Since I teach at one of the largest community colleges in the nation, I was disturbed but not surprised by the fact that, according to an article in The New York Times, by Lisa W. Foderaro, “CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students,” nearly three quarters of the 17,500 freshmen enrolled at CUNY’s six community colleges required remediation in reading, writing or math and almost 25% of those students required remediation in all three subjects. “The reasons,” Foderano writes, “are familiar…: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers.” Providing these students with the necessary coursework to make them college-ready cost, last year, about $33 million, an increase of 100% over what remediation cost 10 years ago.
Nor is this only a problem in New York State. According to Thomas R. Bailey, who directs the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, close to two thirds of community college students nationwide require some kind of remedial education, with problems in math outnumbering problems in reading by a margin of two-to-one. The success and retention rates for the students who have to take remedial courses is also disturbing. Fewer than half of the students who take remedial courses complete them.
One problem with Foderaro’s article is that she connects the problem of students in remedial classes not finishing with community college graduation rates, which are not high, about 25% of full time students at CUNY and 35% nationwide. One problem with making this association is that the studies these numbers come from do not track what happens to students who transfer from a community college to a four year school–and I know that at my school a significant proportion of students do not plan to earn an AA; rather they plan to take courses they need to take at the significantly lower cost the community college offers them and then transfer.
Foderaro highlights in her article some of the successful steps community colleges are taking to address this issue, and she also mentions the fact that to the degree community colleges become remediation centers, they have less time and money to spend on the students who enroll who are prepared. Those students, after all, who often come to a community college because they can’t afford to go to a four year school, are also deserving of the college’s attention and resources.
As I read the article, though, I couldn’t help but remember a conversation I had some years ago with someone who teachers in my school’s physical education department. She’d been a high school teacher for many years, and we were on a committee that was supposed to make some kind of recommendation, or prepare a panel for a conference, concerning student preparedness (I don’t remember which). Anyway, she said that when she was working in the high schools she’d been a big supporter of social promotion, the idea that passing students even when they were not academically proficient in a subject would, by shielding them from the lowered self-esteem that would result from failing, ultimately help them succeed. Now, however, as a teacher in college, that she had to deal with students who couldn’t read or write adequately, or think their way through a basic math problem, she had to admit that social promotion as a policy was a mistake from the start.
Yet it would be too easy to blame students’ lack of preparedness solely on the schools, or on the educational experts who concocted social promotion and sold it to the school system. The quality of students’ academic performance is a result not only of the work they do in school; it is also a result of the quality of the lives they lead outside of school. If so many students are graduating from high school unprepared for college or career, in other words, it’s not just our pedagogical approach or the structure of our educational system that needs to be fixed. We need to do some real soul searching about what it means to be a kid in this culture, socio-economically, psychologically, emotionally and politically.
A woman in my evening class, which meets from 9:25 to 10:45 at night–and so you know the students who are taking it are dedicated to doing what they need to do–told me this week that the reason she hasn’t been coming to class is that her boyfriend, with whom she lives, is deeply and profoundly abusive. (This is the second time in as many semesters that a woman in my class has told me a story about this.) She’s been with him for seven years, since she was 13, and I am not going to go into any of the details she told me to explain her situation, since the specifics of domestic violence are not my concern here. As I read through Foderaro’s article, however, I found myself thinking about this student, who has already missed enough classes that I could fail her–but, of course, how can I fail her for that given what I now know about why she was absent; but then I wonder how is she ever going to be able to perform in my class to the best of her ability? And of course that doesn’t mean I will give her a grade she doesn’t deserve, but if I want to talk about the problem of student performance in my classes, how can I not be aware that every student has a life outside of class and that for far too many of those students, their lives impinge on their ability to do school work, not perhaps as extremely as domestic violence does, but it is an impingement nonetheless.
Neither schools nor schooling is going to solve the social problems that students bring with them into the classroom; nor should we expect them to. I guess, though, that I would like for a change–and this is not a criticism of Foderaros’ article or of anyone who says that schools need to do a better job of educating students–to hear people address the fact that schools and teachers do not operate in a vacuum that is created when the school or classroom door shuts so that students are, for the time they are in class, completely divorced from whatever their reality is outside the school building.
Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.
I blame the social value that says you have to go to college, and that orients high schools purely towards academic work.
Some kids aren’t going to go to college, and other shouldn’t. They should spend their high school time learning a trade. Instead they get pushed into an academic track for which they have little interest or aptitude and end up in community college because that’s what’s expected of them, where they proceed to waste their time and the resources of the school, instead of going out into the workforce where they belong.
Robert,
I think there is some merit to that argument, though I don’t know that it can account for the huge numbers of students we’re talking about. Still, there are always in almost all of my classes–creative writing is probably the one exception–some students who really don’t belong in college, and I think it is a shame that a college degree has taken the place of what a high school degree was when I graduated from 12th grade. I also think it is a misconception that the only way one can be educated, in the best, liberal arts sense of the word, is by obtaining a college degree. I know and have known a lot of people who don’t have a BA who are among the most well-informed and articulate people I have ever met.
I used to teach at Bronx CC. One big problem we had was adult immigrant students who had had little education in their native countries. Whether or not they needed ESL classes, they simply had never been taught a lot of basic academic skills. And a huge proportion of them would have been happy to get their remediation at a knowledge-appropriate grade level — to have taken basic math, say, at a local high school. But they were told that since they were adults, they needed to go to a college instead. This seemed crazy to me. Then they were put into classes of 40 students (class size at the 4-year CUNY schools topped out at 25 or 30), with teachers who had 4 or 5 classes to teach each term (for teachers in the 4-year schools it was 3 a term).
OTOH, I’ve never seen such a dedicated bunch of students, all in all, as CC students. They know they need to learn, and if you teach them how to study more effectively they will use those skills, and they do all this while (often) working full-time jobs, raising children, and just generally having a lot of things to deal with that I didn’t when I was in college.
This is the central issue when we talk about “what’s wrong with the schools”, or why they don’t seem to be as effective as they need to be, or how we can properly evaluate teachers. Kids and just about anybody who goes to school will have a very hard time learning in school if the environment outside of school does not support learning.
Robert’s right. I am minded that my local middle school removed it’s shop and put in a computer lab. Now, we needed a computer lab. But given the level of funding this school district has and the amount of building that has been done there’s no real reason why they couldn’t have kept the shop. I figure there were two reasons. One, someone decided that the plentitude of sharp objects in the shop represented a threat – even though no one has ever attacked anyone else with the tools there. The second reason is likely that in this neighborhood a kid becoming a tradesperson is for a lot of parents regarded as failure. The high schools around here regularly tout the high percentage of their graduates that go to college. But a school that sends 97% of their kids to college aren’t necessarily better than a school that sends 85% there – perhaps the second school is more realistic than the first and is doing a better job of guiding it’s graduates.
I am minded of my late father. He went to college, and it was presumed quite early in my life that I was going to go to college, it was simply a question of where. We were discussing careers when I was a young child. My Dad told me that any honest work was honorable work. No one should be ashamed to do any kind of honorable work, no one should think themselves better than another person because they have a higher paying job, and no matter how menial a job is you should do it to the best of your ability. Or, as he said, “If you’re a shit shoveler, then you be the best damn shit shoveler you can be.”
Richard:
The inverse of that statement is also true. I know a lot of people who hold a BA who are among the most inarticulare and ignorant people I have ever met.
nm, I think it would be a big mistake to mix, say, 25- or 30-year old adults with typical teenagers in a high school setting. I think you could end up with some adults exploiting younger children in a rather nasty fashion.
I’m assuming this is people who did not test into mainline classes and not the number of students who took remedial classes. One of the biggest problems I had at the CC I worked at was a requirement to take what I saw as remedial classes. My SO was a music major at a Big 10 university and had to take pre algebra level classes (after 2 years of calculus in H.S.) because it was “required” for the major.
Given that, it’s a hard situation and college is very different from any prior schooling. I think intro to college lectures or guides are extremely useful.
Solely? No. Most? Sure. And when you start including the fairly minimal requirements we’re talking about, “most” is even more applicable.
Students who spend 12 years in the educational system and who graduate without ability to do math or language are well aimed if they put much of the blame on the system that “educated” them.
