From Cradle to Career: A Holistic Focus
By Rufus Glasper
Chancellor, Maricopa Community Colleges, Tempe, Arizona
President Obama is committed to looking at education "from cradle to career." This reflects what we in Arizona would call a "P-20" perspective, from early childhood through postsecondary education.
For the past several years I have served as the co-chair of our governor's P-20 Council. We have focused on issues that are unique to each sector of our educational pipeline, as well as on how these issues are linked across all sectors of our system. We convened a task force to look into how we could improve the success of students in higher education. Another task force looked at early childhood education and its implications across the continuum from K-12 to postsecondary.
As a community college system, we stand in between K-12 and the universities. We have a great deal at stake in the quality of the students who come to us from K-12, and we are also involved in the success of students once they transfer from us to complete their bachelor's degrees at the university level. This reality has prompted us to take a more holistic view, to get out of our silo as community college leaders and recognize our interconnectedness with other partners in the educational enterprise.
I also look at this P-20 focus in the light of sustainability. Just as the triple bottom line prompts business officers to look beyond their traditional economic calculus to assess the social and environmental costs of their actions, so, too, I would suggest that we need to look holistically at all of our educational system, not just focus on the segment in which we are serving.
Because of my work with the P-20 Council, I now have a richer sense of the importance of early childhood education. Our colleges are now increasing their programming in this area, because good teachers and well-trained child-care workers are vital to early success for students. And, I now see the interconnectedness of these issues: Funding for early childhood is critical to the social development of young people, and a well-run child-care center is not only environmentally safe but also encourages young children to understand and appreciate their role in the world in which they live.
I see this same holistic focus in our renewed attention to the K-12 system and our dealings with our university partners. Blending a P-20 focus with a triple bottom line focus can make both perspectives much richer and lead to better policies
and practices.
Modern business officers must truly take a holistic view of their task. There is too much at stake in our educational institutions for us to view things within our campuses alone, not seeing how interconnected our educational systems are. So, let's look beyond our balance sheets, and take stock of the impact of our operational decisions on the social and environmental fabric of our communities.
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