Framing Corequisite Reform: Examining Staff Perceptions and Buy-in of a Statewide Dev-ed Reform Mandate

ABSTRACT

States and colleges nationwide are adopting corequisite reforms, where students assessed as not meeting college-readiness standards concurrently enroll in developmental and college-level coursework. Leveraging frame analysis—an approach drawn from collective action research—and interviews with 49 actors at 16 community colleges implementing a statewide corequisite mandate, we examine how institutional actors construct meaning of the status quo and reformed dev-ed systems and how they assign responsibility for solving identified problems. Examining the microprocesses experienced by institutional agents may explain the lack of buy-in among college personnel responsible for implementing dev-ed reform—surprising given growing evidence of the effectiveness of corequisites—and variation in reform take-up. Our findings on the frames used by implementing actors illuminate individual-level processes underlying lags in reform implementation and, for policymakers and administrators, can inform potential counterframes to spur further action and overcome resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Community college
• developmental education
• policy reform
• frame analysis
• framing theory
• corequisite

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Because of a delayed response from one of the medium-implementing colleges, we selected an alternate but eventually also received a response from the first.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [P2CHD042849].