In Need of Remediation

By John L. Pulley

In Need of Remediation
The challenge of remediating ill-prepared students continues to confront community colleges.

By John L. Pulley 

Not since the 1960’s, when the Baby Boom generation began graduating from high schools en masse, have community colleges been called on to do so much. Back then the charge was simply to supplement the capacity of four-year colleges that couldn’t keep up with surging enrollments.

Today’s challenge is more complex. The country is undergoing profound economic and demographic changes that are stoking demand for workers with post-secondary training — just as well-educated Baby Boomers are retiring. At the same time, replacement workers coming through the employment pipeline are more likely to have racial, ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics that equate with low rates of college participation, educational persistence and degree attainment.

A broad cross-section of policy makers is calling on community colleges to solve the problem. From think tanks and non-profit foundations to politicians and educational leaders, a consensus is emerging that two-year institutions must bridge the country’s educational and skills gaps.

“Without a concerted, national effort to bolster the role of two-year institutions and expand access to them, the United States is in jeopardy of losing its status as an economic and global leader,” stated the College Board’s Center for Innovative Thought earlier this year. 

Lost in the rhetoric is an inconvenient truth. Many students who enroll in community colleges, perhaps most, are unprepared to do college work. Public two-year institutions have struggled for decades to remediate students. They have succeeded at times, but mostly those institutions have failed.

Community college students who are required to take one or more remedial classes often never complete them. Moreover, enrollment in remedial classes is itself a strong predictor of which students will drop out of college altogether.

If those long-standing trends continue, the educational and economic thrust expected of community colleges could sputter and stall. At the least, it would fail to hit on all cylinders.

As far back as 1968, a study of remedial programs by John E. Roueche, who runs the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, failed to identify a single remedial program that had a success rate of even 10 percent. 

“The truth is things are not much better today,” he says.  < Read what others are saying about remediation. > 

Developmental education emerged as a major challenge for community colleges in the 1960’s, an era of Baby Boom maturation, surging postsecondary enrollments and rapid expansion of the two-year college sector. In the intervening years, the onus of delivering remedial courses has increasingly fallen on the country’s 1,200 community colleges.

The shift in responsibility became more pronounced in the past decade “and will only increase as states further discourage four-year institutions from providing remedial instruction,” predicted the Education Commission of the States in a 2002 report. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did his part to fuel the trend when he eliminated remedial education from the catalogue of the CUNY system’s four-year institutions and made it the exclusive purview of the city’s community colleges.

California’s public colleges later undertook a similar restructuring, but the vast demand for remedial instruction — “basic skills” in the West Coast vernacular — has forced the state to twice extend the deadline for implementing the new scheme. About a dozen states have transferred the function of remediation solely to two-year institutions.

“There is an undercurrent of ‘We want our universities to be great, and these remedial students are keeping them from being great,’” says Hunter Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education. “In California they simply wanted to make their institutions more elite. Admitting underprepared students was not consistent with that desire.”

Many influences have contributed to the chronic failure of remediation efforts – including insufficient funds, lack of leadership, inadequate research — but the primary culprit has been the absence of a compelling impetus to do better. Simply put, the country’s major economic, political and educational institutions long ago learned to live with a disturbingly high level of fundamental academic failure. Over time, the systemic inability to bring underachieving students up to academic speed was accepted and, ultimately, institutionalized.

Nationally, about 43 percent of entering community college students require one or more remedial courses, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Using different methodology, Bob McCabe, executive director of the National Alliance of Community and Technical Colleges, suggests that the actual figure is closer to 80 percent.

A New World

In the era after World War II, the country’s K-12 system largely adhered to a mathematically simple educational formula. Public schools funneled students into three tracks in roughly equal numbers: college prep, general curriculum and occupational. The math worked, and for many years the United States boasted of having the highest rates in the world of high school graduation and college-degree attainment. 

In a fast-changing and newly competitive world, it is suddenly no longer convenient to write off millions of Americans because they lack basic skills. In recent years, as remedial programs continued to stagnate, the demand for and value of postsecondary education has surged. The historically tilted playing field of global competition began to level; technology radically changed the way many of us work and communicate; globalization blossomed; and the percentage of new jobs requiring post-secondary training passed 50 percent on its way to 75 percent or higher.

At the same time, the country’s demographic makeup has undergone a major makeover. And the percentage of Americans age 25 to 34 earning degrees has slid, relevant to other countries that have raised graduation rates.

“We stayed flat while other countries have passed us,” McCabe says. “Ireland has a booming economy now. Once one of the poorest countries in Europe, they made higher education free. … We have a crisis.”

At the confluence of these trends, remedial education finally “is getting the attention today it has needed for decades,” says Byron McClenney, project director for The University of Texas at Austin’s involvement in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed. “We’re just reaching a point now that for the good of the nation, community colleges have to take it [remedial education] on almost as job one or we will not continue to be a competitive nation in the long run.”

There are signs that decision makers are becoming less sanguine about the education system’s failure to adequately teach basic skills. California has launched a basic-skills initiative that will provide more funds to community colleges. Kentucky is rolling out a large effort to bolster basic skills, as well.

