Uri Treisman directs the Charles A. Dana Center at the U. of Texas at Austin. The center works to ensure equitable access to math and science teaching to students of all levels. U. of Texas
Changes around the country in developmental education are allowing hundreds of thousands of students to bypass remedial classes and jump right into college-level work. Still, significant challenges remain as instruction is revamped and supports beefed up to meet the needs of less-well-prepared students.
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Uri Treisman directs the Charles A. Dana Center at the U. of Texas at Austin. The center works to ensure equitable access to math and science teaching to students of all levels. U. of Texas
Changes around the country in developmental education are allowing hundreds of thousands of students to bypass remedial classes and jump right into college-level work. Still, significant challenges remain as instruction is revamped and supports beefed up to meet the needs of less-well-prepared students.
Remedial courses are just one component of the field widely referred to today as developmental education, which includes tutoring, study skills, and financial and other assistance. But even as the terms educators use to describe their work have shifted from “remedial” to “developmental,” some say both connote a “deficit mind-set” that discourages students.
It’s like “we’re trying to develop someone who isn’t developed enough or remediate someone” who needs fixing, said Michael Schoop, vice president for evidence, inquiry, and retention at Cuyahoga Community College, in Ohio.
Some of the most prominent figures in the national effort to overhaul developmental education shared their thoughts about the progress they’ve made and the problems they’ve encountered during a conference last week at the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness. The center is a joint effort of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College and MDRC, a nonprofit education- and social-policy research group.
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The scope of the challenge is enormous. The Community College Research Center has found that nearly two-thirds of students entering two-year colleges, and more than one-third of those starting at less-selective four-year colleges, lack the math or language skills to succeed in college-level classes. In the past, those students have typically been referred to one or more levels of noncredit remedial classes, where many get discouraged and drop out.
But moving students with big learning gaps into college-level classes without sacrificing rigor is harder than it might seem to the state policy makers and higher-education system leaders driving many of the reforms.
“The further you are away from the classroom, the easier this work seems,” said Philip Uri Treisman, a professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He founded and directs the university’s Charles A. Dana Center, which works to ensure equitable access to excellent math and science teaching for all students. It does that, in part, by developing alternatives to college algebra as gateway math courses.
Here are just a few of the challenges Treisman, Schoop, and others have found as they work to spread the most promising practices across higher education:
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Wraparound supports are hard for part-time faculty members to give to part-time students.
Recent changes in developmental education are getting many more students through their first college-level courses. There still isn’t enough evidence, though, that the students are completing their academic programs and graduating.
For that to happen, colleges need to commit to intensive “wraparound” supports, including academic, mental-health, and financial counseling, as well as “intrusive” advising that doesn’t wait for struggling students to seek help.
What makes that hard, according to Treisman, is “lots of part-time faculty and part-time students.”
“When this works, faculty and advisers talk to each other, and for that to work, people have to be there and be vested in the institution,” he said. Remedial classes typically rely heavily on part-time adjunct instructors who are paid by the class and aren’t always compensated for professional development. Those instructors may be rushing off at the end of class to teach on another campus, and are less likely to be able to stick around to connect struggling students with the help they need, or to confer with faculty colleagues.
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Skeptical faculty members need to be brought on board.
As higher-education systems and even entire states shift toward eliminating stand-alone remedial classes and replacing them with “corequisite” instruction, faculty members often complain of feeling left out of the process. In the corequisite model, students who would normally require remediation are placed directly into a credit-bearing math or English course. Learning support is wrapped around such students, through additional coursework, tutoring, or labs.
The approach is one of the “game changing” strategies advocated by the nonprofit Complete College America as it travels around the country encouraging state policy makers and college systems to adopt its strategies.
Faculty members on many campuses have resisted and specifically called out groups like Complete College America for pushing a one-size-fits-all model on their campuses.
Yolanda Watson Spiva, who was named president of Complete College America last year, gets that. As a result, she said, “We’ve completely flipped the way we do this work.”
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The approach used to be that “they had the problem and we had the medicine,” she said. That didn’t account for the fact that campuses have unique needs and that changes need to be led by the faculty and not by a reformer who parachutes in for the day, she said.
Faculty pushback was intense when the California State University system announced in 2017 that it was eliminating all free-standing remedial classes and replacing them with corequisites, said James T. Minor, assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist for the system. Faculty members were given one year to prepare for the change.
While some instructors can be reassigned, many people who teach remedial classes are likely to lose their jobs when widespread shifts like this take place.
While the evidence supporting the reforms was overwhelming, Minor said, “we were having a debate about the right to work for individuals teaching developmental education versus what was in the best interests of our students. Those are the conversations we were having and the battles you have to be willing to take on if you’re going to move ahead.”
“There’s something to be said about shock and awe,” he added. “I don’t recommend it every week,” but if the system had gone through the normal process for change, “we’d still be talking about it and our students would still be sitting in developmental-education courses.”
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When funding stops, momentum may drop.
Getting the faculty on board and involved is particularly important when the money that’s covering reforms dries up. Many of the efforts taking place nationally, like looking beyond placement-test scores or devising guided academic pathways, are being paid for by grants from nonprofits or by one-time state allocations. If faculty members are invested in the process, that momentum is more likely to continue when the grant or champion is no longer there, several speakers noted.
Turnover in governors’ seats can also stall reform efforts, Spiva said. Complete College America’s alliance of states and systems works with statehouses to enact laws that support corequisite remediation and other approaches it promotes. The nonprofit, which has been both praised and pilloried for its snappy, easy-to-digest talking points on developmental education, has to be ready to quickly bring new officials up to speed, she said.
“We need a scholarly version, but also one with information graphics that can be consumed in one minute by someone who doesn’t have a lot of time,” she said.
The signature reform — corequisite remediation — doesn’t always work for the least-prepared students.
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A number of recent studies have shown that most students who are given the opportunity to bypass stand-alone remedial courses make it through their first college-level course.
After one semester under the corequisite approach, the California State University system saw an eightfold increase in the number of students who otherwise would have been assigned to remedial coursework who were passing credit-bearing classes, Minor said. Minority students had the greatest increases.
Still, while the approach holds great promise for many students, it doesn’t necessarily work for those with the weakest academic skills, including those who have been away from the classroom for decades. Louisiana, for instance, has eliminated the requirement that community-college students first get a high-school degree. And even among recent high-school graduates, the gap between high school and college expectations often remains high.
“You don’t want to get them into a college level that isn’t welcoming to them,” said Thomas R. Bailey, president of Teachers College and a longtime director of its Community College Research Center.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, student success, and job training, as well as free speech and other topics in daily news. Follow her @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.