September 15, 2008

Most Students in Remedial Classes in College Had Solid Grades in High School, Survey Finds

Nearly four out of five students who undergo remediation in college graduated from high school with grade-point averages of 3.0 or higher, according to a report issued today by Strong American Schools, a group that advocates making public-school education more rigorous.

Moreover, the report says, a national survey of 688 students in such classes found more than half saying that in high school they were good students who worked hard and nearly always completed their assignments. Nearly six in 10 said their high-school classes were easy, and nearly half said they wished their high-school classes had been harder.

Based on an analysis of federal data from 2004, the report says 43 percent of students at public two-year colleges and 29 percent of students at public four-year colleges have enrolled in remedial courses. It estimates that such institutions spend a total of about $2.5-billion annually providing remedial instruction.

Strong American Schools, established by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a nonprofit group that offers advice to charitable organizations, is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Some prominent education analysts have accused it of overstating the problems of American schools to promote policy changes favored by corporate interests.

The new report follows other research suggesting that remedial programs, on the whole, do not have much long-term influence on college students’ success. —Peter Schmidt

Comments

1. Does this report qualify as news? Why not also inquire why venues delivering lower division undergraduate courses do not prepare students not simply to effectively engage what should [but often do not] prove more demanding upper division undergraduate classes, but also graduate classes where [at least at better schools] the imperative of maintaining “butts in the seats” has disappeared?

   Academics lament the innumeracy, deficiency in science, and the appallingly inept writing of US trained students, but while many institutions have implemented innovative undergraduate math and science programs, most students’ writing remains dreadful. Although college administrators and faculties frequently tout the benefits of implementing writing-across-the-curriculum to remediate the woeful state of their students’ written communication, writing remains unassigned, and American students continue to struggle to write coherently, let alone cogently.

   Until colleges mandate rigor sans mortis respecting this fundamental modality for conveying critical thought, primary and secondary level educators likely will not feel pressured to introduce some of these language skills to their students before their 3.0+ grade points carry them triumphantly off to college.
   When, then, and under what Utopia, will administrators bite the retention bullet, and faculty emerge from their lassitude [conveniently abetted by number conscious administrators] to demand more of their students, not simply in competently edited and thoughtful pages produced, but in the number of
   pages read, the medium so many students detest, but which alone allows attentive, judicious students to acquire the feel for language’s protean cadences and images that invest communicating with majesty?

   — tom lansburg    Sep 15, 11:43 AM    #

2. I think that this should not be a huge surprise to most of us – the main key to getting good grades in high school, in my experience, was not intelligence but just turning in your assignments (as the author states) — these often accounted for a huge percentage of your grade in any class. That doesn’t happen in many college situations (at least in math and sciences at large universities, which is what I’m familiar with) because there really are no assignments. Just exams. And your grades reflect your comprehensive understanding (and test-taking skills) of several weeks’ worth of material. I think a lot of these “remedial” students who got As and Bs in HS by turning in their homework experience a HUGE shock when they show up at Big State U. I saw it too many times with too many of my friends.

   — Bob    Sep 15, 11:52 AM    #

3. What is lacking in public k-12? Reading, writing, and meaning.

   #3, nice anecdotes, and they almost sound logical, but they really do more about unveiling the lens you place on the world (adequacy issues with your girlfriend, maybe? Fear of failure?)

   A California tragedy (coming your way) is that nearly half of 8th graders never finish high school and about 70% of those that do graduate go to a Community College. Roughly 30% of high school graduates qualify and enroll four year public/private university (after 6 years, half will probably graduate). Not everyone is going to college and not everyone needs to go to college (there is plenty of success and opportunity that do not require a BA in English Literature).

   The point? Since the early 1980’s (or even earlier) school reform efforts (huge experiments on our society) have placed us on a trajectory of federalizing education and standardizing (different from having standards) education delivery. The loss of local autonomy, curriculum differentiation, and a push toward high stakes testing has done greater damage on our schools and society than can be articulated here.

   Schools are not challenging or motivating, or even meaningful to students. School is now the time in-between memorizing discrete factoids for regurgitation on a meaningless test with no real impact on the direction and desire of test-taker. Test scores correlates better with zip codes and socio-economic factors than any indicator of academic success. The testing yardstick has no concrete measure related to a students success after high school (college, workforce, society, etc).

