Overview:
For too many community college students, particularly low-income students and students who have returned to school after a long absence to train for a new career, developmental (remedial) education becomes an unnecessarily difficult barrier to cross. Nearly six out of ten community college students need at least one developmental course, and fewer than a quarter of them earn a certificate or degree within eight years. Many quit before ever getting to credit-bearing courses. Those numbers represent the lives of thousands of people who wanted to work toward a brighter future, but didn't even make it to the starting line.
The Developmental Education Initiative, created by MDC in association with Achieving the Dream and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation, is a groundbreaking effort at 15 colleges and six states to find ways to make developmental education more effective, more efficient—or unnecessary altogether. That reduces the students' financial burden and increases the likelihood they'll stay in school.
Goals:
- To remove institutional roadblocks, speed-up classes, improve support services, and make instruction more effective at community colleges.
- To develop state-level strategies to collect reliable data about student outcomes, allocate funds that support broad adoption of successful models, and implement policies that encourage improvements. DEI state policy work is led by Jobs for the Future.
Progress:
Progress in colleges:
- Scaling-up successful practices: Zane State College's intensive advising program serves every developmental student education and helping raise student retention rates to as high as 96 percent.
- Preparing students for assessment testing: El Paso Community College now serves over 3000 students each semester in the Pre-testing Retesting Educational Preparation (PREP) program. Many students advance at least one remediation level—and some more than one—reducing the number of courses they'll take before advancing to credit-bearing work.
- Adopting classroom innovations: Students at Housatonic Community College take self-paced courses, supported by case managers to ensure course attendance and homework completion—and accelerated progress through remedial requirements.
Progress in states:
- Data-driven improvement: Florida is developing a student success dashboard to make student results more visible to state and local decision-makers.
- Investment in innovation: North Carolina Community College System is redesigning developmental math curricula and delivery for all 58 colleges in the state.
- Statewide policy change: Four bills supporting improved developmental education instruction, funding, and faculty professional development passed the Texas House and Senate in 2011.
