[Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is] meant to be honest, grounded, and useful, and it is. It gets the details right. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success is an important step forward for community colleges. The work bridges the all-too-familiar divide between research and practice, outlining actionable, transformative recommendations to improve student attainment that have emerged out of the extensive portfolio of research conducted over the past 20 years by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University. And while many aspects of the book deserve discussion, how change can be effectively instigated at community colleges is a pivotal issue on which any reform efforts will hinge.

Thomas Bailey is the nation’s preeminent scholar of community colleges. Together with distinguished researchers Shanna Jaggars and Davis Jenkins, Bailey expertly diagnoses the limitations of existing community college reforms and outlines a proposal for dramatic change. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is must reading for anyone who cares about making community colleges the engines for social mobility they were intended to be.

In this analysis, grounded both in research and practice, I found both the best diagnosis of our challenge and the most promising prescription for change I have encountered in more than two decades of work on student success in community colleges. The authors make a compelling case that significant and lasting improvements in student success will only be achieved by redesigning the deep architecture of our colleges from a culture of chaos, uninformed choice, and diffuse responsibility—the cafeteria model—to one of clearly designed and supported program models with more limited choice and more secure outcomes—the guided pathways model.