   One last thing, except for maybe the period of time when we had Normal Schools (colleges back in the day- known as high school today) when did preparation differentiation not exist? A lot of people have various expectations of schools, but I do not think all of them can be met unless schools are seen as only one small puzzle piece of a much more grand picture.

   We need small, local K-12 schools that offer comprehensive programs and curriculums which include agriculture, career & technical education, fine arts, math, science, history, language, and English. All programs need high standards and expectations as well as have contextually rich learning environments and be integrated amongst course offering, the lives of the students, the needs of the family, and the larger society.

   — axel    Sep 15, 03:10 PM    #

4. re: axel – Was it necessary to insult #3 before making your comments? Your mean-spirited insult shows your true character even though you talk a good line about education.

   — Drlalala    Sep 15, 03:18 PM    #

5. Re: axel- Was there also some need to insult the 70% who go to community colleges? Are they somehow inferior? Absolutely not. Santa Monica Community College is the top transfer institution to the University of California and California State University systems and has been for the last ten years. We do see a high percentage of those students testing into remedial levels of math and English. So, we teach them what they need and transfer them to succeed. No reason to cry over why they aren’t ready for college level coursework. No wonder with the side-effects of high school teachers dealing with NCLB. Our coursework is rigorous as it should be. Isn’t that what higher education is intended to be?

   — Tony    Sep 15, 03:46 PM    #

6. Drop-out rates are high in most high schools around the country. To keep those down, schools are dumbing down classes, which causes grade inflation. When all 50 states move to require a high school diploma as a means to be able to operate a car beyond a permit, then students will start taking high school more seriously. And, high schools like to use the number of students going on to college to promote themselves locally.

   Parents who can get themselves elected to school boards. Others who can afford private school tuition opt out of public education.

   In the meantime, if you haven’t looked a the number of GEDs awarded each year by your local cc, that might be a real surprise. It is time the public started taking public education seriously beyond having winning sports teams, and marching bands.

   — JR    Sep 15, 03:49 PM    #

7. Bumper sticker read this morning on my way to work,
   “MY GOLDEN RETRIEVER IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR ROLE STUDENT.”

   That about sums it up.

   — unabashed male    Sep 15, 04:02 PM    #

8. Thought you would be interested in.

   PD

   — pdavies@sbc.edu    Sep 15, 04:04 PM    #

9. Every book written or movie made about a great teacher shows that teacher challenging their students. They don’t dumb down the class to keep them from dropping out. Let’s try aiming for excellence instead of setting for certain failure.

   — Mark    Sep 15, 04:17 PM    #

10. Maybe we should put more blame on the parents, educational values starts at home, with out that good foundation no k-12 or for that matter HED will work. we should also test the teachers to make sure they know what they are teaching and get rid of tenure, everyone everyday should have to prove they can still do the job not just go through the motions. Base raises on achievement not union contract and education will improve, because this will challange the kids…

    — anti-everything    Sep 15, 04:31 PM    #

11. The problems with American education certainly are not new, and anyone who has been in higher education for a while is not going to be surprised by the findings of this report. My sense, however, is that the problems run much deeper than the need to make our public schools more challenging or to ask students to do more math, reading, and writing. As a nation, we have come to tolerate poor work and poor language use. The reasons for this tolerance are societal in nature and therefore are extremely difficult to change. More reading and writing will have no effect as long as we embrace a version of populism that casts anyone as elitist who can put two sentences together without using “like” and “you know” as substitues for precise thought. And the influence of this version of populism has not only affected our public schools—we find it in our universities, too. I have a colleague who insists on teaching barefooted in torn jeans and a scruffy T-shirt—not because he is so underpaid that he can’t afford a pair of shoes but because he wants to project a certain image. I have many others who reject Standard English in favor of street vernacular, perhaps for the same reason. At faculty meetings on assessment, a large percentage of my colleagues, convinced that undergraduates cannot meet any academic standard, argue that all work should be graded on “effort.” And we’ve even seen the charge of “elitism” used to effect in the presidential campaign. In the final analysis, our schools are a reflection of our society. If American society celebrates the semi-literate and disparages those who make any public display of a well-educated mind, can we really expect our schools to do better?

    — James    Sep 15, 04:56 PM    #

12. If universities and colleges identified the High Schools these students came from, it would put much pressure on them to improve.

