Tatiana Melguizo: Charting a Path Away from Developmental Education Starts in California

The Pullias Center’s Tatiana Melguizo discusses her research team’s dive into California’s historic AB705 legislation and why community colleges across the country should pay attention.

The California community college system has had to deal with two major developments in the past two years. First, the state passed Assembly Bill 705 (AB705), which required colleges to place students directly in transfer-level courses with supports, and in so doing, essentially eliminated the practice of developmental education by Fall 2019. Then, in Spring 2020, a global pandemic hit, forcing the 116 colleges in the system to move to remote instruction. In the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), this impacted over 10,000 courses.

The mandate to fully implement AB705, coupled with one of the most significant disruptions to the education system of the past two centuries, is creating unprecedented challenges but also unique opportunities for colleges to support student learning and success. This perhaps also represents an enormous opportunity for higher education leaders across the country to learn from the experiences of community colleges in California. Some of these schools led the charge in dismantling the long sequences of courses that exist below transfer-level before being legislated to do so.

Federick Ngo, Cheryl Ching, and I are in the process of conducting a mixed-methods evaluation of AB705 implementation across LACCD funded by the Spencer Foundation to understand and systematically document the challenges and potential equity impact of this ground-breaking legislation. Despite the challenges brought by the global pandemic over the past year, we have been able to collect timely quantitative and qualitative data to start describing the process of early implementation as well as early outcomes.

AB705 requires colleges to increase the placement of students in transfer-level English and math courses by using “multiple measures” instead of an assessment test to determine placement, and by providing students with concurrent support to enhance their success. The multiple measures include indicators of students’ past performance and potential to succeed (for example, high school GPA and coursetaking), while concurrent support includes tutoring and co-requisite courses. We used student transcript data to document initial changes in access to, and completion of, transfer-level courses in math and English.

These data paint a picture of successful early policy implementation. The results suggest that AB705 helped First Time in College (FTIC) students access transfer-level English courses, and improved student access to transfer-level math courses. However, the increase in access was paired with some declines in course passing rates in transfer-level English and math courses. While thousands more students are completing transfer-level English and math courses under AB705, community colleges are still engaged in the difficult but inherently important work of determining how best to support student success.

We also looked at the gains for racially minoritized students, in particular African American and Latina/o/x students, and found that under AB705 colleges managed to more-or-less close previous equity gaps in access to transfer-level courses. However, despite substantial gains in the number of racially minoritized students accessing these courses, the gap in terms of completion remains substantial. These results found from looking at all the data are explained in more detail in a new report from our team.

However, as most researchers know, that data does not tell the whole story. We also conducted multiple interviews with LACCD district leaders as part of our case study. The qualitative component of our study seeks to present a nuanced take on the way leaders in the district and leaders and faculty in focal colleges are understanding, interpreting, and facilitating the implementation of the policy. Early themes emerging from the interviews highlight how AB705 enabled district leaders to push for substantial reforms to developmental education. We can begin to see the technical and political challenges that come along with moving a nine-college district towards common placement models and course offerings while ensuring that faculty are prepared to teach courses under AB705 conditions.

Not only did the district develop a data system to manage the new placement schemes, they worked with math and English faculty to ensure their proposed placement models were in compliance and worked for students. And, in a bold move, the district chancellor decided not to schedule any developmental education classes two or more levels below transfer level; prior to AB705, colleges offered up to five levels below transfer level courses.

In December 2020, we collaborated with Professor Estela Bensimon from the USC Center of Race Equity to convene an invitational conference to share results related to AB705 implementation from a related project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The meeting brought leaders, practitioners, and researchers from around the country to discuss the implications of emerging findings on AB705 implementation. The Wheelhouse Center at UC Davis is summarizing and synthesizing the findings presented at the conference and will share their report in February 2021.

What can community colleges across the country learn from AB705? Should colleges look to adopt AB705-like policies and strategies and what results can they expect in terms of access and completion of transfer level courses? It’s not only too soon to tell but what works in California may not transfer to the community college systems in other states. But that does not mean we can’t start looking at some blueprints for scaling up a better approach to developmental education. AB705 has put California into the spotlight and the early results suggest it may have a real and valuable long-term impact.

Going forward, we will field a baseline survey to ask faculty, counselors, and leaders about AB705 implementation. We also plan to take a deeper dive into AB705 at a set of focal colleges in LACCD. Finally, we will analyze the post-pandemic transcript data and continue to document the changes in access and timely transfer-level course completion necessary for community college students to attain a certificate or degree in a timely manner.

2020 brought with it no shortage of challenges for educators, students, policymakers, and researchers to overcome. 2021 may end up being more of the same, but opportunities to examine historic legislation like AB705 cannot be completely overshadowed by the historic times that frame its implementation.

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Tatiana Melguizo is a professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and faculty member of the Pullias Center for Higher Education.