Comments on The Costs of Catching Up

• From the guy who wrote "Myths & Facts about Dev. Ed."
• Posted by Jim Melko , Author, "Myths & Facts about Dev. Ed." on November 11, 2007 at 4:15pm EST

• Back in the eighties, I wrote an article called "Myths & Facts about Developmental Education" that is quoted elsewhere in the commentary on this article. I've seen the article pop up in many places on the Internet since then.

  In 2002, I left the field of Developmental Education to begin a career as a high school teacher for all subjects in a charter school created to serve those high school students at risk for dropping out of school and those who have already done so. The students range in age from 15 to 21. Most are from an inner-city school system. I have a class of 22, all working on different subjects at the same time on the computer, all with different levels of skills and maturity, and I have to respond to each one individually.

  I love it.

  When I wrote that article, I was seeing in my mind the dynamics of a far-ranging population subject to changes in the economy and other circumstances. I was convinced that developmental education was the answer - responding to the individual's unique strengths and weaknesses - and not a single-minded attempt to bludgeon a diverse population through drills in basic skills - what I referred to as "remedial education."

  Has my high school teaching experience changed my perception? Yes, it has - because I am no longer focused on the dynamics of a population, but rather the plights of every student I have known.

  Politicians seeking to garner popular support insist that elementary, middle, and high schools have failed to do the jobs they were structured to do. They lay the blame at the feet of the teachers, and imply that we have become incompetent or uncaring.

  When we can design a school system that nutures the infant, keeps mothers and fathers together, makes the streets safe and provides the basic necessities of life - when our teachers can work individually with students so that the seven-year old is not relegated forever to the ranks of the "slow learner" when his brain has simply not yet matured enough to be responsive to a first-grade curriculum - when motivation, ambition, empathy, insight, and capability are not stunted by poverty, abuse, tragedy and crime - when the heart, mind and soul can be delivered intact to each seat in the classroom - then our school systems as we've designed them will be able to "do their job."

  Until then, we need schools like mine at the elementary level, schools like mine at the middle level, schools like mine at the high school level - and classrooms like those of Developmental Education at the college level.

  Any good shepherd knows that "no one left behind" means that the strays must also be found and brought along. Any good teacher knows that students are not sheep.

  As I wrote so long ago in "Myths & Facts", developmental education is NOT remedial education. It is NOT the problem; it is the answer to an inclusive society that celebrates diversity, individual talent and ability, creativity, and personal achievement. It is the answer for a social experiment called "America".

• Bad for the economy?
• Posted by David O on August 30, 2006 at 6:50am EDT

• Why is remediation bad for the economy? Isn't it better for the economy for individuals to have access to remedial education so they can upgrade their skills later in life? It may be more efficient for individuals to be ready for college or work when graduating from high school; however, I believe it is better to have opportunities for individuals to obtain knowledge and skills after high school which their high school did not supply.

• remedial education
• Posted by Philip Edgar Beigbeder on August 30, 2006 at 8:20am EDT

• Remediation is good, it would be better if it were unnessary, but we live in a society of new non anglo immigrants. As a consequence of that former trend being different now, Reading english and other subjects are not commonplace for these new immagrants

• Posted by Herm A on August 30, 2006 at 8:35am EDT

• Now we know the costs for remediation. What about about the costs of no remediation?

  Scenario. John has worked for ABC Corp for 30 years and is now faced with a job loss. With family obligations, he needs to return to school for retraining - but it has been 30+ years since he was in school. His academic "skills" are not up to par and must take remedial math and English.

  Without remediation he can't move on to higher level coursework, thus unable to complete school. Now he has to "depend" on the system to help him meet his family obligations.

  This is happening across the country, in particular at 2-year technical and community colleges.

  Take away opportunities from individuals who want to (and need to) improve themselves, then you will see the real costs of remedial programs.

