postsecondary education. The guide highlights innovations from community colleges that participated in Breaking Through between 2005 and 2009. Since then, the colleges have continued to collaborate in Breaking Through, exploring, refining, and implementing these innovations.

The practice guide has four components, each devoted to a high-leverage strategy that community colleges and other programs can adopt to increase the success rates of their low-skilled younger and older adults:
These components can be used individually or as a set to put low-skilled adults on the path to family-sustaining careers. The guide also includes:
- The Contextualization Toolkit
- Supplementary materials, including information about JFF’s Advisor Training Toolkit
BT_Documentation_June7.pdf

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Breaking Through: What Trustees Should Know
JFF (2007)

“What Trustees Should Know” is a PowerPoint presentation that was presented at the Association of Community College Trustees Conference in San Diego, CA.

BT Trustees Presentation.ppt

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Breaking Through: The Initiative After One Year
JFF (2006)

In the fall of 2005, Jobs for the Future and the National Council for Workforce Education launched Breaking Through: Helping Low-Skilled Adults Enter and Succeed in College and Careers with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The goal of this multiyear, college-based initiative is to increase the number of low-skilled adults who enter and succeed in community college-based occupational/technical certificate and degree programs. The primary approach to achieving this goal is to strengthen and expand practices in community colleges that support low-skilled adults through demonstration grants to institutions, coupled with extensive peer learning activities among the grantees. This report summarizes key Breaking Through activities and accomplishments from fall 2005 through summer 2006.

BreakingThroughatOne.pdf

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Breaking Through: Helping Low-Skilled Adults Enter and Succeed in College and Careers
Marty Liebowitz and Judith Combes Taylor (2004)

Around the country, innovative community colleges are playing a larger role in helping low-skilled adults gain the valuable skills and credentials that serve as gateways to family-supporting careers. Breaking Through looks at whether—and how—these institutions can significantly improve the odds that low-income, low-skilled adults will earn the college-level occupational and technical credentials that remain elusive for many Americans. The study, which led to the Breaking Through initiative, focuses on low-skilled, low-literacy adults and how they can move to college and get what they need to succeed in good jobs. It defines “success” as both educational and economic advancement. Plus, it identifies a set of powerful, transferable strategies rather than describing several effective schools/programs whose complete design may not seem replicable.

BreakingThrough.pdf

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Program Implementation

Leaving No Worker Behind: Community Colleges Retrain the Michigan Workforce—and Themselves
Tom Hilliard (2011)

In 2007, Michigan undertook a bold mission: to retrain tens of thousands of dislocated workers and other low-skilled adults so they can qualify for jobs in emerging and expanding sectors of the economy. Community colleges would train these workers while the state would cover up to $5,000 of their college and related expenses each year. By 2011, more than 150,000 adults had enrolled in NWLB-financed training, and 59 percent of participants eligible for federal workforce programs found a new job after completing their training. Leaving No Worker Behind examines what five community colleges learned about catering to the needs of dislocated, jobless, and otherwise low-skilled adults. These lessons can help institutions and states nationwide as they too strive to serve this rapidly growing college population.

LeavingNoWorkerBehind_041411.pdf

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The Contextualization Toolkit
(2010)

Developed as a companion to The Breaking Through Practice Guide, The Contextualization Toolkit is a resource for instructors and program designers on how to create programs and curricula contextualized around specific careers or career exploration. The toolkit draws on examples from the Breaking Through demonstration and scale-up phases.

BT_toolkit_June7.pdf

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Advancing the Frontline Health Care Workforce
JFF (2010)

Job creation is a national priority, and health care is a high-demand and expanding segment of the economy. That combination makes this a strategic moment for creating and implementing innovative skill-development strategies that meet the needs of health care providers and workers. Low-wage workers on the front lines of health care can advance to higher-skilled, family-sustaining careers, while health care providers can prosper with a robust, well-prepared, and engaged workforce. The result will be better care and healthier communities and economies. This brief introduces several national initiatives in which JFF is involved that are engaged in the work of advancing frontline workers in the health care industry.

AdvancingFrontlineHealthCare_onePager_102210.pdf

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Bringing the Front Lines to the Forefront: A National Conversation on the Critical Need to Invest in Workers on the Front Lines of Health Care
David Altstadt (2010)

In March 2010, JFF hosted two working meetings that brought attention to an often overlooked issue central to the quality, access, and affordability of health care: The health sector does not have enough qualified workers to ensure quality care for aging Baby Boomers, the newly insured, and a more diverse U.S. population. David Altstadt reports on the discussions at these meetings, which drew from on-the-ground experiences of three nationwide initiatives that help bolster the skills development, job quality, and retention of frontline health care workers: Jobs to Careers, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, and Breaking Through.

