Guest Post: Understanding and Reconciling the Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Programming

Much developmental education research today focuses on which cog needs the most grease; in other words, how do we fix a system that everyone seems to agree is broken? In a developmental education working paper published by the Community College Research Center in November 2011, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Michelle Hodara take a different tack. In this description of a case study of the City University of New York’s six community colleges, they ask why the system is broken and propose a framework that can help institutions answer that fundamental question. Below, Shanna Smith Jaggers introduces the study and the new framework.

Those who attempt innovation in developmental education often find our efforts thwarted by administration or faculty who seem dead-set against change. Too often, we dismiss our detractors’ objections as springing from short-sightedness, or worse, sheer obstinacy. Yet if we do not make the effort to understand and validate the real (and often positive) motivations of the opposite camp, we are unlikely to make any progress. Based on a recent case study of a large urban community college system, Michelle Hodara and I have developed an “opposing forces framework” that may help innovators understand the conflicting motivations that shape developmental education. In today’s post, I want to focus on one key set of opposing forces: support of student progression versus enforcement of academic standards.

Nationwide, faculty and administrators all want to support students to succeed. Evidence is mounting that accelerated strategies (such as shortening sequences, or mainstreaming developmental students with additional supports) can help do this. While accelerated strategies vary, many of them are based on the fact that placement exams are notoriously imprecise in their assessments of students’ capabilities; such acceleration strategies work by allowing students to “place upward” -- tackling more difficult work than the placement exam would suggest that they should. And indeed, while some students will falter and fail in this more difficult environment, on the whole, upward-placement methods allow more students to enter and successfully complete gatekeeper math and English courses than would be possible under the traditional sequence.

Why would anyone oppose such a strategy? It allows far more students to succeed in the long term, and at a lower cost to both the institution and the student. To put the problem into perspective, however, consider the fact that upward-placement methods are fundamentally equivalent to lowering your institution’s placement cut score -- and then imagine how people would feel about that. In our case study, although all faculty were passionate about student success, they were also universally uncomfortable with the notion of cut score decreases, based on three types of worries. The first worry is that the school would be perceived as having poor academic quality. The second is that introductory college-level courses would be harder to teach due to wide variation in student preparedness. Strongly related to that is the third worry: that a flood of less-prepared students would give faculty the uncomfortable choice of either failing more students or relaxing their standards. All three worries reflect the generalized fear that teaching quality, grading rigor, and academic standards would decline at the college -- in ways that would fail students, exhaust faculty, and disappoint the community. Viewed in that light, acceleration strategies could be understood as an existential threat to hardworking and committed faculty across the campus. Who can blame them, then, for opposing your work?

Overall, our case study illustrated that everyone involved in developmental education is passionately committed to the greater good, but they tend to fall on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they think should be done to advance the greater good. I think this study has convinced us that it may be impossible to fix developmental education unless administrators and faculty sit down and candidly talk with one another, in a context that allows people to bring some of these fears out into the open and work through them. If these conversations happen, then colleges can work out strategies to support progression while at the same time enforcing standards. For example, to ensure high standards in accelerated developmental courses and introductory college-level courses, faculty could work together to develop common learning outcomes across sections of each course, collaboratively creating standards that are meaningful, clearly defined, and maintained at a high level. If faculty are having trouble getting their students to meet the defined learning outcomes, there would be more clear information about exactly where students are struggling, and which teachers have materials and techniques that seem more helpful in certain areas. And rather than punishing faculty who have low pass rates or pressuring them to increase their pass rates, departments could support faculty to experiment and learn together about strategies that seem to be effective with struggling students.

In our case study, we discuss the tension between progression and standards in more detail, as well as two additional tensions (centralization vs. autonomy, and efficient vs. effective assessment). For more details and recommendations, I encourage you to take a look at our report: The Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Education: Assessment, Placement, and Progression at CUNY Community Colleges.