Challenges and Potentials in Developmental Education: An Interview with Raymund A. Paredes

It served as a model for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB); also, in 2000, the state launched an aggressive effort called Closing the Gaps, a plan for increasing higher education access and quality in order to dramatically improve workforce readiness for international economic competition. In a Commissioners Report to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), he said, "We can not achieve our goals in terms of success for our undergraduate students unless we make significant improvement in developmental education which directly leads, of course, to our success in terms of graduation rates and time-to-degree" (Paredes, 2005, p. 1). If it is true, and I believe that it is, that according to ACT less than 20% of Texas high school graduates are prepared to do rigorous college work across the board; clearly there is a large number of students who will require some form of developmental or remedial education.