Guest Post: Driving the Golden Spike – Aligning State Developmental Education Policy

After reading Stephen Ambrose’s “Nothing Like It in the World,” it occurred to me that setting state and system education policy is much like the story of the Transcontinental Railroad—different groups trying to get to the same point, but taking separate paths. While the Transcontinental Railroad resulted in the driving of the golden spike linking the two coasts of the United States, policy processes that are not coordinated often times never get on track and fail to achieve their goals.

Through our policy framework, Getting Past Go has challenged states and systems to align their developmental education policies into a cohesive whole that contribute to state higher education goals. In reality, states and system leaders are faced with disconnected policy processes that have the same goal, but are on parallel tracks. As a result, leaders must creatively and thoughtfully seize opportunities to move these processes onto a single track.

Tennessee’s new developmental education policies provide a wonderful example of how efforts that are not coordinated can still lead to sound and promising policy. Together, the Complete College Tennessee Act and the Tennessee Board of Regents’ (TBR) new A-100 guideline connect results-oriented developmental education reform to statewide higher education goals.

The A-100 guideline, which was developed as part of the Tennessee Board of Regents’ Developmental Education Redesign Initiative, incorporated the lessons learned from six course redesign pilot projects to set clear achievement benchmarks and empower institutions to develop their own evidence-based course redesign plans. Institutions that don’t hit the performance benchmarks must revise their plans until they hit the benchmarks.

While the new TBR policy was taking shape, the Complete College Tennessee Act was making its way through the Tennessee legislature. Among the legislation’s provisions were state goals to increase college completion and a new performance-based funding model that would reward institutions for, among other things, success in developmental education. As these two policies moved toward implementation, it became clear that the benchmarks set in the A-100 made sense for the Complete College Tennessee Act’s performance funding model. Consequently the two policies, while taking separate paths, drove a golden spike into large-scale developmental education reform in Tennessee.

Tennessee’s policies create funding incentives, clear direction on how institutions can earn the incentives, and the institutional flexibility to implement the approach that makes sense.  Only time will tell if this lack of coordination in the policy process will turn out as well as the Transcontinental Railroad.

For more stories about how other states are charting their own path in developmental education, I encourage you to check out the state developmental education profiles on the Getting Past Go Web site at http://gettingpastgo.org. 

Bruce Vandal is Director of the Postsecondary Education and Workforce Development Institute for the Education Commission of the States.