Comments on Questioning the Value of Remedial Education

• Look in the classroom for answers
• Posted by Gail Mellow , president at LaGuardia Comunity College on July 31, 2008 at 7:45am EDT

• I welcome and commend this important large scale study, as well as the soon-to-be-released publication by Dr. Tom Bailey of CCRC, that critically evaluates the value of remediation. We need much more of this kind of research.

  Along with the authors, I encourage not only more research but careful interpretation of their data. The study assumes that there is comparable and high level instruction in each of the developmental classes they studied. I sadly doubt that we can deliver uniformly high levels of basic skills instruction across the hundreds of classes offered each semester at my large, urban community college to the 85% of the high school graduate enrollees who need it. The variabililty of instruction only expands as one studies multiple institutions.

  I believe that we must place much more emphasis on curricula, pedagogy, technology and faculty involvement and leadership if we are to solve this enormous issue.

  The authors caution that the costs of remediation should be given careful consideration given the limited impact they found for students who were assessed as being on the border-line between needing and not needing basic skills. To me, cost is not the issue, since community colleges now receive only 20% of the public higher education dollars for teaching 49% of the public students, and only a pitiful 2% of philanthropic dollars. The answer is not fewer dollars.

  And the focus on dollars is mis-placed; it is the human cost of not succeeding that should capture our attention. Almost 55 million Americans require basic skills, and subsequent success in college, if they are to participate successfully in the social and economic fabric of contemporary life. I have outlined the needs of these individuals in the 2008 Atwell Lecture for the American Council of Education (http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/atwell/)

  We must move into the classroom with research dollars to allow community college faculty to link across classes, institutions, and modalities to develop the pedagogy and curricula that produce high levels of successful outcomes. We know that we can no longer teach as we have been taught, but for basic skills classes the demand for innovation that produces significantly greater rates of success has never been more critical. Focused research dollars in the hands of the hundreds of master community college faculty-scholars can make a large impact on remediating this national problem.

  Gail Mellow, President, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Queens, NY

• President Mellow's comments
• Posted by Angé Peterson , AVP at UCF on July 31, 2008 at 8:00am EDT

• Thank you, President Mellow, for the insightful response to this study. Dr. Tinto's article, summarizing his study, published on June 9th clearly supports your comments. Perhaps it is the word 'value' that triggered my own internal response to the study.

• Posted by skeptic on July 31, 2008 at 8:45am EDT

• I can't help but think of the old saw: If you think education is expensive, try the alternative. I would like to see a greater range of outcomes (employment and income for starters) considered before policymakers conclude that money spent on remedial education is being poorly spent. I would also like to see if there are better ways of delivering remedial education (in the workplace?), that yield better outcomes.

• What remediation interventions were employed?
• Posted by Carolyn on July 31, 2008 at 8:50am EDT

• This study and conclusions were of interest to me. There are thousands of students who benefitted from remediation experiences, and have gone on to earn bachelor and graduate degrees. There is ample evidence to affirm that hundreds of remediation programs encourage persistence and academic achievement. There is also evidence to suggest that there are other 'remediation' programs which are merely revenue-generating opportunities with revolving doors. As with anything else, program design and methodology may have something to do with the ability to achieve desired outcomes. Something to think about.

• Effects of remedial education on completion rates
• Posted by feudi pandola on July 31, 2008 at 9:05am EDT

• A question that should be asked is why we need to spend $1 to 2$ Billion annually on remedial education? It is because of the failure of the educational system at lower levels, or is it simply an artifact of our societal commitment that everyone is entitled to a higher education, dammit, and we'll spend what we have to to make sure that happens.

  The experience at our schools has been that students who return for remedial work simply do not fair as well as the general population in completeing our program. This study seems to confirm our experience. We must question the conventional wisdom that college is for everyone. It's pretty clear that this is not true and that we may actually be damaging those people who go through this process when they may be better off pursuing other endeavors in life rather than obtaining a higher education.

  Dr. Mellow is very perceptive in her comment that the truly important societal cost may not be monetary, bur rather the loss of confidence that failing this process may endgender in some of our young people. We would be far better off in directing these folks into other more productive outlets in their journey through life, such as trade schools, or other occupational training efforts.

