Developmental Education Policy and Reforms: A 50-State Snapshot

The article provides recent state and system wide developmental education (DE) policy mandates and reforms for all 50 states. The rationale is to determine how states are refining the assessment, placement, instruction, and advisement of students deemed noncollege ready and who are advised or mandated to enroll in traditional or innovative DE instruction. This research extends previous DE policy research pubiished from Education Commission of the States and other policy analysis organizations, research centers, foundatiotis, and independent researchers. We used purposeful sampling to collect data from multiple sources (e.g. legislative statutes and mandates, state or system wide policy documents, agency records, etc.). Basic findings include 42states that address, in some form, DE policy, 38 states that address DE assessment policy; 37 states that address DE course placement policy; 32 states that address DE instructional reform policy; and 29 states that address advising policy, in which 18 of those state policies are specific to students enrolled in DE. We also present a policy snapshot for each state. Trends from the research include standardized assessments being widely implemented with many states allowing for multiple measures of assessment as well as advising to configure placement into DE. Corequisite models of instruction are also becoming more common as an alternative to prereqmsite DE stand-alone courses scaffolded by learning support. We posit that DE policies are emergent and mostly in continual flux and recommend the field would benefit from a common and consistent set of DE data for all 50 states.