For example, it is true (AFAIK) that people with illiterate parents learn to read later, and that they are less likely to become expert readers. But if they have had 12 years of full time school instruction which included English classes, it’s difficult to explain why they cannot read well enough to understand a college text and get a “c-” in class.
Again: Completely divorced isn’t really what we’re talking about here. Do you want to make the argument that out of school life has enough of an effect on enough children that it would, even in the case of a competent school system, result in the outcomes described in the article? If not, this is a protest without a point.
The school system doesn’t have perfect inputs. But it isn’t designed to require perfect inputs. Blaming the inputs for the outcomes fails to account for the purported flexibility.
Of course, the article also fails to provide a decent explanation for this. Social promotion is a problem, of course–but an equally large problem is that social promotion would be needed at all, given the relatively lax standards of many state schools. “Meets grade expectations” isn’t the same thing as “well educated,” at least not these days. Social promotion is bad, but social promotion coupled with low grade standards makes it much worse.
Perhaps we should ask the teacher’s unions what caused this, and how to solve it? If they’re responsible for the good that comes out of schools–as some suggest–presumably they’re also responsible for the bad.
RonF, a century ago there were high school classes for immigrant adults in NYC. Even grade school classes, I think. I have always assumed that these were night classes, and completely separate from the regular classrooms full of age-appropriate kids. But there was a recognition that if you’ve never been to school you don’t want to start with college.
G&W:
If you look at the school where I teach and you look at who the remedial students are and you hear their stories, yup, I think I would make that argument–actually, to be more accurate, I would put it forward as a hypothesis worth examining. And if you look at where my wife teaches early childhood, and you consider the fact that they are already planning to build prisons in that neighborhood to house what they will expect to be an awful lot of young men who drop out after 8th grade–the demographic most likely to commit crimes–and you listen to the stories of those kids’ lives–the ones in my wife’s kindergarten class, not even the 6th, 7th or 8th graders–then yes, I would put forward the same hypothesis.
And as far as your dig at the teacher’s union: the union has, in fact, put forward a number of possible solutions, from reduced class size to increased teacher support–solutions that research has shown to be effective and that has been effective where it has been implemented. I am not interested, though, in rehashing our disagreement about the teacher’s union here; there is no single, easy solution to the problem of the school system–not reforming the teacher’s union, not reforming curriculum, not reforming testing. Solving kids’ out-of-school problems will also not by itself solve their educational problems, but there is precious little recognition in the rhetoric about teaching that kids bring the worlds they live in into the classroom and those worlds effect a kids ability and desire to learn very, very powerfully, and when the worlds kids bring in with them are as shitty as the ones I was referring to above, then the effect they have on kids learning, on their desire to learn, to pass, to perform at all, is tremendously negative.
This is not the whole problem, but it is a part of the problem that few people are willing to address, which is why I gave it the emphasis I did in the original post.
A lot of the remedial students at my mother’s school (who probably mostly don’t make it to college) receive intermittent schooling as they move back and forth from Mexico. They’ll get a few years here and there and end up in 9th grade with 4th grade math… and tendencies toward mainstreaming often prevent them from receiving the help they need to progress. If you only have 4th grade math, you can’t leap into algebra, but they may be assigned there anyway.
Mandolin, that type of scenario (among others) is one reason that I dislike the whole concept of grade levels and would prefer to see individualized tracking of students with absolutely no expectation, other than statistical, that a person of age X will be at level X.
In other words, the school might well figure that 80 or 90% of 10-year olds will be in the “10-year old” equivalent math class, but whether a given individual student is in that class, or the 8-year-old level, or the 16-year old level, depends entirely on their test performance and/or teacher appraisal.
But practically nobody likes that model. Most parents would be up in arms that their little genius Becky was tracked into durrrr English when they just KNOW she’s brighter than that. Most teachers hate having to be the bad guy every. freakin. day. by enforcing real standards. Most students don’t want to be challenged and to get the most out of their education, they want to hang out with their friends and play video games. (Even the bright kids are reluctant to let their full brightness show; “that’s the freak who’s taking college-level math, she thinks she’s better than us”.) And of course there would be real costs (for example, having students of widely varying emotional maturity levels in the same classroom for the same subject) based on more than how people suck.