• Not just immigrants...
• Posted by Kim Conley , CITO at Henderson Community College on August 30, 2006 at 8:50am EDT

• Unfortunately, it isn't just the immigrants that we are seeing with a need for remediation. We frequently see students who graduated with GPA's of 3.0 and above test into our developmental reading and math courses. 70% of our students test into at least one developmental course. The problem seems to stem from an archaic K-12 education system that doesn't stress the basics and seems to only be interested in placating politicians who THINK they know what is wrong with the system, yet fail to ask the experts who are in the trenches trying to educate our students. We say that we value education, yet the people we entrust to teach our children in their most formative years are paid minimum wage (daycare and preschool teachers) or barely above (K-12 teachers).

  When will our problems with remediation begin to be solved? When we TRULY value education and begin to emphasize its importance by putting our resources towards the problem instead of just rhetoric.

• Posted by Jim on August 30, 2006 at 8:50am EDT

• There is an economic cost of remediation...that is the cost of the high school education that these students did not receive.....

  There are several types of remediation....adult students going back to school and needing their individual skills in english and math brought back up to a level that ensures college success...

  Then you have the remediation of students right out of high school who graduated but lack the necessary english and math skills to succeed in college.......this is where the economic loss takes place...someone has to pay again for the education that did not take place at the high school level...but these students are "certified" by having their diploma.....

  It is better to do this type of work at community colleges, where the cost are lower then at 4 year public or private insitutions where the cost of education are higher......

• cost of remedial ed.
• Posted by Medea Rambish , Director of Developmental Studies at Montgomery County Community College on August 30, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• Taken from “Developmental Education Myths and Facts” by Jim Melko

  Myth 2: Developmental education is just another term for remediation.

  Fact: Remediation is concerned with correcting academic weaknesses, whereas the purpose of developmental education is “to give attention to the fullest possible development of talent and to develop strengths as well as to correct weaknesses.” Dev. Ed. instructors know that students may be fully exposed to basic skills instruction throughout his or her elementary and secondary education, intellectual development will vary from student to student, resulting in developmental gaps and weaknesses that are compounded when advanced instruction assumes basic skills to be in place. Dev. Ed. seeks to advance the student’s basics skills to a level commensurate with his or her current intellectual and personal development.

  Myth 3: If we could somehow improve our educational system, we could eliminate the need for developmental education. Money budgeted to developmental programs is money spent twice and therefore wasteful.

  Fact: Dev. Ed. is the “Great Equalizer.” It allows institutions to raise and maintain their standards without denying access to certain populations. It is not teaching oriented but learning-oriented. Dev. educators view education from the learner’s perspective rather than the instructor’s, and address the unique and individual needs of each learner.

  Fact: When dev. educators are successful, it is because we have understood why the displaced worker is suspicious of or discouraged by education, why the illiterate adult did not learn to read, why the college freshman suffers from math anxiety. We advocate for the learner rather than the instructor, and we look beyond grade distribution curves and seek out the reasons why even a single student is unable to succeed.

  Developmental education, in my opinion, is THE most important program in any college, especially community colleges. It only strengthens the economy of a community. It is NOT money spent twice.

• Remediation
• Posted by Timothy , Fact oif Life on August 30, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• Three things about life are certain: Death, taxes, and the need for remedial language and math instruction in college.

  Why remediation? Simple. Students don't 'get it' sufficiently (math and English) at the level of education they're supposed to get it at. They 'need it' in order to progress in school or work. So what's wrong with providing what they need? The reality is, it's not a question of 'if' they 'need' it, but what is the best way they can get it.

  Solution: If a student is admitted to a college or university, it becomes that institution's responsibility to help the student get up to speed in any deficiencies, like math and English. If a college or university doesn't want to provide adequate remedial instruction/services, pass on that student and allow the student to enroll in an institution that will provide what the student needs.

