Crossroads Community College

Developmental education is often reduced to its most basic and easiest definition: remediation. Reducing any object, concept, or human being to its simplest form seems commonplace, especially today amidst waves of information. Who has time to look closely, especially at one of a historically and politically complex nature which involves millions of college students, billions of dollars, and has become part of a nation's educational agenda?

Arthur Chickering (1969) can be an introductory reference as his work is among the most widely cited in regard to theoretical foundations of developmental education. Chickering's seven vectors of college student development delve beyond his "developing competence" in subject matter, which may or may not be remedial, to include a broad and deep consideration of human development (Higbee, n.d.):

• managing emotions

• moving through autonomy toward interdependence

• developing mature interpersonal relationships

• establishing identity

• developing purpose

• developing integrity

In essence, developmental education is "any experience that helps students define 'who I am', 'who I am not' (Reisser, 1995) in relationship to themselves, other students, and curriculum. While Chickering's framework has been considered by some educators for 44 years, developmental education (DE) in some form has been around for much of the history of

formal education in the United States. Ironically, while DE's focus is on attention to the growth of the individual, particularly of those who may not have had many educational opportunities at school, home, or community, historian David Arendale (2002) claims that the topic is largely ignored by scholars despite its long and sizable role in U.S. postsecondary education. He found one chapter in the history of post-secondary education that provided an accounting of the role of developmental education, provided by the University of Wisconsin when as early as 1865 a pattern continued since the institution was established 20 years prior. Arendale's research finds then that at Wisconsin 290 of the 331 students were enrolled in college preparatory coursework, so only 41 students were actually engaged in college-level work. In 1894, it was estimated that 40 percent of students nationwide were enrolled in college preparatory courses at college (p. 5) and 80 percent of colleges and universities provided developmental education. In 1907, roughly half of Ivy League students were claimed to have failed their college entrance exams.

A review of this component of higher education suggests that many students throughout American history have been involved with different academic activities related to developmental education and learning assistance . . . At times developmental education programs involved nearly half the number of students than those enrolled in official graduation-credit bearing college-level courses. Sometimes the number in developmental education exceeded the other group. (Arendale, 2002, p. 4)

More interesting are the ideas Arendale (2002) raises as to why the research historians have consciously or unconsciously ignored the space developmental education has occupied in the nation’s history. One reason is that historians have placed a higher priority “on traditional topics and histories of the majority white male class and not those of women, students of color, and those of deprived academic and economic backgrounds” (p. 8) who often comprise most of the students needing developmental education. Along with this idea is that developmental education is a metaphorical “road apple” in the history of postsecondary education, an unsightly blemish on our social and political history that includes injustices and that most, with collective memory or “heritage amnesia,” would choose to forget. I also suggest a reason related to the "road apple" perspective of developmental education and where most of DE is occurring: the stigma of community colleges as well as the scholarship conducted there. In a survey of about 300 articles, the body of scholarship conducted by community college faculty has been criticized roundly by at least a pair of researchers (Safarik & Getskow, 1997) who attack faculty as having "parochial" natures whose "contrubution to the literature is a symptom of an overriding and pervasive lack of professionalism" (p. 71) ill-informed by research and theory and therefore detached and unlikely to impact policy beyond its institution. This broad rebuff of scholarship in community colleges is one explicit slam of attempts to tell the story of community college work and may, I suggest, be a rare blast but part of a much larger implicit silencing or purposeful neglect of an area of scholarship, like community college developmental education that Arendale has illustrated.

This history--or lack thereof--of developmental education not only provides a broader context for an introduction to this study but is an insight into the root of this inquiry. Not only is it indicated that educational historians have neglected developmental education and its enduring role in the country, I suggest that the reason I had never heard of developmental education (DE) ten years before leaving my high school classroom and accepting a DE teaching position in a community college's English department is because, like its students, the field and its work is marginalized. We--researchers, educators, and the broader citizenry--are still choosing not to look. Most people in education I talk with about the DE field are, like I was, oblivious to developmental education, and like in the past, DE is still a large phenomenon in post-secondary education in the United States.

