Positive Results for Remedial Program at NYC Community Colleges

October 24, 2011, 11:53 am

A program known as “Start” is helping the growing number of students who need remediation at New York City’s community colleges, The New York Times reports. The low-cost course, offered by the City University of New York, focuses on reading, writing, and mathematics. Since its introduction, in 2008, more than half the students in the course have passed all three of their remediation tests. Seventy-four percent of New York high-school graduates who enroll at one of CUNY’s six community colleges take at least one remedial class. Those needing remediation in all three subjects are at highest risk of dropping out. In 2010, 22.6 percent of CUNY students needed such remediation, up from 15.4 percent in 2005. CUNY is currently working to improve low graduation rates with an experimental community college in Manhattan.

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blesstayo

“Seventy-four percent of New York high-school graduates who enroll at one of CUNY’s six community colleges take at least one remedial class?” Who trained these teachers at New York high schools?

Are the New York high schools funded by tax payers? The New York high schools seem to be broken and dysfunctional
11274135

Sorry, Blesstayo. It’s not that simple. The students who enroll in the CUNY colleges are not all recent high school graduates. They are a mixed population of recent high school grads and returning adult students with complex educational, economic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. There are many reasons why they might need catch-up courses. But more than that. You should not be so quick to blame the schools. Kids spend 15% or less of their waking hours in and on school from kindergarten through 12th grade. The rest of their time is spent trying to survive in the world around around them, and the world a lot of students live in is not very supportive of the nuances of learning to read, write, and compute. The correlations between academic readiness and socioeconomic status are well established. The enemies of learning are poverty, crime, drugs, dysfunctional families, and other disruptions of the nonschool lives of students. The students who find their way to CUNY campuses are to be congratulated and asssisted for their ambition and determnination.
ccenglishprof

blesstayo:

You seem to be unaware of the national data that shows that between 60-90% of students have to take at least one remedial/developmental class in writing, reading, or math at the university or community college level. This isn’t just because of poor performance by high schools. Numerous studies have shown that there is not much alignment between high school curricula and exit skills and college placement standards and instruments (the latter is a whole thorny problem in and of itself). This lack of alignment was one of the big arguments that fueled development of the new Common Core Standards for K-12.

I was just at a state conference here in California and one of the presenters from City College of San Francisco stated that 89% of all of their incoming first year students place below freshman composition. She said that they have a very large ESL/ELL population and over half of their students do not have English as a first language.

So yes, there may be some ammo to fire at K-12 education but I think we also have to contextualize the data…
karld

They concentrate on reading, writing, and math. Wouldn’t it be easier just to do that in the first place?
katym198696

Just as common here in Minnesota. I am an Advisor at a community college in the Twin Cities, and most students I advise take AT LEAST one developmental course to prepare them for college level reading, writing, or math. This is not just adult students returning to school after many years, either. Most high school students test into developmental courses, as well! I have never been so frustrated with high schools as I have been since I started in this position.