• Between Rhetoric and Reality
• Posted by Glen S. McGhee , Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project on July 31, 2008 at 9:30am EDT

• The need for remedial coursework, in part, results from a disconnect between the levels of high school mastery as determined by the FCAT -- a minimum standard that must be passed for graduation -- and the CPT cut scores used to place students in remediation. I would have liked to see a study that doesn't ignore the prior FCAT scores while choosing to concentrate only on the CPT scores.

  The underlying pressures to eliminate dropouts and graduate high school students are here colliding with the open access mission of the community colleges. At first glance, there is nothing to suggest that Burton Clark's cooling-out CC model is wrong; in fact, this study clearly demonstrates the gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

  The study also neglects certain endogenous placement mechanisms, such as the use of CLM for additional placement refinement at some CCs. The success of using the McCrary test for dealing with the retesting problem is difficult to assess, so this must remain an open question as well.

  I also find hidden assumptions about the level of instruction difficult to accept.
  Instruction varies from classroom to classroom, from institution to institution, but this is ignored by the study. What kinds of classrooms are the students stepping into that test-into remedial courses ? What quality are their instructors in comparison with non-remedial instructors? How much of these effects can be attributed to instructor interaction and remedial-supports, such as CC-provided tutoring? How many students are accessing this when it is available? These are some endogenous factors not yet examined.

  I'm also wondering about dual enrolled students, that take and pass college-level classes offered at the high school, but test-into remedial work while successfully transfering the earned DE college credits. How large a subgroup is this, and what are their outcomes?

  "In the case of Florida, mandated assignment to remedial courses and actual
  remedial enrollment rates differed at most institutions, especially below the cutoff. A surprising number of students with assessments below those necessary to be exempt from remediation did not in fact enroll in the courses and instead directly entered college-level courses in the relevant fields." It would be helpful, I think, to have a better grasp of this variation and a clearer picture of the reasons for it, since it is so important for student outcomes.

• False Premise
• Posted by Florida Prof on July 31, 2008 at 10:35am EDT

• The article states that College Algebra, MAC1105, is required for every Associates degree in Florida. This is false. Only Business and science majors are required to pass that class. The others take a pair of "college level" courses in Liberal Arts math.

  The authors also fail to make it clear what they consider remedial placement in math, an important detail because there are five different levels of placement for math in the Florida system. Placement into MAT1033, which is not considered a remedial course by the state, rather than MAC1105 would be more comparable to what they studied for reading.

  However, many students place into Basic Algebra because it corresponds to the minimum FCAT score needed to graduate from high school. The correlation between FCAT scores and CPT scores produced by a State of Florida study clearly shows that many graduates only have 7th grade skills in math and face a minimum of two semesters (8 credits) of math before they can take a math class that will count toward graduation. This is probably what Glen McGhee was talking about in his first paragraph.

  Then there are those that place into an Arithmetic class and start college by learning fractions. It is little wonder that many get discouraged or delay taking any math as long as possible.

• huge challenge
• Posted by Gary Davis on July 31, 2008 at 10:45am EDT

• Community colleges should be proud of their open door but they should know about studies such as this one. The authors admit (p. 32) that they haven't measured the value added by retaining the remedial students. That study should be done. And we need to remember that new "hands on" models might work better than the traditional remediation approaches we've been using. The chance to start applying new skills in the workplace might give remedial students the confidence and the money they need to persist even longer. We're good at what we do but we know we can always do better.

• The Limits of Remediation
• Posted by Reality on July 31, 2008 at 10:50am EDT

• Ah, where to begin. My own studies (over a 20-year period) of the success rates of students in the remedial program housed in my division at a community college show results similar to the Calcagno-Long study. Students on the cutoff margin (the group Calcagno and Long studied) were more likely to persist than lower scoring students, but still were very unlikely to finish any program at the college or to transfer. Students with lower placement test scores almost never went much beyond remedial.

  Dr. Mellow’s plea to “place much more emphasis on curricula, pedagogy, technology and faculty involvement and leadership” to address the failings of remediation strikes me as disingenuous. We are not “discovering” this problem now; many of us have been talking about it for 30 years and trying to do something about it for 30 years. Believe it or not, people actually specialize in the field of remedial studies, and there are professional associations, conferences, grant funds to apply for, and so forth. And yet, here we are with a persistent “problem.”

  Dr. Mellow’s assertion that money is not an issue is simply wrong—we live in a zero-sum age, and a billion spent on remediation is a billion not spent on something else. In the case of my college, I sometimes imagined what effect the million plus taxpayer dollars spent on remediation each year might have had if it had been invested in the seven area high schools. Maybe not much—it’s not a lot of money—but maybe a better result than we were getting.

