Green Light, Red Light

We discussed the February 8 DEI Pre-Conference Convening on the blog last week, but we wanted to lift up some reflections from the meeting participants. At the end of an intense day of problem solving, sharing, and collaboration, David Dodson, president of MDC, led the group through a red, yellow, and green light exercise. He asked participants to talk about:

• what they learned that they’d like to immediately proceed with-- green light!
• what things they’d like to examine with some caution--yellow light!
• and anything they’d like to stop and reexamine--red light!

Participants gave the green light observations to creating more incentives for faculty to innovate in developmental education; high-stakes testing got a yellow light, and one-stop, non-systemic faculty development that is not part of long-term staff development got the red light signal for reexamination.

But let’s back the car up a bit. As the group was pulling up to the yellow light, one significant note of uncertainty arose: the absence of a working theory of what works for students at the lowest level of development. One meeting participant said, “we have opinions, biases, but not a working theory, and until then we’re shooting in the dark.”  The glaring caution here: an emphasis on scaling can provide an unintended disincentive to help students at the lowest levels, and focusing on students that have a shorter road to successful completion. 

This same issue got a red light of reexamination in today’s Inside Higher Ed. Arizona’s Pima Community College Chancellor, Roy Flores, discusses one response to this conundrum: his college is changing admissions policies. Students that test into the lowest level of developmental education will not be allowed to enroll, but will instead be referred to other adult education services in the college and community. Though budget constraints are part of the impetus, Chancellor Flores is chiefly concerned by data that show that “students testing into the lowest levels of developmental education have virtually no chance of ever moving beyond remedial work and achieving their educational goals.” 

Here again is the tension between the access mission and the student-success mission of community colleges. What do we need to learn and where do we need to innovate in order to build pathways to valuable credentials that meet the varied needs of individuals on that path?



Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.