    — G Lovett    Sep 15, 05:01 PM    #

13. I was recently elected to the local school board; I had no special agenda — I just was willing to serve.

    After getting my orientation on our local public schools, it seemed self-evident to me that the better the socio-economic factors in a child’s life, the more that child wil “succeed” in school, and certainly the better that child will do on the No Child Left Behind tests — but this is no great revelation.

    I also firmly believe that the great majority of our teachers are trying very hard to do the best they can. Learning strategy after learning strategy after learning strategy is employed by a whole host of dedicated teachers and administrators, but we are still on “warning” status because of the results of our NCLB tests.

    There are two factors that I have come to believe are a significant hindrance to our improving public education, and I believe both of these are under our control.

    One is what I believe to be the very,very sad state of discipline in our public schools — usually beginning in the middle school years. Public school teachers and administrators either are or feel they are quiite constrained in their ability to deal with those students who insist on disrupting a class. Kids simply cannot learn, and teachers cannot effectively teach, in an undisciplined environment.

    The other factor I believe that is under our control is the expectation that all students can and should succeed in school (by getting that high school diploma, even if the student is functionally illiterate or innumerate). I know that this is the premise of NCLB, but I think that experience has taught us that that premise is badly flawed. When I brought this up as a problem, I was told essentially that I didn’t really understand the issue, or that some students just don’t test well, or that “society” won’t let us flunk students out of high school (we have enough problems with those who choose to leave on their own). So we graduate these students and send them off to college (and remedial courses) or to industry (and remedial courses) or to the Army (and remedical courses) or to the local McDonald’s (where thankfully there are pictures on the cash register). I can’t help but think, when someone tells me that we shouldn’t “punish” those students who don’t do well on tests — okay, why don’t you go to a doctor who didn’t get a license because he didn’t test well? How about having your home built by a contract who couldn’t pass the licensing process? Better yet, let’s do away with the driver license testing so that we won’t punish those who don’t do well on tests.

    I know that I’ve oversimplified, and even been sarcastic. But I strongly believe that our nation’s future depends upon the strength of our primary and secondary education (higher education will take care of itself if we can fix the base line). If we cannot accurately define the problem, or if we will not allow for certain facts or issues to be discussed, then we will all eventually pay the price for it.

    — PA Man    Sep 15, 05:02 PM    #

14. One thing that continues to bother me about reports such as this is the assumption that all of these students that had to take remedial classes actually needed to do so. Most public colleges have a financial incentive to fill their remedial classes. Our system does a report each year of students who tested for remdial, but were exempted from having to take such courses because they had already passed the higher college-level course. I would be inclined to ask how many of those motivated “hardworking” 3.0 students from high school would actually allow themselves to fail in college?

    — Rich    Sep 15, 05:30 PM    #

15. This just in: Non-college graduates often do fine. My plumber makes more than a tenured English professor. Schools should offer basic training for those who will not go to college, and that’s ok. I worked for one school that had a B.S. in cooking. Instead of torturing these soon-to-be chefs with remedial English and saddling them with student loans, they would be better off at a training school. The simple fact is parents send their kids for 4 years of extended childhood.

    — TP    Sep 15, 06:04 PM    #

16. The comparisons between public and private K-12 experiences are pretty facile here. To claim it is primarily a curricular problem or larger literacy emphases in private schools doesn’t account for a couple of things.

    1) Remember that putting a child in a private school is, on face value, going to correlate with parental investment in education. (Not necessarily a quality education mind you. But for that parent or set of parents to make such a choice and deeper financial investment, education may already be a stronger familial and cultural value than those parents who choose not to pursue a private school or simply see public school as legally required.)

    2) The self-selecting population bias is going to have an exponential effect in the student body of a private school. Kids coming from more families in which education is held as a greater value are surrounded by and reinforced by more kids with those values.

    3) No, not every kid “needs” to go to college. But just about every kid today DOES need real twelfth grade reading, writing, computational, and critical thinking skills even for jobs that don’t require an AA , BA/BS or higher. And if a kid does graduate from high school shouldn’t they at least be within a semester or quarter’s worth of study of doing university level work? In California your average high school senior is graduating with 9th grade level skills. That’s a whopper of a trifecta: we sell kids short, screw the taxpayer, and perpetuate social inequality/class divisions all at the same time.

