USC Pullias Center Awarded Nearly $400k by Spencer Foundation to Research AB705 Implementation at LACCD Colleges
The Pullias Center for Higher Education has been awarded an approximately $400k Spencer Foundation grant. The grant will fund the “Examining Implementation of a State Mandate to End Remediation in Community Colleges: A Research-Practitioner Partnership” project over 2.5 years. The goal of this project is to examine how Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) colleges are implementing the major structural changes required under the newly-passed AB705 legislation in California.
The principal investigators for this project will be Tatiana Melguizo from the USC Pullias Center, Cheryl D. Ching from University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Deborah L. Harrington from LACCD. The Pullias Center and LACCD have a longstanding researcher-practitioner partnership. For the past decade the two organizations have collaborated on research related to understanding and evaluating the assessment and placement policies and practices in developmental math. At the recent Pullias Center Math Convening, Melguizo shared new research from the center which showed that almost half of Los Angeles community college students who were deemed “college-ready” in math according to high school standards were placed in developmental math (below Algebra 2) when they transitioned to community college. This math misalignment is particularly severe for black and Latina/o students with more than one-third experiencing the misalignment.
“This legislation has the potential to basically fix remediation and reduce inequities in outcomes by placing the majority of the students directly in college level math with different levels of support,” notes Melguizo.
The project seeks to understand sense-making and decision-making across the district, identify strategies and barriers to successful implementation of AB705, and provide an early assessment of whether and how LACCD is achieving the student success goals of AB705. Members from both LACCD and USC have crafted research questions and developed the research strategy, and will work together to design a survey of college administrators; collect and analyze qualitative data from surveys, interviews, and observations; analyze quantitative data; draft reports of research findings; and implement a dissemination plan for local, state, and national audiences.
Subscribe to the Pullias Center newsletter to be kept abreast of future research around AB705 implementation and the efforts to achieve math equity in higher education.