Richard, you are right that there is no “magic bullet” simple solution that would fix everything and make schools great. But there are a few masterwork +1 bullets that might at least help. We can count on the teacher’s unions to support any reform, like smaller class sizes, that puts more money in the union’s pocket. (More teachers = more dues.)
Beyond that, however, we have got to put more decision power into the hands of individual people – both teachers, parents, and students. We have got to pay teachers a wage that attracts higher-quality individuals to the profession. We have got to encourage a culture of excellence instead of one that valorizes mediocrity and conformity to an arbitrary system.
Here’s my magic bullet of the day, derived from my many years of experience as an undergraduate. (I didn’t quite reach Sarah Palin levels of school-jumping, but pretty close.) I worked the hardest and got the most out of my education when it was coming out of my hide, not being paid for by benevolent society or benevolent parents. I think school taxes should be broken out as a separate line item on people’s tax bill, so they know *exactly* what they are paying for the schools. I think that parents of kids in the public school should pay more tax, above and beyond the normal levy, so that they are personally invested in the fact that they are paying for this shit. But once the money is collected, it should then be returned per capita to the students and the parents, who then have to turn it over, IN CASH, to the school once a month. No pay, no attendance (and you get in trouble with your local taxing authority, and they come after your ass hard for the cash.) And outside of every classroom, there should be a whiteboard with the exact cost of that period’s lesson, per student, in foot-high letters. “This Math Class Is Costing You And Your Parents $30. Pay Some Fucking Attention.”
Or words to that effect.
I think it would make a big difference.
Wow. I could not disagree more with your funding proposal.
Let’s start with the practical difficulties. What are you going to do about renters? Are you going to charge more property tax to landlords who rent to families with school-age kids? Coming from someone who is always telling liberals to rethink their desire to have government support their policy preferences, let’s spare a moment for the unintended consequences of your proposal.
I’m also really surprised to hear that your school taxes aren’t a line-item on your tax bill. I’ve only lived in Denver a year, and I’ll admit that last year, with everything else going on in my life at the time, I didn’t look hard at the statement. But everywhere else I’ve lived, each taxing entity is broken out on the statement. Most parents who pay their own property taxes already know how much they pay for schools.
And as long as we’re arguing from anecdote, in my own family, my brother did terribly in the same school system (and same family) that did a great job educating me. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth and mandatory come-right-home-and-sit-in-dad’s-office-doing-homework-for-four-hours sessions did not make a whit of difference because he didn’t see the relevance of schooling. He had to live on his own for a few years and see just how limited his prospects were with neither education nor a trade. Then he was quite motivated, even though my parents were paying.
I believe you that for you, paying your own way was good motivation, but I think as much or more of that comes from the maturity to pursue education for your own goals, as opposed to because you have to or you are expected to.
I also have a very serious doubts that you can translate your undergrad experience of caring more because you were paying to younger kids. Seriously, what kid hasn’t heard about how their parents are paying for X, therefore the kid must Y? This generally results in much eye-rolling.
They are broken out on my property tax bill. I’ve never heard of a property tax bill that doesn’t break that out.
I think that’s foolish. I don’t have kids, have never had kids, will never have kids. But funding K-12 is in my own best interests. Having a place for kids to spend their day in a, hopefully, productive environment means that they’re not hanging around my street while bored. That means less time and less cause for the various annoying (and sometimes criminal) things that kids do when they’re bored. We can also talk about how a well educated populace attracts businesses in ways that places with atrocious education systems cannot. Ask Intel about that. Do I really need to go on and on about why K-12 benefits everybody without school age children?
Even without school aged children, I am personally invested in the fact that I pay for this shit.
School taxes are broken out – by elementary school district, high school district and community college district – in my Illinois property taxes. Which actually leads to a discussion of funding schools via property taxes, as that leads to a negative feedback loop where the worst schools end up in locations where people have the most need for them but the least ability to fund them.
Robert:
Most teachers hate having to be the bad guy every. freakin. day. by enforcing real standards.
