The process of assessing underprepared students, placing them into an appropriate developmental education course sequence, and advancing them through to college-level coursework is broken. Based on a case study of the City University of New York’s six community colleges, this report proposes a new opposing forces framework for understanding the dysfunction of the developmental education system. The authors discuss the tensions inherent in the framework — systemwide consistency versus institutional autonomy, efficient versus effective assessment, and promotion of student progression versus enforcement of academic standards — and use CUNY as a case study to describe how each of the opposing forces shape developmental policies, practices, and student progression patterns.