• Association between remediation and Inclusion
• Posted by Vi Rajagopalan , Underdog on August 30, 2006 at 10:01am EDT

• Remediation does not necessarily mean lack of preparedness, which almost assumes that the K-12 experience for many of the students who fall into the category did not receive the necessary skills. The "inclusion" and the No child left behind acts, to name a few, could be factors contributing to a significant number of students with disabilities entering colleges and universities. In fact K-12 not only provides services but are required to provide alternative approaches to teaching and testing methods to meet the needs of this population. Many of them including my own child enter the college scene expecting that they will be provided with the same even if it is of lesser intensity. Colleges, even community colleges (I work for one of them) are getting better at providing academic support services for students with disabilities, butmany of them do not aalcate money in thier budget to train their faculty and testing center staff to provide the necessary help for the disabled. Although the 1/3 rd of college students identified as unprepared may not all be disabled, the disabled students and their numbers are significant in this pool. So just placing them in developmental education classes may not be the only solution but money should also be spent on providing training for faculty and staff on learning styles,alternative testing methods etc. The persistence rates for students with diabilities which is significantly higher than the "nondisabled" students is an indicator that this is a highly motivated group. The money spent will yield positive results and directed towards a worthwhile cause.

• The other side of the ledger.
• Posted by Pat :Leonard on August 30, 2006 at 10:01am EDT

• Yes, colleges’ remedial expenditures are high and increase each year. That is only part of the story. On the other side of the accounting ledger are the tuition income and other revenue flowing from this enrollment. At many institutions this income produces a surplus. My limited experience has shown that remedial income exceeds remedial expenses by a significant measure. College leaders are been ingenuous when they piously complain about their expenditures while not revealing their offsetting income stream.

• A rose by any other name
• Posted by GoFigure on August 30, 2006 at 10:05am EDT

• Let's call remediation what it really is - redoing educational work that was not done well the first time. Anyone who has taught knows that ESL students or natives who received a decent k-12 education can succeed in nearly any college setting, even when they struggle with English. However, if you cannot read and write or even perform basic math skills, someone missed the boat in early life - both through educational systems and under the poor guidance of their parents. Community colleges do a hefty portion of their work documenting success in required liberal arts courses so that students can ease into their major courses at four year schools without any real challenge to their basic skills. Since freshman and sophmore years were originally used to cull the herd, community colleges are an agreed upon means of bypassing those requirements for "at-risk" students. How long should it take to teach students to read, write and perform basic math skills? Having taught reading and writing, I can assure you - NOT FOURTEEN YEARS.

• Posted by Diane on August 30, 2006 at 12:25pm EDT

• I did a national study of public and private not-for-profit 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education (excluding "specialized" institutions such as schools of nursing,art institutes, etc.)a few years back. It quickly became evident that virtually all colleges and universities have developmental programs, although some are called by other names. Only five or six colleges or universities, out of hundreds studied, had no programs of developmental or remedial education.

  The really interesting thing, though, was that what was identified as "developmental" or "remedial" was more a function of the institution or even of the academic program than of the individual student. That is, very elite institutions also have such academic assistance programs for students who are not quite up to standards for their institution or for a particularly demanding discipline. Those same students would have been outstandingly academically successful and never deemed "developmental" or "remedial" in a less-competitive institution or less demanding program.

  It sometimes works the other way, as well. I have also seen students enter community college through adult and continuing ed programs to acquire the GED, continue through developmental programs after being admitted to "regular" student status, and eventually transfer to elite institutions to complete a degree cum laude.

  The point of this rather lengthy comment is that developmental education has been entrenched in American higher education from its earliest days (via preparatory schools attached to the early colleges) to the present. Virtually every public and not-for-profit private institution has developmental education in some form. Yet, the need for developmental education cannot be laid directly at the doorstep of either the public schools or immigrant populations. Associating developmental education solely with non-elite institutions and students and arguments about the economics of developmental education seldom take into account the is a misreading of the realities of higher education.