  What to do? Dr. Mellow believes 55 million Americans need remediation “if they are to participate successfully in the social and economic fabric of contemporary life.” But this notion ignores the limits of remediation (not to mention the “actual” as opposed to the fantasy job market in this country). Students who require a lot of remediation got that way after spending a decade or more in K-12. In most cases we can’t undo a deficit accrued over 10 or 12 or 13 years in a few semesters in classes that meet at best 15 hours a week. I’d suggest focusing on the students who are at the margin (the group Calcagno-Long studied). Perhaps more resources spent on them would produce better results?
  But wouldn’t we be consigning the folks with low skills to lives of hopeless poverty as Dr. Mellow implies? In the real job market, everybody can’t be a doctor, nurse, teacher, computer technician, and lawyer, contrary to the advertising campaigns of colleges and their supporters. The job market provides tens of millions of service sector jobs that don’t require much if any higher education and tens of millions of “somebodies” will do these jobs. Many of these jobs don’t pay well, and when college graduates do them, they still don’t pay well. A number of studies show that we actually have an “oversupply” of college degreed people. While other studies show we’re “behind” other countries in our college graduate output, the anecdotal evidence I’ve accumulated over the years supports the oversupply thesis. I know of dozens of former students, acquaintances, and children of friends with two and four-year degrees who work as secretaries, receptionists, bank clerks, security guards, assistant managers of chain restaurants, and so forth. Might the solution to low pay be higher minimum wages and perhaps revisiting Richard Nixon’s (yup, Richard Nixon) guaranteed minimum income?
  I am not, by the way, advocating giving up on the goal of producing a nation of adults competent in basic skills. Call me a foolish optimist, but I’m still hopeful we can teach basic skills to most children over the course of the 13 years of K-12. That’s where the resources need to go.

• Remediation?
• Posted by Fred Flener , Retired on July 31, 2008 at 12:35pm EDT

• "Reality" makes some good points. Let's look at the mathematics of the system. Suppose a high school graduating student is three-four years behind on some scale learning curve. Now we try to "catch him/her up" in a couple of "remediation" courses. That means the learning curve actually has to accelarate at a much higher level than it had throughout the high school time. Why do we think we have that ability to teach better/faster than the high school teachers? There are probably many examples of students who "mature" and are ready to learn the content, but wouldn't it be better to focus on having students learn more in their 12+ years of pre college education? The reality is "why haven't they learned basic stuff earlier," not "how can we remediate students who didn't learn?" Of course, this isn't an exclusive do this "or" the other, but I am skeptical about the benefits of remediation for many, if not most, students.

• Posted by Arnold Gelfman , Executive Director, Planning, Assessment, and Research at Brookdale Community College on July 31, 2008 at 12:35pm EDT

• If the primary purpose of basic skills courses is to prepare students for college-level work, it would seem that the best measure would be success in the next directly related college course(s). The actual report referenced in the article discusses utilizing the Reading section of the CPT to assess the validity of English Composition placement. What happened to Sentence Skills or Writeplacer which are designed to be specifically linked to English Composition and what about performance in developmental writing (not reading) courses? In addition, since the study only deals with students who score in a very restricted range around the cutoff scores (the area with the most doubt relating to placement decisions), I would predict that there is great variability from institution to institution as to waiving placement in developmental courses through retesting, advisor judgement, SAT scores, etc. Thus the primary differences between students who are placed and not placed may be minimal except for one group having to take one more course. That, in and of itself, can have a negative impact on long-term retention.

• Posted by engineer on July 31, 2008 at 1:45pm EDT

• I would assess remedial education as conducted at the college or junior college level as about 95% a waste of time and money. If the students didn't get it in 12 years of school, they are not going to get it in a semester or two in college. There will of course be a few exceptions - probably less than 5% - late bloomers or finally moved out of a disaterous home - but they will mostly manage anyway.

  I taught a couple of freshman level classes (not remedial) at a junior college for fun after retirement. Out of 60 people, there was 1 that I might have considered hiring as a tech. Well over 50% had no business in college at all, the other 50% might benefit from a year of focused trade school in preparation for a relatively moderate cognative demand job. Not everyone belongs in college.

  Its pretty clear that many public schools (almost all urban school districts) are a massive failure. Management - not money - is the problem. Remedial college classes are not going to fix that.

