{"id":12819,"date":"2011-03-04T21:39:23","date_gmt":"2011-03-05T05:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12819"},"modified":"2011-03-04T21:39:23","modified_gmt":"2011-03-05T05:39:23","slug":"disturbing-statistics-about-remedial-students-at-community-colleges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12819","title":{"rendered":"Disturbing Statistics about Remedial Students at Community Colleges"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>,” 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.<\/p>\n

Nor is this only a problem in New York State. According to Thomas R. Bailey, who directs the Community College Research Center<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12819"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12821,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12819\/revisions\/12821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}