RX_BringingTheFrontlinesToTheForefront_062910.pdf

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The Key to Prosperity: The Skills of the American Worker
JFF (2010)

Workers, businesspeople, and politicians have a common goal: getting more people into productive work as fast as possible. While that’s important, the same strategies that will put millions to work quickly can also lay a foundation for a thriving and sustainable economy. And in communities across the nation, a wide variety of innovative new projects show the way forward. This JFF op-ed highlights efforts in some of these communities, related to Breaking Through and two other initiatives, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions and Jobs to Careers.

LaborDay_OpEd_090710.pdf

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Better Together: Realigning Precollege Skills Development Programs to Achieve Greater Academic Success for Adult Learners
Gloria Cross Mwase (2008)

How can states help working adults bolster precollege skills and take full advantage of college credit-level career and technical programs? Better Together offers examples of a better way to meet this challenge through the alignment of two distinct systems for strengthening precollege skills: adult education and developmental education.

BTBetterTogetherUpd2010.pdf

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A Framework for Effective Recruiting for Breaking Through Colleges
Kristina Cowan (2008)

This five-step guide for crafting an outreach strategy is designed to help colleges get students into an advisor’s office and interested in Breaking Through.

04Frameworkforrecruiting.pdf

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Data

Scaling Up Breaking Through: 2010 Evaluations
Elisabeth Barnett, Debra D. Bragg, Elaine Delott Baker, and Margaret Puryear (2010)
Breaking Through has engaged over 40 colleges across the country in redesigning programs to help low-skilled adults acquire the skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education and attain credentials. In studies of colleges that scaled up successful pilot programs, Breaking Through participants demonstrated significantly higher rates of retention, course completion, and higher skill gains than non-Breaking Through students. These studies, produced with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, are:
Breaking Through is a collaboration of JFF and the National Council for Workforce Education.
2010_Evaluations.zip

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Scaling Up Preliminary Data Analysis
Richard A. Voorhees and John A. Muffo (2010)

This report is the first analysis of demographic and outcome data reported on career pathway programs participating in the scale-up of Breaking Through. The five “Scaling Up” institutions are: Durham Technical Community College (Durham, NC); Lake Michigan College (Benton Harbor, MI); Owensboro Community & Technical College (Owensboro, KY); Pamlico Community College (Grantsboro, NC); and Tacoma Community College (Tacoma, WA). These programs reported unit data for the 2009-10 academic year in a template developed by Voorhees Group LLC. These data are preliminary, especially since key outcomes that should be attributed to career pathway programs require time to mature.

ScaleUpAnalysis-081210.pdf

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Advancing Adults into Community College Programs: Data Tools from Breaking Through
Peter T. Ewell (2008)

The goal of Breaking Through is to demonstrate that community colleges can restructure themselves to create clear pathways for low-skilled adults into professional/technical certificate and degree programs. Colleges participating in the initiative have found that incompatible data and data systems represent a significant barrier to creating pathways into college for adult students. Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems has worked with these colleges to provide insight into solutions that would be useful to any college seeking to serve low-skilled adults.

BTAdultEd_0.pdf

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Policy

Overcoming Obstacles, Optimizing Opportunities: State Policies to Increase Postsecondary Attainment for Low-Skilled Adults
Amy-Ellen Duke and Julie Strawn (2008)

Breaking Through seeks to help low-literacy adults prepare for and succeed in college, with JFF coordinating research on state policies that can support institutional strategies. This policy series overview was prepared by the Center for Law and Social Policy.

BTpolicyoverview.pdf

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Pushing the Envelope: State Policy Innovations in Financing Higher Education for Workers Who Study
Radha Roy Biswas, Vickie Choitz, and Heath Prince (2008)

Pushing the Envelope profiles 12 states that have amended or created student aid programs to better serve adult students. States typically have done so based on the proposition that investing in the education and skills of the workforce produces a return on investment not only to individuals but also to businesses and the state. These states are leading innovators that have begun to push the policy envelope by expanding, changing, or creating programs that work for working adults.

BTPushingEnvelope.pdf

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Breaking Through |

Resource Categories

Core Documents

Program Implementation

Data

Policy