• Posted by Eduardo Marti , President at Queensborough Community College on August 30, 2006 at 12:25pm EDT

• Open Admission ensures that all who can contribute to improving our society are given the necessary tools to fulfill their potential. But, with Open Admissions we find that many of our students come to us without the preparation needed to meet the requirements of our curriculum. Whatever the cause, it is what it is. While some student are very quick to adapt and succeed, many do not. Over 43% are lost after 6 years (even counting early transfers, certificate completers and students still enrolled.) Therefore, we must provide programs and services that minimizes the human loss that this drop out rate represents. If we are to maintain high academic standards in the community colleges, we must provide our underprepared students with the necessary tools to survive the rigor of our curriculum. Remediation and other support services are necessary so as not to make the Open Door a Revolving Door or to provide our students with an inferior education-the worst form of waste. For every student lost, society loses thousands of dollars in the tax revenues that can be produced, over their lifetime, by a well educated member of our workforce. Do the math!

• Remedial Students Not All The Same
• Posted by Paul Billingsley on August 30, 2006 at 12:25pm EDT

• We cannot forget the fact that a very large percentage of the remdial demand is created by the non-traditional student population. The average community college student is 27-28 years old. Expecting this population to demonstrate skills last used when they were in high school is simply unreasonanable. Many just need to refresh and not be forced through complete remedial tracks. Unfortunately, too many institutions either have no choice, or have made little progress in identifying these studnets and providing targeted programs for their needs. All remeidation is NOT the result of being improperly taught in high school.

• Re-route Student Success and be Cost-Effective
• Posted by Garcia on August 30, 2006 at 12:25pm EDT

• Why not re-route academically unprepared students to Adult Basic Education (ABE) for preparation if their entry scores are below levels of academic (college) success? Then open-door / land-grant colleges are not denying entry but re-routing students to academic success and graduation completion.

  While interviewing low-income, first-generation, minority (Hispanic) students who either stopped out, dropped out, or totally withdrew from our college, I found a common theme for their departure -- academic unpreparedness, unfamiliarity with college system, and financial aid (grant). Therefore, below are " my " opinions to resolve institutional budget constraints and increase student persistence.

  Again, why not re-route academically unprepared students to Adult Basic Education (ABE)/ GED for preparation if their entry scores are below levels of academic (college) success? ABE (GED) and developmental education offer similar courses and provide (almost) equally qualified instructors to prepare academically unprepared students; inasmuch, below are reasons and/or advantages/disadvantages to considering this recommendation.

  ADVANTAGES:
  1. ABE courses do not count as "credit" courses and do not affect a students GPA when students fail; no matter how many times the student has to repeat the course to pass.
  2. ABE courses do not count toward a students "attempted credit hours" if the student is using federal financial aid.
  3. ABE/GED is state funded (grant) and should not require additional institutional dollars to operate.
  3. Core "credit" faculty will not have the challenge of trying to teach to various levels of student academic readiness in the classroom. When academically unprepared students are allowed to register in developmental courses, some students take advantage of the entry and enroll in other core subjects that may not have a pre-requisite requirement; for example HIST, GOVT, PSY, SOC etc. Furthermore, when students are placed in the lowest developmental course offered does not necessarily mean all students are at the same level of academic preparedness; causing faculty burnout.

  DISADVANTAGES:
  1. ABE (GED), like high school, standard of college readiness is not equivalent to actual college preparedness. However, this can be resolved if ABE / GED preparation is required to increase its instructional standard as high schools are currently being recommended through No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
  2. Currently students who have acquired a High School Diploma or GED do not qualify for the ABE instructional assistance because it is supposed the student has proven documentation of higher learning obtained. Inasmuch, it would require implementation of an ABE policy to allow unprepared students with HS diplomas or GEDs to utilize their services.

  .... My question.....
  Why are colleges (institutions of higher education) having to deal with this issue in the first place?