Most teaches are the bad guy every single day in at least some parents’ eyes just by enforcing what standards there are. One reason my wife got out of teaching. The hostility from a few parents overrode the silence of the many and the approval from a few
Most students don’t want to be challenged and to get the most out of their education, they want to hang out with their friends and play video games.
Which wouldn’t change if they were broken up by ability groups. My local high school has up to 5 different ability groups for various subjects. The kids who have a serious deficiency are 1. The stoners and slackers are 2. The “average” kids who love their video games a little too much are 3. The bright kids who are skating and the not-so-bright kids who work hard are 4. The bright kids who work hard are 5.
(Even the bright kids are reluctant to let their full brightness show; “that’s the freak who’s taking college-level math, she thinks she’s better than us”.)
Or because they’ll get beaten up. Or shunned. Or called names all the time. Or pissed on. Or have their clothing pulled out of their lockers and cut to pieces.
And of course there would be real costs (for example, having students of widely varying emotional maturity levels in the same classroom for the same subject)
This already exists in the schools. Or Boy Scout Troops, for that matter, which is why I had to watch and discuss a presentation on “Ages and Stages” on how kids of a given age have wildly varying physical and emotional maturity levels. That 14-year old kid who looks like he could work as a laborer on a construction site? He’s got the maturity of an 11-year old. That other 14-year old kid who’s 5′ 4″ and looks like he won’t hit puberty for a couple of years yet? To talk to him you’d think he was 17. Varying the ages a couple of years won’t make as much difference as you might think. I’ll bet the vast majority of kids won’t be more than a year off their calendar age, anyway.
This, OTOH, is a hell of an idea. And maybe a letter should go home (in the mail, not with the kid) after mid-terms and finals. “You paid $316 for your kid to take Algebra II this last semester. He got a C-. How much time did your kid spend doing his homework these last 3 months? Because what little of it I see looks like the dog did it. Oh, and he fucks around in class almost every day too.”
Chingona, you’re certainly right about the practical difficulties.
As for the incentives not applying well to kids…maybe. Maybe they should have to kick in some of their birthday and babysitting money. Or maybe they should have to work at school functions for pay, and then have the pay go towards their costs.
(Basically, I just like enslaving children.)
Thanks for the info on property taxes. I don’t think our taxes (El Paso County, Colorado) have a line item but – embarassing admission – I don’t read my statement very closely because the mortgage company pays those (with my money).
OK, stop answering my posts, because I have to work!
RonF:
I would love to be able to send a note like this home–though, of course, since I am teaching college, mine would go to the students not their parents–but can you imagine the uproar if, god forbid, a teacher actually sent a letter home with something like your last sentence? There is absolutely no way that the teacher would not become the problem and any and all focus on the student’s behavior would be lost. I am sure you were not suggesting that a teacher really ought to use that kind of language in a note to parents–though I don’t know a teacher who has not felt what that sentence expresses–but it made me smile to think at what would happen if teachers really gave voice to the anger they feel about student performance, commitment, etc. in school.
Do it, Richard! Not the “fucks around” part, but game out how much it costs to be in your class and tell the students. Tell every other section and see if there’s a difference in effort. You could also mention the non-economic opportunity costs of time. (As in, “this class is costing you $123.45, as well as ninety minutes of your precious, irreplaceable life, time that you can NEVER GET BACK. I wonder if you will make it count.”)
Robert:
I actually do have that conversation with them, though I do not do it systematically–and you’re right that might be worthwhile experiment–but I can tell you that the conversation I do have does not seem to make a difference. The thing that makes a difference every semester, the only thing really, and that separates those who will work from those who will not, is holding them accountable to real, college level standards–because the overwhelming majority of my students seem never to have been held to real standards when it comes to their writing. (And I want to emphasize the seem in that sentence: I do not know what their previous teachers were like and I have had enough experience with students who have gone through my class, in which, say, I spend an awful lot of time on how to write a Works Cited page, who then tell the teacher they have after me that they never covered that material to think that a student’s performance in my class is necessarily a reflection on the quality of the teacher(s) they had before me.)
I’ve had enough students tell me that since they (or their parents) are paying X amount and they are physically showing up for classes, they have carried out their part of the bargain to think that pointing out how much a given class is costing will help. Because in any “education is a purchasable commodity” world, the part of the instructor is to hand out As.
