Race and Power in the Implementation of a Developmental Education Reform

• In Event: The End of Remediation in California's Community Colleges: Policy Implementation, Student Outcomes, and Faculty Experiences

Abstract

Parker (1998) and Tate (1997) urge policy scholars to study not whether racism exists within education systems but to examine how racial meanings provide the basis for action, which can impact minoritized students (Evans, 2007). This study examines how racial meanings are evident in actors’ sensemaking and actions to implement AB705. Using concepts of critical sensemaking (Helms Mills et al., 2010) under a racialized organizations lens (Ray, 2019), critical race sensemaking is conceptualized to consider how meaning is constructed and actualized to inform the dominant racial order, as evident for example, in the over placement of minoritized students into developmental education. It allows us to examine whether actors believed the policy was motivated as a means to achieve racial equity.

This study uses 38 in-depth interviews with community college actors responsible for AB705’s implementation at two sites to address three goals. First, it examines the ways institutional actors made sense of the goals and desired outcomes of the policy. Second, it investigates whether awareness of developmental education as a racialized practice shaped how actors made sense of AB705. Finally, it examined how leaders exercised their agency and power to influence the policy’s implementation from the standpoint of racial equity.

To the first goal, the findings show implementers had varying interpretations of AB705 based on various experiences. The spectrum of interpretations were categorized as ‘advocates’ and ‘opponents’ of AB705. Advocates were: 1) believers of data identifying prevailing equity gaps, 2) avid consumers and purveyors of professional development, and 3) previous experimenters of acceleration. This led supporters to believe that AB705 would increase access to transferable courses, affirms students as college-ready, and as a social justice initiative with transformative potential to close equity gaps. In contrast, opponents guided by many years of teaching experience framed AB705 as poorly informed and fallaciously motivated.

To the second goal, awareness of racialization was similarly split on a spectrum of beliefs. Advocates welcomed AB705 because they recognized that racialization was an inherent feature of developmental education. They identified racialization in two areas: patterns of racialized placement and course curriculum that centers exclusively on whiteness (Leonardo, 2009). To advocates, this recognition turned into support of AB705’s mandate to expand access and also the questioning of existing curriculum. In contrast, opponents saw developmental education as a necessary academic intervention to correct student deficiencies described in coded and sometimes racially explicit ways (Pollock, 2004).

To the third goal, this study found that leaders who were aware of racialization in developmental education and supportive of its reform were much more influential in pressuring implementation of AB705 from the standpoint of racial equity. They facilitated dialogue about race and openly challenged racist assumptions in faculty beliefs and practices. Additionally, executive leadership was differentially involved in supporting AB705 from the perspective of equity and exercised their influence accordingly. The study contributes to a dearth of literature on race and power in the sensemaking of higher education policies with aspirations for racial equity.

Author

• Adrian Trinidad, University of Southern California