• Remediation
• Posted by Dan on August 30, 2006 at 2:15pm EDT

• Interesting beginning to this topic with the limited information provided. While browsing the references, I see no reference from the National Center for Developmental Education.

• Something is broken
• Posted by Remedial by necessity on August 30, 2006 at 5:10pm EDT

• For now, let's set aside older students, immigrants, and people for whom English is a second or foreign language. Let's consider only high school graduates from the class of 2006. I have about 30 of them spread through three sections of a course at the community college where I teach. The course is a 100-level English class for students in a two-year track; that is, it is not a course that transfers to four-year schools. Few if any of my 30-odd "traditional" students were in a college-prep program in high school.

  On paper, these young people are not enrolled in a remedial course. But when the term started, none of them could identify subjects and verbs or tell a complete sentence from a fragment. They read slowly and painfully, with little comprehension and less retention. Several admit that they have never read an entire book. Putting words together on paper is agony for them, and they have no idea whether the sentences they create are correct or clear. Their vocabularies are tiny; the dictionary is a mystery to them. I frequently have to define simple words (including monosyllables) that I use in class. When I asked one class the product of 7 times 8, I stumped the whole group until an older student said 56. A few of the recent high school grads disagreed with her.

  No matter what the catalog or syllabus says, most of the course is remedial. The students' skills and knowledge are on a fourth-grade level.

  These people have high school diplomas printed and signed within the past four months. Remember that I'm talking about native-born U.S. citizens whose first (and only) language is English. They drive cars, carry cell phones, live in homes with cable or satellite TV, and watch television and listen to the radio. They cannot read, write, multiply, add, subtract, or divide on anything that approaches a high school level.

  What the hell is wrong? I wish I knew.

  In the meantime, I slowly, patiently try my best to teach them what sentences are and why knowing about sentences is a good thing.

• DevEd
• Posted by Penny on August 30, 2006 at 9:05pm EDT

• One of the issues that not discussed is that jobs for high school graduates have changed. Many of the students who wouldn't have gone on to college 20 or 30 years ago could go out and find good manufacturing jobs. Many, perhaps most, of these students weren't ready for college then either. The problem is that now those manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and Americans need to have some college to be competitive.
  We have students who come from families where there's a history of just getting by in high school and being able to find good, family-wage jobs. Their families haven't prepared them to do well in school, not because they don't care, but because they don't know how. Students who don't need developmental education are generally students whose parents are college educated and who educate their children by reading to them, taking them to cultural events, etc. In other words, these parents are supplementing K-12 education in significant ways because they know that's what's needed for their children to survive in college.
  Let's give the "new" college students the skills they need to succeed. Their caught in a changing society, not necessarily a failed school system.

• Costs of Catching Up
• Posted by Lynn Byrne , Educational Consultant at Hill Country ECS on August 31, 2006 at 5:35am EDT

• I think "Remedial by Necessity" has hit upon the major issue--there's a major failure in the prek-12 system. No student with a functional IQ should be permitted to slide through the preK-12 system without being able to read at an 8th grade (or better) level, do basic math, and write sentences that make sense. But it happens each and every year.

• The Costs of Catching Up
• Posted by Dan on August 31, 2006 at 10:15am EDT

• While checking for the ballpark figure, why does not the The Alliance for Excellent Education state simply the cost is roughly 1% of the budget. To be fair, shouldn't that percentage be mentioned. A kagillion dollars sounds huge, but when it's forthrightly stated with integrity that the kagillion is 1% of the budget, more credibility can be given to The Alliance for Excellent Education on the character scale of the seven classic virtues beginning with courage.

• Remedial. Developmental. Whatever
• Posted by Retired Prof on August 31, 2006 at 10:15am EDT

• Remedial education or developmental education. Whatever. The marketers can't actually change reality by changing our lexicon.