Yes, I know that if you put that last one in there as I wrote it the message would get lost in a self-righteous response from the parent. Well, some of the parents. But you could put “Your son is habitually inattentive and distracts the other students to the detriment of their education as well as his.” Which is edu-speak for “Your son fucks around in class all the time” and the parents damn well know it.
In public schools in Japan the schools save money and help instill the work ethic and personal responsibility by having the kids clean the school. I bet if the kids had to stay after school for 1/2 an hour every day cleaning tables and chairs and floors and windows and walls and emptying the trash barrels you’d see a lot less vandalism and maybe the kids would end up taking more pride in their school. Tell me why this is a bad idea. Oh, and the cleaning crew gets picked at random and assigned during the last period so that the kids can’t deliberately screw over some kid they don’t like whose turn it is to clean today.
But you could put “Your son is habitually inattentive and distracts the other students to the detriment of their education as well as his.”
Oh really.
Not if you don’t have tenure.
And even if you DO have tenure, and you put this down, you can look forward to being called down to the principal’s office (while having to leave your class with an administrator who will not follow your lesson plan and thus your class will get behind, affecting their test scores later on in the year) for a very stern talk about how Mr. and Mrs. So and So were very angry about your note on their son’s report card and are filing a formal complaint against you with the union because Little Ronnie always said you didn’t like him.
And if you are very very lucky, this might be said to you in a tone that conveys “hey, we know this is BS and we’re going to support you.” But more likely, if you’ve complained to the principal about the lack of resources in your classroom, or the refusal to give Little Ronnie consequences like detention when he has acted out in your class in the past, or the requirement that 15 minutes of your class time every other Friday be taken up with the school chocolate bar sales, or even if the principal is just annoyed that s/he is having to take an angry phone call from a parent who by the way is Vice President of the PTA and just donated a new bulletin board for the lobby…
… well then the level of scorn and blame in that conversation is going to dwarf anything you might have sent home in your note to the parents, even if you had used the blue language you entertained in your fantasies.
(Oh, and here’s hoping you’re OK with being assigned after school bus duty next semester, five days a week, because it’s mysteriously going to become part of your “other duties as assigned,” and you can forget about ever getting that aide you’ve requested for two years running.)
the only thing really, and that separates those who will work from those who will not, is holding them accountable to real, college level standards–because the overwhelming majority of my students seem never to have been held to real standards when it comes to their writing.
And RJN – I feel you. I am dealing with this exact thing in graduate school. I can’t tell how much is “never having been taught how to write,” how much is “never having been taught how to do critical thinking/synthesis” and how much is “lacks the actual cognitive capacity for doing work at this level.” Insert gnashing of teeth as I re-re-re-grade papers from mid-quarter with the end of the quarter staring me in the face.
I have never particularly wanted to be a billionaire, except for two reasons:
1. Personal spaceship. ‘Nuff said.
2. So that I could take a job as a school teacher somewhere and just do whatever the hell I thought was best, and if anyone got in my way, I would buy them and their family and send them to Mogadishu.
Robert –
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Robert:
This cynical beyond belief, and I limit that characterization only to your characterization of smaller class size–which has been empirically demonstrated to have a positive effect on student performance.
OK. What reforms have unions supported that would HURT the union?
If my suggestions for helping more around the house involve me spending more time doing quality control of our liquor cabinet and checking that the video game consoles are working fine, my wife is not “cynical” for characterizing me as only offering up things that are in my interest, even if we really do need liquor cabinet QA and video game console maintenance.
I agree that smaller class sizes would help students. They also, obviously, would help unions. Not a whole lot of credit points for suggesting “make us richer” as a problem-solver, even if making them richer will actually help.
Comment deleted by author.
I took trade classes in High School. I also took (well, tried to take) College courses. While I hadn’t needed any remedial classes, I still flunked out of University. (I passed College Success!)
None of my vocational education has gotten me a job. I’ve been told ‘it doesn’t count’ because it’s from a high school. I’ve been told I know too much – they wanted to train their own to use the tools, not people who knew what the parts they were soldering onto boards actually did. And I’ve been fired to ‘broaden my opportunities’ aka ‘I knew more about the world from my high school than my supervisor of twenty years did’.