“A lot of policy makers are suddenly concerned about it,” Boylan says. “The trend used to be that legislators would say ‘We have too many students taking remedial courses and we have to get rid of them.’ The new movement I see is ‘It looks like we’ll have to do this for awhile, so let’s do it right.’”

Byron McClenney concurs. “It’s going to be a problem for as long into the future as you can see,” he says. “In state after state, it’s being taken on as a policy issue.”

Complicating the issue for community colleges is ambivalence about the ways in which remediation defines them. Leaders of two-year institutions publicly extol the importance of teaching basic skills. Privately, they ask themselves whether remediation bolsters or detracts from their mission, whether the community colleges’ function of feeding students transfer to four-year institutions has been displaced by the necessity of teaching basic skills.

“When do you cease being an institution of higher education if you do all remedial work?” asks George Vaughan, professor emeritus of higher education at North Carolina State University. “We need to have a balanced curriculum. To be competitive, you cannot commit too many resources to any one function.”

Katana Hall, interim dean of Academic Support and Learning Resources at Baltimore City Community College, concedes that developmental education has an inherent “ick factor.” There is no glory in teaching basic proficiency in math, reading and writing, and more than a few professors assigned to teach remedial classes consider the duty to be a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

“That is a phenomenon that is still out there,” says Kay McClenney, who directs the Community College Survey of Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. “People don’t want to be known as that remedial institution down the street even if 80 percent of their students need it when they come through the door.”

The party line is that community colleges must endeavor to teach basic skills because the country cannot afford to abandon a segment of society for whom education is the best last chance for social mobility. The charge to teach basic skills is, in a manner of speaking, God’s work. 

“We are a beacon of light and hope for students who want a better life for themselves and their families,” Hall says.  

Resolving the competing aims of universal access and academic excellence isn’t easy. Community colleges are hybrid institution charged with performing numerous functions: honing the skills of a workforce increasingly in need of technical expertise, retraining workers displaced by globalization, funneling students to baccalaureate-granting institutions and establishing competitive honors colleges. Too often, Roueche says, two-year institutions function like hospital emergency rooms that make extraordinary efforts to save the life of every person wheeled into their ERs, no matter how hopeless the patients’ condition. Pulled in so many directions, is it wise for community colleges to shovel limited resources into remediation’s voracious maw?

“We work so hard around issues of access,” Roueche says, “we have ignored issues of quality and excellence.”

Setting Blame Aside

Nationally, the percentage of new college students who require remedial education has held fairly steady for many years, but absolute numbers have crept up as overall enrollments have surged. Now, demand for developmental and remedial education is expected to grow as more unprepared students enter college. Feeding the trend are chronically inadequate secondary schools, persistent poverty, an influx of immigrants and the enrollment of millions of students who wouldn’t have attended college a generation or two ago.

Students enrolling in community colleges are more likely than their peers to require remediation if they don’t take an academically challenging course load in high school, if their parents didn’t go to college, if they attend an inner city high school and if they are people of color — risk factors that are becoming more prevalent in community college populations. Postsecondary institutions are also called on to teach basic skills when the curriculum taught in high schools doesn’t mesh with colleges’ expectations for newly enrolled students, a phenomenon known as misalignment.

Some educators draw a distinction between developmental education that is required due to secondary students’ lack of exposure to basic-skills instruction and remedial education, a type of developmental education made necessary when attempts to teach basic skills in high school fail.

“Some of our students never got it to begin with,” says Geraldine McBroom, president of the National Association of Developmental Education. 

The perception that taxpayers and students are “paying twice” to impart basic skills has fomented anger and finger pointing. 

“Forget about who to blame,” Kay McClenney says. “Once students approach your doors, they are yours. We hope they aren’t revolving doors, which is what happens when we fail to deal adequately and efficiently with remedial education. … Developmental education needs to be acclaimed as the highest of priorities at the institutional, at the state and the federal policy levels.”

Numerous initiatives involving hundreds of millions of dollars are underway to fix structural flaws in the K-16 system that contribute to the high-school-to-college skills gap, among them dual-enrollment high schools and high-school-to-college bridge programs. Vandal, from ECS, warns however, that educators shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that the dilemma of unprepared students will resolve itself “if we could just get our hands around the high-school-to-college transition.

“It is not the silver bullet,” he continues, suggesting that the problem is too big for any one solution to solve. “You have this pig of underserved students going through the python.”

Competing for Resources

The challenge of providing basic skills to community colleges can be compounded by homelessness, poverty and drug abuse — issues that are less prevalent at institutions with more selective admissions criteria. At Baltimore City Community College, remedial students have “a plethora of social issues they have to overcome,” says its president, Carolane Williams.

It’s costly, Williams says, in part because remedial classes tend to be smaller and require more ancillary services to offset high dropout rates than are needed for non-remedial course sections. “The more resources we put into developmental education, the more it takes from other services we can offer. We take that out from other costs. The funding doesn’t keep up.” 

Not everyone agrees. Remedial education is only as costly as the resources devoted to it, contrarians say. Providing remediation on the cheap can be a money maker.

