This Issue: Rethinking Developmental Education
Perhaps no other year has been met with so much anticipation and trepidation at the same time as 2021. The prior year seems like it would be no tough act to follow but we have all been somewhat conditioned to expect the worst at any time, or in some cases, all the time.

Not so for our guest editor, Dr. Tatiana Melguizo, the Pullias Center researcher and professor at the USC Rossier School of Education. She has been tirelessly involved in research on groundbreaking legislation in California that could shape education in community colleges across the country for the better. This edition of our newsletter opens with her take on that project then we move to a closer look at the event she helped organize to share her team's findings so far.

This issue also brings news of a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that incorporates the expertise and perspectives of Dr. Julie Posselt, one of the Pullias Center's researchers. We also put a spotlight on Dr. Cecile Sam's project on "safe spaces in higher education," which is one of five projects to receive a Pullias Center Equity Alumni Award.
Tatiana Melguizo discusses her research team’s dive into California’s historic AB705 legislation and why community colleges across the country should pay attention.

The California community college system has had to deal with two major developments in the past two years. First, the state passed Assembly Bill 705 (AB705), which required colleges to place students directly in transfer-level courses with supports, and in so doing, essentially eliminated the practice of developmental education by Fall 2019. Then, in Spring 2020, a global pandemic hit, forcing the 116 colleges in the system to move to remote instruction. In the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), this impacted over 10,000 courses.

The mandate to fully implement AB705, coupled with one of the most significant disruptions to the education system of the past two centuries, is creating unprecedented challenges but also unique opportunities for colleges to support student learning and success. This perhaps also represents an enormous opportunity for higher education leaders across the country to learn from the experiences of community colleges in California...
To discuss the research on the implementation of AB705, a two hour conference was organized by Dr. Melguizo and a team at the Pullias Center in partnership with Estela Bensimon of the USC Race and Equity Center and Bensimon & Associates. The event featured three presentations that addressed the ways racially minoritized students are benefiting from the implementation of AB705, along with identifying the enablers and barriers around implementation. Attendees of the conference also considered how the research presented at the meeting could be leveraged to strengthen the racial equity focus of AB705 and to ensure that AB705 fulfills its potential as an anti-racist policy.
Mental Health, Substance Abuse, and Wellbeing in Higher Education: Supporting the Whole Student includes the most current research, and reviews how institutions of higher education– from community colleges to doctoral programs– should support the mental health and wellbeing of undergraduate and graduate students in all fields of study. NASEM assembled a 15-person committee for this project whose expertise included psychiatry, drug and alcohol abuse, social sciences, neuropharmacology, trauma, DEI, mental health, and of course, learning and education.

Julie Posselt, an associate professor of higher education at USC Rossier School of Education and a researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education, was selected to join the committee. An expert on graduate education and STEM fields, Dr. Posselt brought expertise on institutional and organizational factors affecting racial and gender disparities in mental health, as well as threats and supports for wellbeing in graduate education.
“AB 705 in the Los Angeles Community College District: Results from Fall 2019” describes early outcomes of AB705 implementation in the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), the largest district in the California Community College system (CCC), and one of the largest in the country.

The report examines enrollment and completion of transfer-level courses among first-time-in-college (FTIC) students entering LACCD in Fall 2017, Fall 2018, and Fall 2019.The research found increased access and completion of transfer-level math and English courses, but significant variation by race/ethnicity. The authors highlight and discuss seven key findings while framing them against the goals of the AB705 legislation.

This research was conducted in a research-practitioner partnership between the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Community College District and supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.
“Understanding the Narratives of Safe Space to Inform Higher Education Policy” examines the term “safe space” and how it has been reported in higher education news. This project is one of five funded through the Pullias Center Equity Alumni Award.

This project is a discourse analysis of how the term “safe space” has been reported in higher education news. Data was gathered from over 400 news articles that mentioned “safe space” between the years 2004-2018 and data will be analyzed through examination of the different ways it has either been implicitly or explicitly defined and the controversies linked with those definitions.

Former Pullias Center member Dr. Cecile Sam is Project Lead and Principal Investigator for this project. She earned her PhD in Urban Education from USC in 2012 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rowan University. .

Quick Takes
from the Pullias Center

  • A team of researchers led by Zoe Corwin is taking a grassroots strategy to spread the findings of an important study on skateboarding culture.
  • A new publication by KC Culver, Jordan Harper, and Adrianna Kezar puts equity front and center with a new model that considers the unique challenges in design thinking related to policy making in higher education..
  • The PASS Project team will present at "Creating an Ecology of Validation Where First-Generation, Racialized Minorities, and Low-Income Students Can Succeed" at the AAC&U Annual meeting on 1/21 at 4:15pm ET.
  • Pullias Center Director Adrianna Kezar and AAC&U's Ashley Finley will lead a panel of Delphi Award winners from LSU and Northcentral University discussing innovations in supporting contingent faculty at the AAC&U Annual Meeting on 1/22 at 12:15pm ET.
Recommended Media
Suggestions from Guest Editor Dr. Tatiana Melguizo

The Pullias Newsletter will return in February