So it’s a tough balance to make. Maybe if I’d studied something useful in High School instead of mastering typing, keyboarding, electronics assembly and repair; and studied forestry, logging, auto repair which were also available. Of course, my school didn’t pass students because of social pressure, either, and the state had a test you had to pass to get a diploma.
Strangely, neither of those things affected the rate of remedial students. And I do know the remedial courses suck – I’ve been attending CC off and on to better myself in my adult life, so I know many students – so I would buy the idea that remedial students graduate at lower rates. But my attending CC without a plan for a degree (I was learning how to operate a specific machine, or a foreign language… Those don’t make a degree!) hurts their numbers?
That’s so not fair.
Returning to the original topic: What accounts for the fact that a larger percentage of people need remedial education than in the past?
Hypothesis: The fact isn’t true. That is, the same percentage of people need remedial education as in the past. It’s just that a larger percentage of all social groups — including those that need remedial education — are going to school today than in the past. Thus, the need for remedial education has always existed; the new factor is that we’re now OBSERVING this need.
Yes, this is driven by the fact that employers have inflated their expectations of job qualifications. It’s driven by the fact that the percentage of people employed in blue-collar work is declining, causing ever more of the people who would otherwise have taken a blue-collar job to seek additional education. And it’s driven by the fact that we’re in the biggest recession in the past 75 yrs. Thus the cost of dropping out of the (barely-existing) labor market to get more education has rarely been lower — plus students get the benefit of creating a story to explain why they’ve been out of the labor market for so long.
How to “solve” this problem? Improve the economy, especially for blue-collar industries. Once this happens, suddenly there will be less demand for remedial classes, graduation rates at Community Colleges will soar, and we’ll all be patting ourselves on the back for how we achieved this triumph by applying LEAN methodology to the classroom or some other nonsense.
Elusis, where do you teach? Because I can tell you from personal experience that’s not what happens in my local elementary or high schools. I won’t discount that this is what may happen in your schools, mind you. But it sounds like your union isn’t helping you much.
I’m old enough to have gone to CC to take classes in BASIC and Fortran. (And oddly, I don’t feel the need to hear Robert’s thoughts on that fact.) I never expected to get a degree from the CC, and sure enough, I didn’t. The conceit of my social class is that I look to other institutions such as four-year colleges to provide me with credentialization and validation; I look to CCs for — well, for education, pure and simple.
So I find no sense in the idea that we should judge a CC on the basis of the percentage of its enrollees that go on to earn a degree. That’s just not a relevant metric.
Too bad, you get to hear my thoughts:
Ha ha, you’re old.
And I agree, graduation percentage seems an inappropriate metric to judge a CC on. “Student satisfaction” (however defined) would be a lot more meaningful.
Eh? Write larger, whippersnapper; I didn’t bring my specs with me.
In fact, let me show you how it’s done. I’m sure I’ve still got those computer notes around here somewhere….
I learned FORTRAN as a child, and also was trained in how to input your programs to the mainframe with punchcards.
RonF, I teach graduate school and am not in a union because none of my workplaces have offered either unions or tenure-tracks.
My parents both taught in unionized public schools for 25+ years. Both of my grandmothers taught in public schools all their lives. My sister teaches in a unionized public school now.
The scenario I presented above is one my mother and father both faced again and again during their time as teachers. My sister is currently in a position where the principal actively dislikes her for having created a very successful program that is highlighting the lack of success of other programs at the same school. None of my family members ever got a lot of help from their unions other than the very basic protection against being outright fired.
graduation percentage seems an inappropriate metric to judge a CC on. “Student satisfaction” (however defined) would be a lot more meaningful.
Robert, that is the worst possible metric to judge education on.
Student satisfaction should be measured in terms of things like, do you get help from the financial aid office and the registrar when you need it. Do people return your calls. Do you understand the policies and procedures in your school, college, major, etc. Are classes held regularly and on time. Does the university communicate changes in policy to you effectively. Is there a functioning student government. Are you free from experiencing intimidation and harassment from other students, faculty, and staff, or are such incidents handled well if they do happen.
