“The Panhandle is Different than the Peninsula”: How Rural Colleges in Florida Implemented Education Reform

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 25. Rural Education

Abstract

When it comes to the creation of higher education policy, state legislators are challenged with addressing the diverse academic needs of college students enrolled across a spectrum of institutions. In this paper, we explore how 164 campus personnel at five rural colleges in Florida implemented state-wide developmental education (DE) reform (Senate Bill 1720) using the theoretical frameworks of “situated cognition” (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) and cognitive sociology (Zerubavel, 1997). Specifically, we ask whether the five rural-serving colleges implemented DE reform in unique ways that may have differed from their non-rural counterparts and what their rationale was for doing so. Our work reveals that institutional culture and capacity generated a combination of strengths and liabilities in how education reform played out in a rural context. In some ways, a rural-serving identity made colleges more flexible and better able to adjust their advising and curricular structures to comply with the mandates of SB 1720. But in other ways, rural-serving institutions lacked the resources necessary to adequately support students and campus personnel through such a dramatic transition towards a new way of doing DE. In looking toward the passage and implementation of future education reform, we call upon policymakers to consider what exemptions might be made to ensure that new mandates support rural and non-rural colleges alike.

Authors

• Amanda Nicole Nix, Florida State University

• Tamara Bertrand Jones, Florida State University

• Rebecca L. Brower, Florida State University

• Shouping Hu