Both initiatives are based on research, contain clearly articulated objectives and rely on outcomes assessment to document progress. “Every decision we make, every action we take is viewed through the lens of two questions,” explains McPhail. First: “How does this action improve or expand learning?” Second: “How do we know?”

When he accepted the challenge of blending three community colleges into a single multi-campus system, he hoped to touch off what he calls a “learning revolution” in Baltimore County. Two early victories nudged the school into the spotlight and won quick public support. The Community College Futures Assembly awarded its Bellwether citation to CCBC for McPhail’s first iteration of LearningFirst, and the League for Innovation in the Community College selected CCBC as one of its 12 Vanguard Learning Colleges. The back-to-back honors signaled the “revolution” was under way, a fact that got the attention of Maryland legislators, local educators and perspective students. Visibility, credibility and enrollment surged.

“Those short-term wins were important because they provided critical external validation,” says McPhail. More good news came in 2001 when the federally funded Title III program awarded CCBC a five-year $1.7 million grant to help boost retention and success among those minority and developmental students whom McPhail describes as the school’s “at-promise” population.

“Terms like ‘at-risk,’ ‘marginal’ and ‘disadvantaged’ are pejorative and carry racial connotations,” he says. “As an African-American educator, I will not have these kinds of characterizations made of my students.” More acceptable to him is the ‘at-promise’ descriptor that supports his belief that “given appropriate intervention, these are students who can close the gap.”

The program he and his colleagues have designed — appropriately called Closing the Gap — is multi-faceted and includes measurable goals. By 2005, they intend to close the four-year graduation and transfer gap between minority and white students to 6 percentage points and erase it completely by 2010. Currently, the transfer/graduation rate for all students is about 10 percentage points above the similar rate for minority students. (About one-third of CCBC’s for-credit students are students of color.)

“We’re focusing on what research tells us about best practices,” McPhail explains. “We’re translating the research into practical strategies and then tracking and monitoring the results.” The plan targets five areas: institutional culture, instruction, student services, academic preparedness and professional development. Intervention programs support several of the target areas and aren’t limited to current CCBC students. They also reach out to future “at-promise” students.

“We go into the high schools and administer our entry-level skills test to 10th-graders,” he says. “When the scores come back and everyone is shocked, we work with the parents, students, counselors and teachers to give them an assessment of how much ground the students need to make up if they are to succeed at the community college level. Our faculty works with the high school faculty to develop individual plans and prescriptions to help students bridge the gap two years before they arrive on campus as freshmen.”

Just as CCBC gives teenagers a vision of what might lie beyond high school, so does it give its own students a vision of what might lie beyond community college. Each year a faculty member leads a delegation of interested students to the campuses of America’s historically black colleges and universities. The goals of the trips are to show students examples of African-American scholarship and excellence and to help bridge the gap between community college and a four-year school. McPhail recently saw the success of the initiative when he visited CCBC’s Dundalk campus for one of what he calls his “shadowing days.” As a way of keeping in touch with the school’s population, he periodically links up with a student at breakfast, attends classes, then shares lunch and trades insights with the student.

“I was shadowing one of our basketball players who also happens to have a 3.1 grade point average,” says McPhail. “I didn’t know he had gone on the tour last year until he started talking about how he had fallen in love with Morehouse College in Atlanta. Now his dream is to become a Morehouse man.” To help him achieve that dream, the student has set a goal of raising his grade point average to 3.5 by the time he leaves CCBC. Attending a four-year school in the South “is an opportunity he may never have thought of before he participated in the tour,” says McPhail. “Now we’re going to do everything we can to help him get into Morehouse.”

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