Developmental education (DE) reform is a national phenomenon. Across the country, policymakers, reform networks, advocacy groups, philanthropic organizations, and others have called for fundamental changes in how institutions of higher education prepare students for college work (Jaggars & Bickerstaff, 2018). Community colleges are critical to this project because of their outsized role in providing DE to recent high school graduates as well as adult students (Bragg, 2001). Although DE approaches have differed over time (Arendale, 2011), in the current era, DE is synonymous with “pre-requisite remediation.” Pre-requisite remediation is the sequence of pre-college courses (also known as DE or below-transfer-level courses; we use these terms interchangeably) into which colleges place students deemed “underprepared,” based on an assessment of their reading, writing, and math ability.

Questions about the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of pre-requisite remediation started in the early 2000s and has grown in subsequent years as researchers used large data sets and causal statistical analyses to show that (a) the standardized assessment tests that most colleges rely on for placement inaccurately measure students’ college readiness (e.g., Author, 2016); (b) measures such as high school GPA, grades, and coursetaking may better capture student readiness (Bergman et al., 2018); (c) placement in DE stymies progression to college coursework and completion (Valentine et al., 2017); and (d) current arrangements disproportionately impact Black and Latinx/a/o students (Xu, 2016). Additionally, qualitative studies cracked open the “black box” of the classroom and highlighted the prevalence of “basic skills instruction” that foregrounds procedural knowledge and discrete skill development over the critical thinking, conceptual complexity, and context-based learning generally expected in higher education (Cox, 2015; Grubb & Gabriner, 2013).