• some instructors make faillure a snap
• Posted by Gary Davis on July 31, 2008 at 2:40pm EDT

• Wow! Thanks to "engineer" for demonstrating part of the problem. With a teacher like "engineer" the poor devils in his/her classroom didn't stand a chance. I hate to admit it, but as a department chair I sometimes hired adjuncts like "engineer" and then simply hoped for the best. I seldom got it. Like "engineer," too many remedial instructors simply don't know how to teach remedial students. Others do. Some instructors have disdain for those who don't learn just as they did. Others are more tolerant of different learning styles and paces. I remember one honored Illinois community college teacher who said "I could teach math to a rock if the rock were willing to work with me during my office hours." That's the kind of person who succeeds in the remedial classroom. It takes special knowledge, talent and dedication. And yes, money is a problem. We blow trillions on ill-advised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but we struggle to provide a basic education for our own people. Our priorities are not just misplaced; they're perverse.

• remedial cash cow
• Posted by rightwingprofessor on July 31, 2008 at 5:35pm EDT

• Why is this so "costly"? Where I come from remedial classes are huge, taught by low-paid part-timers and adjuncts. They bring in huge amounts of tuition and cost very little to run. I think we should be discussing whether it is moral to hold out the hope of a college degree to students who we know almost surely will not obtain one.

  Rightwingprofessor

  http://rightwingprofessor.blogspot.com/

• It depends
• Posted by Bob Avakian on July 31, 2008 at 7:00pm EDT

• Our program is set up so that our instructors end up doing a lot of one-on-one tutoring. This builds personal relationships and, not surprisingly, leads to higher retention and completion rates than students who are not part of our program.

  I would like to see the data of the study parsed by method used. I would think the less involved the instructor, the less of a positive effect remediation will have. Just a personal bias.

• Look at the data
• Posted by engineer on July 31, 2008 at 7:00pm EDT

• Gary,

  Look at the data.

  National average high school graduation rate is about 70%. For the top 50 cities, ranges from 25% to 77%, with a 52% average. I'd say that's pretty dismal. See
  http://www.americaspromise.org/uploadedFiles/AmericasPromiseAlliance/Dropout_Crisis/SWANSONCitiesInCrisis040108.pdf

  Students planning to major in education have about the lowest mean SAT scores of any major (mean 1442 - about the 40th percentile of college bound students). See http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf

  Its just not very good material with which to operate the public school system.

• what the data show
• Posted by Gary Davis on August 1, 2008 at 4:35am EDT

• Engineer has given us data to consider. The data show that lots of folks didn't learn much in high school. So do we settle for that or try to remediate the problem? I vote for remediation. The fact that those majoring in education have lower than average test scores has long been known. I agree we need better teachers and that's partly a function of our screwed up national priorities. When blackjack dealers and security contractors in Iraq make more than our adjunct college teachers, we've got a problem.

• K-12
• Posted by Charlie Kane on August 1, 2008 at 9:15am EDT

• My father was a Texas farm boy who dropped out of school in the 8th grade (around 1933). He did read and write--all his life--at about the 8th or 9th grade level (he attended some night school on the G.I. Bill). He was a kinesthetic learner. He went into carpentry and rose to building superintendent. He was good at arithmetic but not math. Yet he could spot mistakes in architects' blue prints (say, ratio of steel to concrete) and show architects where they needed to re-do their calculations. Unions were still strong in those days.

  Our family moved well into the middle class by the late 60s. All that created the enabling conditions at least for me, the younger of two sons, to finish high school and attend college. I worked construction during summers and holidays, but I didn't have to hold down a full-time job while still trying to cut it in college. Nor did I need remediation because I'd had the same luxury in high school and few distractions, as characterized my middle class life by the late 1960s.

  Bear in mind, also, we were white.

  Since 1973, however, this kind of upward mobility for a huge segment of the working class has slowed to a halt. So, yes, Gary Davis, much of what education must address is what's happening economically, inside AND outside of education proper. What's making K-12 increasingly difficult for the lower 50% of the population? The official lament is that poor education makes us less competitive in the global marketplace. But I think there's a systematic incentive to poor education for the lower half; it is characteristic of the way globalization itself is carried out under corporate auspices. It's engine needs first the creation of vulnerable, exploitable "third-world" populations, with the U.S. itself representing a growing third-world among its own citizenry.

  In my father's day, there was quite a distance between rich and poor, that is, Michael Harrington's "Other America." But the spread was nothing like it is in this new Gilded Age: an important context to consider.

