A Developmental Writing Experiment: Mixing ELL and NES Student Writers

Recent studies of the disparate impacts of writing placements for students designated as in need or underprepared, at both two-and four-year colleges, are revealing an underside of placement-driven remedial education in new ways.There are long-term impacts: students who don't complete remedial programs or whose progress is delayed; lower retention rates; unsuccessful transfer.For populations whose languages and English varieties are excluded or devalued in the writing classroom, the disparate impacts play havoc with the stated social justice missions of many open access institutions.Pictures showing the long-term impacts of these programs, which do not take account of the support and attention we provide in our classrooms, should challenge us.They should also wake us to the fact that our classrooms, however supportive, may be unique experiences amid a wave of obstacles that students must navigate to meet the promises of education in today's America.The articles of this issue all recognize the same sobering reality: that the supportive, responsive pedagogies of our classroom do not stand on their own.This fact is especially relevant for the students our authors focus on-students of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity.Placed into programs that are yet to "reimagine the meaning of 'college readiness' in ways that advance student agency" and "fairness" (Poe, Elliot, and Norbert 2019), these are the students most likely to bear unintended harms in a range of placements.