Winning on Developmental Ed

Every week, it seems we read a report or article about the need for the United States to increase the number of students who have degrees or certificates to meet the country’s workforce needs. We in community colleges are doing our part to meet this challenge.

But too often promising practices for helping more students get to graduation fail to reach those who need them most -- the millions who enter college with literacy and numeracy challenges that put them years behind their peers. That has to change. And to do so will require strong collaboration with state policy makers.

Colleges have shown that they can successfully fast-track students who are close to college ready into college-level courses. But what about the many students who are farther behind, who continue to spin their wheels, taking the same developmental course four or five times without advancing to gatekeeper courses in math and English?

Who are these students? Why aren’t they succeeding in developmental education? What do we know about their prior learning and high school experiences? What happens to them after they leave our colleges?

We need robust data disaggregated by student groups to answer these and related questions. Once we have that information, we should focus on how best to engage and empower faculty members to find appropriate solutions. They are best equipped to lead efforts to design interventions that will benefit students with deep developmental needs and to bring those interventions to scale. It is essential to put faculty and staff members at the center of this process and to ensure that they have enhanced professional development opportunities so they can have the greatest impact.

There are numerous examples of programs proven to be effective for students who are close to college ready, including the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, the Charles A. Dana Center’s New Mathways Project and the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program. As emerging research from Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is beginning to demonstrate, accelerated learning programs are also showing promise in helping students who are less prepared for college. But the fact remains that there are few well-researched examples for students who are farthest behind, creating a crucial need for new models and more evidence about what works for these students across multiple academic areas.

Whenever we discuss what works to accelerate developmental education for students with deeper remedial needs, we round up a few usual suspects, such as Washington State’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST), which relies on contextualization and team teaching to deliver intensive supports to students whose test scores place them into adult basic education, and the City University of New York’s Start program, where students delay college-level courses to first participate in 15 to 18 weeks of intensive instruction in reading, writing and math.

I-BEST is particularly well researched. Quasi-experimental evaluations of I-BEST students found that they performed better than students not in the program on a range of measures, from number of college credits earned to persistence and earning a credential.

We need to create a more significant R&D effort in this area -- which will have significant payoff for community colleges and their students.

In addition, to ensure that we can scale up innovative efforts and help them take hold, we will have to reimagine how we fund our community colleges, to make it possible to 1) generate additional resources for effective interventions and professional development and 2) direct the most money to the students with the greatest needs, both academically and nonacademically.

State agencies and legislative bodies are understandably reluctant to provide new resources, given the limited results that developmental education has produced. Colleges must demonstrate that they can improve results with increasingly sophisticated developmental education practices, such as those identified in the recently released “Core Principles for Transforming Remediation Within a Comprehensive Student Success Strategy.” This document offers community colleges promising practices to draw upon, from managing intake of students to providing academic support in gatekeeper courses aligned with career interests.

Showing results will energize the conversation about how we, as a nation, invest in our human capital. At the moment, the bulk of public dollars flows to institutions that enroll students who have always enjoyed educational advantages. However, it's lending a strong hand to students without those advantages that will broaden the path to upward mobility. Increasing investment in institutions dedicated to opening their doors to those who have long been denied opportunity isn't optional. It's the only route to a skilled and prosperous workforce and a vibrant democracy.

Equally important, as states mull more investment, they should consider creative options for rewarding colleges for helping the most at-risk students persist. Performance-based funding models can provide colleges incentives for graduation, and institutions can develop strategies to reallocate resources to build the next level of intensive interventions needed for students who are not succeeding under existing models.

As co-chairs of the Policy Leadership Trust for Student Success at Jobs for the Future, home to the Taskforce on Developmental Education, we're fully committed to furthering solutions that change outcomes for students.

We know that the best way for colleges to increase the number of United States citizens holding degrees and credentials is to retain and advance our current students. That starts with creating a robust, multidimensional developmental education system that is student centered -- and persuading state governments to do everything in their power to make it happen.