During the 2010s, a slew of initiatives were launched to reform traditional developmental education – and with good reason. A 2012 Complete College America report revealed that nearly 40% of remedial students in community colleges never completed their remedial courses. Fewer than 10% of those students graduated within three years.
The criticism leveled at developmental education led to both federal and philanthropic interest and investments, which, in turn, led to research and innovation and a roadmap for fixing developmental education. Much of the work revolved around three strategies: ending over-reliance on standardized placement tests, accelerating students into college-level courses (often through corequisite courses), and eliminating the insistence on algebra for non-STEM students.
But, “despite this emergence of effective remedies and a substantial commitment to reform, the developmental education reform movement has stalled,” say the authors of a report from FutureEd, a think tank out of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. The report explores the “stalled revolution” of remedial education reform.
Barriers to reform
A 2020 national survey of more than 2,700 faculty and administrators by Tyton Partners revealed that about 40% of postsecondary institutions nationwide had not implemented any dev-ed reforms. Even among respondents who said their institutions were implementing reforms at scale, 24% said more than half of the developmental courses offered were traditional, multi-semester remedial sequences.
And a New America report from 2020 showed that most students relegated to remedial courses were disproportionately Black, Latino and/or low-income.
The FutureEd report highlights barriers slowing progress. One of the major barriers is local autonomy, which has made scaling reform difficult.
In Oregon, because community colleges are independently governed, adoption of reforms has been uneven from one campus to another. Only 10 of the state’s 17 community colleges have implemented reforms, such as corequisites.
In some states, “faculty and other stakeholders felt left out of the process when legislative victories in the early years of reform brought rapid, widespread change,” the report says.
When Connecticut and California passed dev-ed reform legislation, there was resistance from faculty and administrators. There were arguments that prescriptive legislation didn’t allow for instructor innovation.
In fact, in California, after legislation was passed in 2017, not only did many colleges continue to provide remedial education in the same way, some colleges added sections. So, in 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed tougher legislation that essentially banned traditional remedial education and has been largely interpreted to mandate corequisites.
The legislation was strongly opposed by the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges and faculty unions who argued that corequisites are inappropriate for many students.
Others also have questioned if corequisites are still the most effective method of remediation, particularly after pandemic-fueled learning losses.
Northern Virginia Community College has offered corequisite courses for several years, but Covid learning loss has left many students unprepared to learn and in need of more support.
And some colleges – especially small colleges – just don’t have the resources needed to schedule corequisite courses.
“The biggest barrier to dev-ed reform, however, is that it does not involve quick fixes,” the report says.
What can be done
The report offers advice for moving developmental education reform ahead. The first step is to engage faculty. Faculty buy-in is crucial to the success of any reforms. And engagement shouldn’t just happen early in the process; there should be “sustained and concerted efforts to engage, persuade and accommodate faculty,” according to the report.
Data collection also is necessary. There currently is not enough national data on the number of students assigned to remedial education each year and their outcomes. Having better national data would provide a picture of the effectiveness of reform, help determine what other problems are left to solve.
A third step is to embrace innovation. While the corequisite model works for some, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Reformers are encouraged to experiment with other models that meet students where they are.
Lastly, the report recommends using developmental education as a “springboard” for college completion. While developmental education can remove one obstacle on the path to graduation, campus-wide transformations – such as guided pathways – must be instituted to get students from semester to semester.
Some successes
The FutureEd report also highlights some of the reforms that are working. Long Beach City College in California moved from using standardized placement tests to assessing students based on multiple measures. The results were “spectacular,” the report says.
When using only test scores to measure students, only 9% of first-time students were placed in college-level math. When LBCC started considering high school performance to assess students’ readiness, that figure jumped to 30%. College-level English placement jumped from 13% to 60%.
Pass rates for college-level courses remained mostly unchanged.
The Community College of Baltimore County began offering its first corequisites in 2007 with a pilot course called the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). Developmental students could enroll directly into English 101, along with a one-hour companion class, to review the 101 class session. Instructors would answer questions, work with students to brainstorm ideas for upcoming assignments, edit essays and more.
Faculty even set aside time to help students with non-academic challenges they faced.
The results were positive. The pass rate for students enrolled in English101 and the companion class almost doubled that of developmental students in English 101 prior to ALP. It also led to larger cohorts passing the next-level class, English 102.
A 2012 evaluation by the Community College Research Center found the pass rate for English 101 and 102 to be 75% and 38% respectively for ALP students, compared to 39% and 17% for developmental students not in ALP.
In Tennessee, community colleges have offered corequisite learning support since 2015. This has helped narrow completion gaps in gateway English between developmental and college-ready students. For instance, for students with the lowest reading placement scores, the completion gap compared to college-ready students shrank from 35 percentage points to 19.
Louisiana, West Virginia and Texas also are some of the states seeing improvements due to implementing corequisite courses.
Meanwhile, Paris Junior College (PJC) in Texas, adopted three math pathways that direct students to right class based on their major, rather than forcing non-STEM students to take algebra. Students pursuing liberal arts, fine arts and humanities would be directed to quantitative reasoning, while students going into the social sciences or health professions would be directed to take statistics. The algebra-to-calculus track is for students studying science and engineering, business and accounting, or who aspire to teach math.
“We’re trying to give them relevant math courses that they can actually use in their degree plan and then throughout their lives in their jobs,” explained Ed McCraw, PJC’s interim dean of math and sciences.
“Mathways,” as it’s called, is available to all students, not just those in developmental education.
