During a July convening at Carnegie with representatives from several organizations working on increasing success for community college students in developmental mathematics, participants came up with some tensions that need to be acknowledged and/or addressed.

Those include:

• Increased pressure to increase graduation and completion rates and the desire to get students to learn more mathematics do not necessarily lead to the same actions.
• Instead of “tracking” students at community colleges (something done to students) can we instead provide options and ask students to decide what they need (as they do in choosing a major).
• We acknowledge that the low success rate in developmental math is not necessarily the fault of faculty or students or high schools, but instead is because developmental math needs to be done differently.