While some researchers (Bailey, 2009) cite data that claim as many as 60% of incoming college students are referred to developmental coursework, most data points to the number being closer to 30% who actually took at least one remedial course (Boylan, 1995, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2008).  

Among the students who are required to take DE courses, which may mean as many as several semesters and seven courses in math, reading, and writing, those most likely to need these basic academic skills are those students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and those from minority race and ethnicities. 

 

As of 2009-2010, my community college assessment center recorded 39.4% of students who took the Computer-Adaptive Placement Assessment and Support System (COMPASS) placement test needed DE writing, 37.3% needed DE math, and 23.3% needed DE reading before being deemed "college ready." A majority of these students, nationally speaking, are high school graduates (Bailey, 2010).  What this data as well as the figure above and Arendale's history underscore is that students who need DE are a continuing phenomenon. What is just as significant is that more students are seeking enrollment in post-secondary institutions as the nation's goal, set by President Obama, is to increase the number of community college graduates by 5 million by 2020. Overall, degree-granting institution enrollment increased by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000 and 37 percent from 15.3 million to 21.0 million (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98). The cost involved is catching the interest of conservative groups. More than $3 billion is said to be spent each year by students and states to provide DE academic supports for 1.7 million students (Complete College America, 2011) at 75% of U.S. colleges and universities (Boylan, 1995). Critics claim that investments in DE are not yielding results. CCA's "Higher Education's Bridge To Nowhere" (2011) states that fewer than 1 in 10 students who take DE courses graduate from community colleges within three years and a little more than a third graduate from four-year schools in six years and arrive at the conclusion that developmental education in the United States is "a dead end" (Complete College America, p. 8). A sample of other criticism follows:

• “Developmental education is one of the main challenges to improving completion at community colleges” (Whissemore, 2010, para. 1)

• “More than 2 million U.S. college students this fall will be spending a good bit of their time reviewing what they were supposed to learn in high school or even earlier. . . . Colleges aren't geared to teaching secondary education to marginal students” (Vedder, 2012, para. 1)

• "The picture of past and current developmental education appears bleak" (Bailey, 2010, p. 51)

This brief introduction to developmental education represents a national landscape and history that indicate a broad and complex discipline, which I suggest is ultimately centered on the individual, the student. The bullet sentences above suggest that critiques lack an ability or desire to see the individual and the specific contexts in which the student, the community college student in particular, is working, living, raising his or her children, and going to school. In fact, a sense of derision and blame for the individuals can be felt in the language used. At the same time, a consideration of the history of this education has been largely neglected. Now there is sudden concern for developmental education being too costly and ineffective and a threat of eliminating DE in its many forms and improvement initiatives.  Yet, while I have been proposing a critique of my own, suggesting a profane vision of developmental education in its lacking history and its present criticism, I cannot lay claim to not sensing a plank of wood in my own eye as an instructor and now researcher in the field. My critique and my answer to it acknowledges my own blindness to individuals who enter my classroom. Arendale (2002) makes another suggestion as to why historians have neglected to explore developmental education: they were never developmental students. Here is the "otherness" that most teachers face in these classrooms with students of lower socioecomic status who are culturally and linguistically diverse. Not just diverse: They are different and in these differences rest a social, political, economic, and historical gap in understanding that resists easy reorientations.

Here is a persistent inability to see and now as I teach developmental education classes I recognize that I do not know who these students are. Whereas Arendale’s discussion is related to a neglected part of educational history that has been sustained over centuries and included perennial questions like What is the purpose of postsecondary education? Who should attend college? What should the curriculum look like?, I am driven first to explore Who are the people in my class? and What is their experience? as I acknowledge my own oversights and gaps in what I may understand about these students. Subsidiary questions include What is the curriculum and is there a “good”, ethically speaking? and  In what ways do these classes connect or disconnect socially and curricularly to developing literacy among underprepared students.