Seizing the Moment: Community Colleges Collaborating with K-12 to Improve Student Success is a report by the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Higher Ed for Higher Standards that is relevant to community college first-year composition instructors and high school English teachers. The report makes a number of recommendations to accelerate students’ pathways to meeting first-year college requirements: community colleges partnering with K-12 to create more college readiness interventions, identify college readiness measures to support acceleration, revising institutional placement practices to honor these measures, and providing first-year students with accelerated pathways. Although the report acknowledges that recent research “has pointed to the value of using more than a single test” (p. 11) to ascertain students’ readiness for college-level work, the report recommends using scores on Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessment tests to place students into accelerated pathways. The report argues that taking remedial courses may discourage students and suggests alternatives to remediation such as mainstreaming students with co-requisite courses.

The full report can be found at http://www.aacc.nche.edu/newsevents/pressreleases/Documents/HEfHS-CommunityCollege-Paper-Final-web.pdf