    — BRDflicks    Sep 15, 06:04 PM    #

17. Nicely put PA Man. The one size fits all philosophy of NCLB was obviously misguided from the beginning. Ham stringing our schools in matters of discipline, placement, and retention is but one of several factors dragging down so many of our schools (there are others, not the least of which is the incredible number of unwed mothers, typically underage and indulging in absolutely atrocious prenatal behaviors). The kids showing up unprepared for college are the ones in the forgotten middle who could have been ready had not so much resource and attention been committed to what has been a vain attempt to bring up academic performance of kids who were lost before they ever had a chance in life.

    — CW    Sep 15, 06:04 PM    #

18. Re: # 3,4,5,&6
    Drlalala, you are correct, an unintended consequence of trying to stick in a small point about comments that are of the “when I went to school” nature. Sorry Steve, I think you have aabout as many “issues” as anyone commenting. Again, apologies. Tony from #6, I offer apologies, as well. California Community Colleges are not only economical, but may very well be more rigorous in lower division courses designed for transfer students. Maybe it is because CC professors know how to teach or maybe they have a chip on their shoulders because of prevailing attitudes of University Academics- who knows. One thing is for sure, CC offer more for less to the greater portion of our adult community than universities.

    — axel    Sep 15, 09:46 PM    #

19. Reports like this one do sound awfully familiar.

    Although I’ve never taught in the public school system, I often wonder what went on in the schools from which many of my community college students graduate. So I ask them, and they tell me that teachers spend too much time dealing with classroom disciplinary issues and give too much credit for turning in homework assignments.

    Like a previous poster noted, college comes as something of a shock for many of these students. After taking a look at my syllabus and the workload, many simply drop my classes (I teach first year composition as well as surveys of American and World literature). They know they can find another professor who won’t require as much from them. Which means unfortunately that many students seek to perpetuate the shortcomings of the education they recieved in high school.

    I don’t have any answers. What I stress in the classroom, however, is the need for students to decide as soon as possible what kind of learners they are going to be. If they bring a lot of indifference and bad habits to the learning process, they will not learn much. For some, again unfortunately, that’s okay as long as they can get passing grades.

    One thing more. I also stress positive pride. Too many students think, or have been taught, that pride is almost always a bad thing. They associate it with boastfulness. I encourage them to take pride in the school work they do, to think of their work product as a reflection of their character. And some students actually buy into the idea.

    — Georgia teacher    Sep 16, 07:50 AM    #

20. I agree with #16 (TP). Are we the only developed country in the world that assumes that all students should go to college? We’ve created this monster (the Educational Iindustrial Complex?) and now it has to be fed with more and more students. This causes the dreaded “dumbing down.” I know because I work in an open enrollment institution. I hate to be elitist, but some students are simply not “college material.” And yes, my contractor makes much more than I do.

    — AP    Sep 16, 08:19 AM    #

21. As some previous posters have indicated, the problems take root even before kids get into school … & persist throughout their student careers because they aren’t the 1st generation to be failed by the system. The prob really does begin at home, because so many parents aren’t capable of (or interested in) reading & writing. They don’t get their kids engaged in the learning process because they aren’t engaged themselves, & they can’t help their kids w/schoolwork because they don’t have the capacity. And if their child is failed in a subject, or disciplined for bad behavior — do they turn to tutoring or counseling or becoming more involved themselves? No, they call a lawyer.

    — mvg    Sep 16, 08:44 AM    #

22. The problem is that what used to be a “college preparatory” curriculum in high schools when we were there is now an “honors” curriculum available only to the very best students. The current “college prep” curriculum has been dumbed down to the point it does not match up with college expectations for entry level students. Look at the number of years of writing, math, and science courses required in the two and you’ll see this.

    Yes, its a new form of de facto “tracking” of students, but somewhat deceptive, and does not serve students well.

    Moreover, most colleges don’t communicate to the high schools that send them students about how those students are placed in entry level courses, so the high schools are not aware their own student fare poorly. They could and probably would fix it if they were aware of it. It’s a gap that must be bridged if a college is to improve its retention and graduation rates.

    Elite colleges and universities don’t have this difficulty, of course, because they admit only students with high test scores.