• Let's Not Forget About...
• Posted by Dr. K on August 1, 2008 at 9:35am EDT

• In this article and discussion, I've heard nothing about two large groups that benefit from remediation. One is the non-traditional students. Oftentimes these students did learn what they needed to in high school, but that may have been decades ago. How many perfectly intelligent adults haven't read a novel or solved a quadratic equation in years? In order to take in more non-traditional students, we have to have a bridge. In my experience, most of these students have the maturity and sense of direction to actually complete their programs.

  The other group is foreign-born students. I know that ESL tends to be viewed in a different category from remediation, but essentially it is just another branch on the tree. The distinctions become less pronounced when we consider generation 1.5 students (those who grew up mostly in the U.S. and speak English fluently, if not flawlessly) who sometimes end up in mainstream remedial classes in an effort to shake the ESL stigma and English-speaking foreign students who came out of very different educational systems and may not test well on our exams, thus winding up in remediation.

  Others commentators have pointed out that remedial programs are not mononlithic. Neither are the students served by them.

  I must add, however, that having taught reading courses to all age groups, it seems to me that a student who is trying to balance school, work, and possible family responsabilities will not in one or two semesters' time make up for years of limited reading. If content-area professors consistently held their students accountable for completing readings with comprehension, the college drop-out rate would be that much higher.

• An indictment against pedagogy more than dev ed
• Posted by briny on August 5, 2008 at 5:00am EDT

• I work in "remedial" (a wrong-headed paradigm from the get-go) education in a Florida community college. I'm also a product of it.

  By selecting Florida as its case study, it may well have been very convenient for the study design, but those very elements of convenience make the State a very poor case study.

  At this college, and in so far as I can ascertain throughout the state and much of the country, quality of instructors in dev ed is highly variable, and higher quality instructors are hand-tied from dynamically placing students front-and-center. This is because of the very same uniform requirements that the researchers herald as making Florida an "ideal" focus of their study. I frankly cringe at the situations many developmental students are placed within, and this does not only go to heavy reliance on adjuncts (e.g., in my opinion, the lone tenured reading prep faculty at my college frankly has little business even entering the same room as students). More often than not, when a student persists, it is in spite of the instructional environment, not because of it.

  From this, the study appears to me to be much more one that should call into question how developmental ed is conducted within the classroom and labs, where innovation is discouraged, and mandated curriculum and textbooks partition out much of the possibility of the sort of critical literacy practices that stand to highly energize students and induce persistence.

  But if we're going to cut dev ed, lets cut lecture-and-textbook courses from top to bottom. The following is from:

  Saunders, P. - The Lasting Effects of Introductory Economics Courses - Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter, 1980), pp. 1-14

  "The economist Paul Saunders...set out to assess the long-term effectiveness of the lecture-and-textbook format. For those who haven't heard about it, I should explain that the study involved a two-semester economics course, with macro- succeeded by micro-, the kind of economics sequence now taken by almost a third of undergraduates nationwide. Two weeks after the end of the year, these students were given a special exam designed to test their retention of the material. Amazingly, they scored only 19% better than students who had never taken the course at all. And after two years had passed, that figure had dropped to 14%. Among alumni, the figure was halved again. While the researchers noted enormous differences among individual students—some remembered quite a bit, while some remembered absolutely nothing—no one who has enough nerve to read the results can avoid feeling slightly shaken. Imagine how much it cost to offer the economics sequence. And for what?--for a few basic principles that many people learn without ever setting foot in an economics class."

• remedial eduaction
• Posted by scott russell on August 6, 2008 at 10:35am EDT

• 2 billion per year, my-my. There are something like 200 billionaires in this country who could write that check and still be billionaires; they would, however, have to go broke writing a check for certain recent military adventures.

• Posted by Diane Walsh , Instructor on January 29, 2009 at 5:55pm EST

• In trying to understand the value of remedial education, perhaps a little perspective shifting re. the questions being asked could be helpful... ?

  In my institution, we asked not how many failed to complete, but how many of the students who DID graduate a program had taken ABE / upgrading / remedial courses. The answer at our institution was that about 30% of ALL the graduates, from ALL programs, had taken at least one of these courses.

  I think this sort of positively framed question might show more clearly the benefit of remedial education than negatviely framed questions - if we look for failure, we'll probably find it, but if we look for success, we might be pleasantly surprised by what we find.