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In 2011, a prominent Texas business group erected provocative billboards condemning low completion rates at the state's community colleges and questioning the value of tax dollars spent there. The Texas Association of Business put up the signs to prod community colleges to do more to increase student success and help create a better educated workforce. College leaders were outraged at the vitriolic public attack. Yet, just a year and a half later, the once apparent adversaries were working together to help community college students across the state. They cosigned a letter urging the Texas Legislature to support outcomes-based funding, a controversial strategy that provides financial incentives for institutions that increase the number of students who make progress toward and complete a postsecondary credential. This publication is a concise documentation of the work of the Texas Student Success Council, a group of diverse stakeholder groups in Texas who collaborated and were successful in bringing about some high leverage policy changes in the state's legislative session. It includes a summary of the Council's origins, accomplishments, process for setting its policy agenda, and recommendations for states seeking to implement a similar strategy. An appendix provides a list of the Texas Student Success Council Members as of January 2014.

More and more young people are enrolling in postsecondary education, particularly in community colleges, with the goal of preparing for jobs that provide access to middle-class wages. Unfortunately, too few students succeed. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the large number of students who lack the academic skills to do college-level work upon enrolling--and the dearth of tested, effective ways to help them catch up. A significant redesign of remedial education--how it is organized, delivered, and taught--is required if the nation's community colleges are to achieve more than incremental progress in increasing student success. The vast majority of the nation's community colleges need substantial ongoing supports to do so. The most logical and efficient locus of such support is on the state level, through policies and capacity-building efforts that identify promising practices, test program outcomes, and disseminate proven models quickly and effectively. Six states--Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia--are putting the state policy strategy into action through the "Developmental Education Initiative," launched in 2009 by MDC and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation. This paper describes what the "DEI" states have set out to do and why, the momentum they have developed, and next steps in their efforts to overcome obstacles to better results. (Contains 4 tables and 23 endnotes.) [Funding for this paper was provided by "Achieving the Dream," Inc.]