But “student satisfaction” as an overall metric starts to measure for things like: is there too much reading. Are the assignments too hard. Are you allowed to do them over if you don’t like your grade. Do you like how the professors grade you. Do you like the grades you got. Do you like the professors as people. Do you agree with what’s presented in your classes. Do you agree with the policies the professors establish for things like attendance, lateness, and plagiarism. Do you think you should be allowed to answer your cell phone during class and surf Facebook. Etc. etc. etc.
Fine, if you want to be hard-ass about it, the best metric for education is improvement in a student’s fundamental intelligence. Most schools will fail, and should be closed down. Happy?
Cell phone disruptors should be required in every school. Either that, or just make the schools a Faraday cage. Of all places, MIT did that accidentally with a new-built dorm!
improvement in a student’s fundamental intelligence.
Since, by conventional definitions of IQ anyhow, no one has any idea how to do that, I’m not sure that’s a helpful metric either.
I don’t think that’s really true, Elusis. Certainly there is a great deal of disagreement about how to best do it.
Even limiting ourselves to the (very) narrow ‘conventional’ view of IQ, there seem to be at least some cognitive tasks which, when practiced, increase g. Taking a much broader and multidimensional view of intelligence (which I do, and which is what I had in mind), it seems fairly clear that improvement in cognitive functioning is teachable. (If it isn’t, then all schools are simply places where people can learn new facts, and we can replace them all with Internet terminals.)
We often do not SEE that kind of improvement, but that is largely a function of motivation and (rational) management of payoff. Getting smarter is hard work. It requires the student, first off, to recognize that they have room for mental improvement, which for a substantial fraction of people is emotionally very difficult. Many people choose to stay stupid. Even for those who are able to get over that emotional/self-esteem hump often choose not to, because the payoff for getting smarter at the margin is not very high, and often even when it is high, carries costs that make the net utility low or even negative. (“Wow, if I work hard and figure out how math works I can get a better job and earn more money…oh, and also most of my friends will stop liking me and my relationship with my family will suffer because they will perceive me as thinking of myself as better than them.”)
I do have to admit that as a metric for gauging particular schools it isn’t all that helpful, because as noted above, it’s going to boil down to a metric about the self-motivation and emotional versatility of a school’s students, much more than a measure of the work being done by the actual institution. I don’t think that what institutions do matters a huge amount in the big picture; drop fifty self-motivated bright kids into Hogwallow County Community College and they will get themselves a pretty good education, drop fifty lazy fuckwits into Harvard and they will learn how to order wine with a snotty attitude.
I have no idea what “student satisfaction” would measure. At the end of last semester, one of my students sent me an email thanking me and saying that I was the best teacher she ever had. A few comments on ratemyprofessors say that I’m a horrible teacher and that my lisp is so strong that I’m impossible to understand. (This one makes me wonder what they’re expecting from math professors — a pretty significant number of the people teaching math have very strong foreign accents, so if a student can’t figure out that I mean S when I say TH, they’re going to be totally lost with plenty of other instructors.)
Given that my mother has received student evaluations that say, “The problem with this professor is that she expects us to care,” I agree that “student satisfaction” needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
In this whole discussion, I keep thinking back to something a teacher friend of mine said about education reform – that it’s trying to solve the problems in education without looking at the social problems that contribute to the problems in education. And you can interpret “social problems” as broadly as you want to – whether it’s the sense of entitlement some parents and students bring to their education (or at least, to their grades) or the kids who didn’t do any of the homework because they were taking care of their younger siblings while mom or dad was passed out drunk.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that my friend was not trying to escape accountability for her own performance as a teacher and that she would be the first person to admit to large and systemic problems in our school systems. But those problems don’t exist in a vacuum, either.
I’m teaching at the university level, where the rules are different (can’t talk to parents without the student’s permission), but we’ve been explicitly told not to do this. Any question about a grade, from a student or a parent, gets a response of “Your scores were X, Y, and Z, which, according to the guidelines set out on the syllabus, gives a final grade of ___.” We were specifically told to not include any judgment on the student’s work, just a list of scores. (And we actually do have a little more leeway in grades than that suggests, but we’re not supposed to discuss that, either.)
Simple, just take out remedial classes and no one will be in them.