  Our K-12 schools are doing a terrible job of giving a certain segment of the population basic skills. If I were king, I would simply take the deficient community college students by the hand, lead them back to their high school prinicpals and say, "Sorry. He's not done yet." How the heck do these kids even graduate?

• Posted by Thane Doss on August 31, 2006 at 3:46pm EDT

• There's a huge difference between remedial and developmental, and it should not be glibly glossed over. Quite a few students from countries other than the US pay large amounts of money to attend US colleges, and this is often considered a strength of the US. It shouldn't be a terrible surprise that some of them, having spoken and written English only as a foreign language in classes in their home countries, don't write academic English well. They may very well have difficulties identifying subjects and verbs (particularly with words that can be either nouns or verbs) and may find it mystifying that something with a contextually obvious, but unstated, subject is that horror of horrors, a sentence fragment. Some languages other than English are quite accepting of the understood subject in sentences other than commands. These students are developmental, not remedial, and it makes a lot more sense to group them into classes and teach them than it does to blame them--they often know far more math and science than the average American student.

  Back when I started college at Georgia Tech, I was given placement tests. As my high school's math sequence ended with analytic geometry, I was given the choice of beginning either in the top level abstract algebra course--a course that I felt would have been remedial for me, but that would certainly have been developmental for anyone who had not had trigonometry and analytic geometry in high school--or beginning with the first calculus course. I took the latter, in which about half the class had had a year of high school calculus and perhaps a sixth had had two years of high school calculus. No one in the calss was considered remedial or developmental. Hmmmm....

  It is sometimes noted that the first developmental education in America took place at Harvard, long before the 20th century, when it was found that a large portion of the matriculants simply didn't know enough Latin and Greek to undertake proper study of the Bible.

  All of education ideally is developmental. But it's a heckuva lot easier to "teach" people things they already know--or to get them once they know a bit about researching and to tell them to go educate themselves and present you with a paper that shows the results.

• Only a Symptom
• Posted by P. F. Goebel , Director at University of North Texas on August 31, 2006 at 4:05pm EDT

• The costs incurred by community colleges to provide coursework covering remedial skill sets to students address only a symptom. The core problem is the failure of high schools to adequately equip graduates with a base line of knowledge and skills to enable them to experience greater success at post-secondary institutions of higher learning or on the job. Obviously graduates are leaving high schools ill prepared for either higher education or employment potential. This article emphasizes the importance for universities, colleges and high schools to make a greater commitment of working together to identify proactive strategies to address gaps in the knowledge and skills sets of high school graduates, including the issue of financial illiteracy. We must look beyond traditional academic models to ensure remedial skills of high school students include important life skills.

• Why money does not matter
• Posted by Anonymous on August 31, 2006 at 4:55pm EDT

• When did we become a society that only registers failing education systems when the costs are too high? This attitude is repugnant when you consider the fact that few people who are forced to take remedial classes are thrilled with the propect of being labeled "behind," nevermind "a financial burden to society." Suck it up America; if we fail to provide appropriate skills from Pre-K to 12, we will have to provide it when we begin to demand those we failed to pay taxes. The money is the least of the concerns regarding this problem.

  It would be nice if we could be less inclined to measure every human being with dollar figures.

• Posted by Marvin McConoughey on September 5, 2006 at 4:35am EDT

• A multi-faceted problem will require a similar corrective approach. One of many needed actions would be to charge K-12 systems the cost of providing their graduates with corrective educaton if they require remedial education upon reaching college. The K-12 system could help many students to do better by the simple expedient of telling them the truth about their performance. Call an "F" an F. Call a "D" a D and so on. Colleges nationally could help by more clearly communicating to the K-12 system what constitutes minimal acceptable performance in colleges. The communication could be as sophisticated and elaborate as required, but it should take place. Economically, it is probably lower cost to provide K-12 learning in that system rather than in college. Further, students not going on to college will still need a quality K-12 learning achievement in their post-school occupations.