Just Equations founder and executive director Pamela Burdman submitted the following letter to the California State Assembly Higher Education Committee in support of the implementation of California Assembly Bill 1705 to ensure community college students are given the access and opportunities needed to reach their goals.
Dear Chair and Members of the Higher Education Committee,
On behalf of Just Equations, I would like to express our strong support for Assembly Bill 1705 (Irwin) implementation. If properly implemented, AB 1705 will ensure that California's community colleges are helping all of our students to succeed.
Just Equations is a California-based policy institute with an emphasis on the role of math education in ensuring equitable opportunity. Our staff have been involved for more than a decade in analyzing and synthesizing research related to postsecondary math education practices and policies.
AB 1705 was designed to help ensure that California community college students have the greatest opportunity to reach their goals. Building upon AB 705, it requires the state’s community colleges to recognize high school coursework instead of relying on inaccurate placement tests. This includes placing students into math classes with appropriate support, to ensure them the greatest chance of making progress toward a college degree. By eliminating remedial courses that were excluding students from transfer-level courses in which they could have succeeded, AB 705 has produced dramatically better student outcomes and increases in student completion, while reducing racial equity gaps in access to, and completion of, transfer-level courses. It has also led to more students enrolling in and completing Business, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (BSTEM) math courses, with noteworthy gains for Latino and Black students, who have been historically underrepresented in BSTEM majors (PPIC 2021).
Nevertheless, implementation of AB 705 has been uneven across the community college system, and a substantial number of students are still encouraged to enroll in below-transfer courses, despite evidence suggesting that doing so dramatically reduces their likelihood of completion. Just 14% of students who took one below transfer math course in fall 2019 completed a transfer-level course in a year, compared to 60% of students who enrolled directly in the transfer level.
AB 1705 was adopted to help strengthen the implementation of AB 705. It is essential to ensure that all students benefit from these successful reforms by:
Equitable placement and completion reforms at community colleges have produced unprecedented gains for students. This policy is a critical lever in meeting the goals of the California Community Colleges system’s Vision for Success. For these reasons, we strongly support AB 1705 implementation.
We also want to emphasize that successful implementation will require effective data collection and analysis at the college and system level. In particular, the December memo that allows colleges to offer Calculus prerequisites creates a risk that students who have the ability to succeed in a Calculus corequisite course will instead be required to take prerequisite courses that don’t count toward a STEM major, possibly jeopardizing their progress toward a degree. It is essential that the system follow through with the plan to “rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of the different approaches in students’ completion of Calculus, Calculus 2, student performance and persistence in STEM, and their completion of STEM degrees.” This requires that any prerequisite sequences be shown to improve students’ progress toward these outcomes or discontinued.
Sincerely,
Pamela Burdman
Executive Director, Just Equations
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