“There have always been people who have claimed that as community colleges are forced to do more and more remediation, they have fewer resources left to do things like training nurses and computer technicians,” says Boylan. “I tend not to agree with that because most community colleges do remediation by hiring huge numbers of adjunct faculty, paying minimum wages, then reinvesting that [profit] into programs like nursing and computer science.”

If remedial education is indeed a business, then business is good indeed. Towson University, for example, began offering free tuition to students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. After discovering that finishing in the top decile doesn’t guarantee academic preparedness, the university began paying for scholarship winners to acquire basic skills at BCCC prior to enrolling at Towson. 

Mismatched Resources

Measured against total higher-education spending, the portion of the postsecondary pie allocated to remediation is relatively small. The Center for Community College Policy estimated a decade ago that approximately 1 percent of the country’s total spending on higher education went to pay for remedial education. Since then, spending on developmental education has failed to keep pace with demand. The disparity is part of a larger problem, “a serious mismatch … between what community colleges are asked to do and the resources provided to get the job done,” the College Board asserted earlier this year in a report, Winning the Skills Race and Strengthening America’s Middle Class: An Action Agenda for Community Colleges.

“We have to figure out the funding models,” says Vandal. “That conversation is begging to be had, but it’s not being held in too many places right now.”

Financial pressures can tempt community colleges to move unqualified students through the remediation pipeline, a practice that can generate revenues and artificially improve the success rates of remedial programs. Lawrence McCutchen, a remedial student at Baltimore City Community College, suspects that an ulterior motive of some sort contributed to his passing a required section of remedial math (see related story).

“I was surprised,” McCutchen says. “We weren’t tested that much. The instructor was walking around on exam day and basically telling us the answers.”

Without making the instructor of the course available for comment, a spokesman for BCCC said the college’s objective is to see that students who complete developmental courses are prepared for the challenges of the next level, whether it’s another developmental course or a college-level course.

“We emphasize quality over quantity,” says Enyinnaya Iweha, a professor at BCCC and chairman of the department of computers, mathematics, engineering and sciences. “Instructors are not encouraged to push students through the pipeline — we do not encourage social passing of students.”

To underscore that point, Iweha notes that this past winter the mathematics department organized a Second Chance program for students who in the fall 2007 semester scored between 60 percent and 69 percent in remedial math courses — scores that were within spitting distance of a passing grade of 70 percent for remedial courses.

“If we encouraged social passing of students, why would we take the pains to run such a program at no costs to the students?” asks Iweha.  

Repeating the Past

The more pertinent question, asserts Boylan and others, is why decades of failure haven’t prompted community colleges to be more innovative in their approaches to remedial education. If the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results, then American education’s approach to remedial education is downright nutty. Too often, remedial programs replicate the same methods that resulted in the failures those programs seek to correct.

“After a student fails a remedial course, the college doesn’t’ do anything different,” Boylan says. “They enroll the student in the same course.”

The failure is made more bewildering, some experts say, in consideration of the apparent aversion community colleges have had to adopting methods of remediation that have been shown to work.

“I’m angry about it,” says Roueche. “We have identified community colleges that have developed exemplary programs for developmental students. I’m not sure why colleges won’t learn or can’t learn from other institutions.”

McCabe agrees, saying that “we certainly have learned over the years a lot of things that work. We know more about how adults learn today than we did 20 years ago. We know more about successful practices in developmental education and to a great extent we don’t use them.”

Techniques shown to improve the results of remedial education include team learning, putting an emphasis on visual and tactile teaching, using instructors trained in remedial learning, bridge programs and counseling services. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others, are investing in dual-enrollment high schools that provide opportunities for secondary students to take college-level courses, usually at community colleges.

Successful remediation, some educators say, has less to do with cognition than it does students’ attitudes.

“The big key to all this is motivation,” McBroom says. “For many students, it is less about what they know than how they feel about learning and their ability to learn. Developmental educators are really good at helping students learn how to learn.” 

A Moving Target

To a large extent, the remediation challenge is a moving target. In parts of the country, African Americans have been displaced as the largest minority group in community colleges by Mexican Americans, South American and Eastern European immigrants.

“Some institutions have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to [remediate] Blacks or Hispanics, then here come the H’mongs,” Boylan says, referring to Southeast Asian refugees.

In Texas, the governor and legislature determined that remaining competitive requires the state to increase college enrollments by 500,000 people over the next decade. “Guess who those 500,000 are likely to be?” Roueche asks. “First generation students, people going to school without family support, bilingual students and ESL students.

Those students will need more financial assistance and more services than colleges have provided in the past. The toughest cases will end up at two-year institutions.

“For as far as we can see into the future, the need for developmental education in the community college sector is going to be vast,” says Kay McClenney. “It is not going to go away. It is not something that can be denied or wished away and it should not be swept under institutional or political rugs. There is too much at stake.”  

<Remediation Summary | BCCC Case> |  Visiting The Past > |  Remediation Data> |  In Their Own Words> | Un-Prepared Students >

 

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© 2010 Community College Week (ISSN 1041-5726)
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