    — Mervyn Emrys    Sep 16, 09:53 AM    #

23. My mother spoke perfect English. She came here in1900, a 7-yer old from a Greek island, without a word of English, and a ttended public school. – no bi-lingual or multi-lingual nonsense then. To graduate from 8th Grade, each pupil had to stand before the class – as she did – RECITE a long poem in ENGLISH and SIGHT-READ a passsage in GERMAN AND LATIN An 8th grade education was an EDUCATION. . High-school was the equivalent of today’s College. That was the time before “colleges” became lucrative Corporations, trollling for “students”. As for “Education”“? What’s that? Thus, today, persons in high places (Clinton, et al ) say “between he and I” . Or Obama: “I have more experience than her.” As for “who – whom”? – forget about it. N.B., a Harvard professor ofEducation (on a TV show) said children need not learn spelling but should be allowed the freedom to make up their own spelling so as not to “stunt” their “creativity”..

    — Despoina Ikaris, Ph.D. (London)    Sep 16, 09:55 AM    #

24. I live in one of the best public school districts in Illinois – located in an upper-middle to upper class area. Last year, at 8th grade curriculum night, the reading teacher asked a SRO classroom how many parents were avid readers. Only five of us raised their hands. The teacher said “Great! That’s the highest response I’ve had all night.” I gasped in disbelief.

    The teacher’s advice to parents: “Fake it ‘till you make it.” “Pick up a book every night,” she told us, “and make sure you’re not holding it upside down. Look interested and turn a page every few minutes.”

    I agree completely with poster #22. The problem begins and ends at home with the parents.

    — Frustrated Parent    Sep 16, 10:36 AM    #

25. Yeah, I’m pretty tired of informing students that their writing is at the 8th grade level and hearing them wail, “But I got all As in high school!” I tell them it’s not their fault; someone did them a grave disservice by waving them through the gate. Then I encourage them to submit early drafts to me and to work with the many resources available on campus. In a class of 120 students (and let’s talk about the higher and higher and higher enrollments in public university classrooms) it’s all I can do.

    However, my transfers from the California Community Colleges are much better prepared. Those professors do amazing work.

    — Beth    Sep 16, 10:38 AM    #

26. Really, the only thing that is missing in high school is time. Yeah all of these challenging activities are great, but the reality of the k-12 system lies in standardized tests. Private schools have the ability not to submit their students to such meaningless assessment. You want change, ditch the crutches (tests) and rehabilitate the system. A great example of no-nonsense reform is what is going on in Washington DC, take a listen http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94453547

    — Jeff    Sep 16, 10:53 AM    #

27. Re #7’s comments on community colleges, the fact that a high percentage of graduates go to community colleges is in many ways the good news. In our state, students who spend their first 2 years at community colleges graduate from our state universities with consistently higher GPA’s that those students whose entire academic experience was at the same university. I do not think we are atypical in this respect.

    It’s not rocket science to figure out why this disparity exists. In a “major” university the freshman and sophomore core courses are likely as not to be taught by a graduate student in a room with several hundred students. In the typical community college, there are 20-30 students being taught by an instructor with at least an MA, and quite possibly a PhD.

    — EJB    Sep 16, 12:17 PM    #

28. Peter Schmidt should do his homework: there are several serious studies showing that college basic writing courses are extremely effective at helping students succeed. Of course, it depends on what goes on in the basic writing program.

    — Edward M. White    Sep 16, 01:03 PM    #

29. There are many reasons for the lower performance of first-time students. I taught in the public school system for a while, and quit because of the system in place. Local control dictated the standards of the educational process. If the parent community valued “self esteem” over content acquisition, we delivered as many “A’s” as possible. The standard was changed to following instructions (turning homework in) than measuring knowledge. I learned first hand that as an instructor you could not set standards higher than the parental controls at home.

    When students leave home, they are confronted with the “real world”. Higher education has always been a part of the transition between home-based education and the work force. Perhaps we are missing the new dynamics at play by expecting all high achieving HS students to be college material. Perhaps the first two years of college are now meant to do what high school was meant to do in the past… that process of “weeding out” those meant to pursue other paths than academic and professional degrees.

    The drop out rate has now shifted from being realized at the high school level to undergraduate college. We in academia need to understand this and not have the value of our programs determined by this retention rate.

    — LET    Sep 16, 01:04 PM    #

30. Who’s teaching the teachers how to teach? Often, tenured professors who don’t have an incentive to incorporate new approaches into their curriculum—their jobs are protected by union seniority until THEY decide to leave or retire.

    Under the tight union system, bad professors often survive while the energetic newer professors are the first to leave since they are lowest on the seniority totem pole.

    In other words, mediocre professors help create mediocre primary and secondary teachers, in many cases.

    — joan warner    Sep 19, 05:37 PM    #

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