Guest Post: Texas is Taking Developmental Education by the Horns

The theory of change for both Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative rely on the integration of institutional change and policy change. Today’s post comes from Cynthia Ferrell, director of the Texas Developmental Education Initiative state policy team. Cynthia introduces the Texas approach to this college/state integration.  For more on Texas developmental education policy and to see some legislative action, check out Bruce Vandal’s post over at Getting Past Go. Now, let’s get ready to rodeo!

We Texans pride ourselves on doing things big. And like our famed and fearless rodeo bull riders, we have strapped ourselves, with full intentions of victory, to the back of the massive and stubborn challenge of improving developmental student success. Four brave Texas DEI colleges—Coastal Bend College, El Paso Community College, Houston Community College and South Texas College—have sparred with the beast and have found innovations that are making a dramatic impact.

These institutions, and other Texas ATD colleges like them, collaborated with the DEI state policy team to co-construct a strategic state policy plan founded on what the institutions had learned about improving developmental student success and the state policy supports needed for further improvements and scaling. The new Texas Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Strategy placed their promising innovations at the center of a statewide cycle of continuous improvement and policy planning aimed at closing student success gaps. The following graphic illustrates the four core priorities of the plan.

1. Cultivating Broad Engagement: The colleges found that getting everyone involved was an important key to developmental student success. So, this state policy priority is about getting lots of Texans involved in scaling up effective practices. Much of this work is being done through collaborations between the policy team, lead institutions, and established state associations. One exciting new development is a grass-roots initiative of enthusiastic ATD faculty who want to build a statewide network for all Texas community college developmental education faculty. These faculty leaders, with DEI state policy team support and coordination, are building face-to-face and web-based opportunities to encourage statewide scaling of developmental innovations that work.
2. Building a Statewide Culture of Evidence: Colleges are building institutional cultures of evidence and we want to do the same for the state. Texas has great statewide data on community college developmental education outcomes. This priority is dedicated to raising awareness of the state of developmental education, increasing commitments to improving developmental student outcomes, and informing policy and decision-making by sharing state data in more meaningful ways. We (the DEI team and the DEI colleges) are in the midst of planning the Texas Community College Developmental Education Data Summit for core teams from each community college.  
3. Scaling Successes: While the 26 ATD college districts and DEI colleges are busy piloting and scaling successes funded by state and national foundations, Teaxs legislators committed state funding to finding sustainable solutions to the developmental dilemma. In addition to the state formula funding of developmental courses in the last biennial budget, the state appropriated $15 million for developmental and adult basic education innovations, pilots and demonstration projects.
4. Providing Policy Supports: All of the colleges revised their institutional developmental policies to support student success. Likewise, this priority was designed to inform state-level policy and advocate for innovation funding to support colleges’ efforts. Although it is too early in the legislative session to predict the outcome, several developmental education bills and riders have been filed and are currently being debated, including legislation regarding statewide college readiness assessment and placement, statewide planning that would require offerings of technology-based developmental coursework and faculty development, success-based outcomes funding (momentum points), and non-semester length developmental education funding.

Together, the Lone Star State’s ATD and DEI colleges, and the DEI state policy team, are truly taking developmental education by the horns.