Community Colleges and Remedial needs
 

I saw this article this morning. I am surprised but shouldn't be, that community colleges are now heavily leaned upon to bring students up to par with college course requirements.


Isn't it the responsibility of the high schools to get kids ready for college?


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/ny...l.html?_r=1&hp

You would think so, wouldn't you? :p:

Things have really changed, imho. Of course, I could just be seeing it from my perspective: in HS we were college bound or we were not. These days, working at the CC level, I see a whole different side of things. You would not believe the number of people who take DEV (remedial or developmental) classes just to be able to take a regular old college course. Some students cannot get past that. There is a limit, too, to what FA will pay for with developmentals.

I won't get into my opinions about "not everyone is college material" because that would be like shooting myself in the foot. Oh, I have very strong opinions, but they are not conducive to where we have and are headed: higher education accessible to everyone! But, I've also seen people who had no direction or support and did poorly in HS surprise the heck out of themselves and excel in college.

If everyone "deserves" a college education and universities start handing out diplomas the way high schools do, a college degree will mean about as much as a high school diploma does today. The solution? Get an MA or PhD - at least until its decided that everyone deserves one of those, too. :eyebrow:

I take one campus class. I do see a lot of older people, like myself who are updating their skill set. It had crossed my mind, wondering, if it were not for the economic downturn if the student body would be different. Is this just something passing or is this the new norm for community colleges? Of course, most kids are in class and it is raining cats and dogs, so there isn't a whole lot of people around for me to really see the demographic and ages of the student body.

I looked at the remedial courses offered, there are not many. I suppose the larger the city the bigger the need for remedial courses. That, and there are off shoot centers here that provide those remedial courses. I bet.

Don't shoot the messenger! :lol:

Hey, I know. Believe me, I know.

@ sky: I think it's the new norm. But I work in a huge CC in an economically challenged urban setting.

When my son finishes his transfer degree, he will be going to a university. In the beginning he was bewildered at the community college NOT looking like your typical college experience.

To respond to your post. I think the article said that only 25% make it past the remedial courses, so no worries about colleges giving away degrees to the undeserving.

If the academic standards don't get them, the inability to get further FA will. Usually they fail FA standards before they fail academic standards (for one thing we count everything...took you 3 tries to pass Maths 100? We have to calculate your 2 Fs...or withdrawals or whatever) along with your successful completion, when we check for the obligatory satisfactory progress regulations.

Unfortunately, the choices are to either work minimum wage or get a degree. Of course, $10 an hour seems to be the new minimum imo.

Terrible to get FA for remedial courses. In debt before you even begin to begin.

With our low cost, most of our students could cover tuition/fees and books with some extra with just the Pell grant. However, they love the loans.

This is why we have some new initiatives regarding borrowing. At the very least, we can put up a few hurdles so they have to think a little about what "borrowing" means, and what the repercussions of not repaying are.

I just wrote an essay on the sub-prime housing debacle. I am hoping it's not THAT easy for people to borrow.

My job involves providing academic support to people like this.

Quite a few are recent migrants or refugees. One chap from Sudan needed to learn statistics. Trying to teach him that, I discovered he had never seen algebra before. I skipped that and then realised he could not even add up single digit numbers. Then I watched him mess it up by misusing a calculator (pressing + and = too many times). This guy is supposed to understand statistics! We did him no favours letting him into university when what he needs is high school. I'm willing to bet he knows how long he can sustain suppressing fire with an AK-47 and three clips of ammo, though!

I could throw out a dozen more examples like this. I believe in accessible education, but it has to be at the right level for the student.

Actually, its the responsibility of the student.

True, but how is a seventeen year old to know what the appropriate standards are? Which things they don't know? The best learning techniques? Schools share some of that responsibility.

It has to be a combination of responsibility between the school, students, and parents. The schools should present the doors and the parents need to push their screaming students though it...

Just had our parent teacher conference for our 3rd grade son. He's still having a lot of trouble with spelling. Fuking English langwidj makes no sens. Wut a bunsh uv arbitrary rulze. Evry wurd semze to be an eksepshun to a basik rule. Yue just nede tue memorize them al. (Seriously, I just tried spelling words how they sound using basic rules of spelling, and out of 30 words, 17 don't follow the basic rules. WTF? English sucks. There is very little logic to it.)

The boy rocks at math and science though. And he's finally starting to enjoy reading real books on his own. So I think it will come together for him.

The point being, kids are being graduted from high shool yet they are not ready for college level courses. Is that the responsibility of the student?

What about this startling statistic?

Wow, 65% of irresponsible students. Really?

A person has to have a high school diploma for college. You'd think people, once receiving a diploma, were beyond remedial in course work. Remedial work needs to begin before college. Thus, the responsibility for remedial programs is the schools, imo.

65% is a staggering fail rate.

Is this the backlash of no child left behind?

The Department of Education in NYC thinks there is a problem beyond the responsibility of the students. At 65% student remediation nationwide, it seems a little more than student responsibility.

Kids are no longer being taught to learn, they are taught to regurgitate information in order to pass the state exams. IME - This has had little, if anything to do with their college classes.

Not necessarily.

Don't forget that there are a lot of students in community college who have GEDs. Perfectly acceptable for admittance and FA. Certainly the curriculum for a GED differs from a traditional HS experience.

Or, a student must make certain scores on the mandatory placement testing.

Also, a student may pass a certain amount of courses and then be able to apply for assistance.

Many many college students are not coming out of traditional high schools, at least not in the community colleges of which you speak.

It's all about "Ability to Benefit." Any of the above 3 options are acceptable forms of proving that one has an ability to benefit from higher education.

@Glatt
More reading will help. English is not learned. It is absorbed.

*nods* It's a problem over here too.

Unfortunately it's one of those really tricky little nuts to crack, and whne you attempt to solve the problem you just make new problems.

So, we had a real problem here with a lack of consistency across the education system. With schools selecting their own individual curriculums, it was entirely possible for kids in one school to come through their education with a good grounding in all the basics, whilst kids from another school might come out with serious gaps in their education. At the same time we had a serious, and rapidly growing, problem with functional illiteracy amongst school leavers.

In order to try and get to grips with this, various measures were introduced. New ways of teaching were explored, standardized curriculums and exams were introduced. In order to try and find out why children were falling behind, and to attempt to stem that fall, new methods of testing and monitoring were introduced, at various stages in the child's schooling.

So, now we have a much clearer idea of what the schools are doing, what children are at risk, and various strategies to tackle those problems. We know that every chiild has access to certain standard elements of the curriculum, and that an exam result in that subject means the same regardless of which school they went to.

Unfortunately, results from testing and the level of attainment/achievement that can be tracked in a child all get fed into the school's grade and affects its ability to attract certain types of specialist funding, amongst other things. With schools competing in league tables, and desperately trying to avoid the perils of Offsted and Special Measures (a mechanismm for rescuing failing schools) the most important thing is that kids get their grades.

Ummmm, yes. But think about the way children learned in the past.
No, of course I do not have first hand experience, but I read Little Women, the Anne (of Green Gables) series, the Little House series, the What Katy Did series.

Things in the good old days were learned by repetition.
This does not equate understanding.
Exams were couched in terms that reflected learning.
Times and dates and places were important, yes.
So the old crusties that write comments now think children are SO ignorant. But mostly, if you asked them questions relevant to today, the fogies wear their ignorance with pride.

"No child left behind" should mean that all children are educated regardless of what their parents earn. There are enough things compromising the sobriquet "Land of the free and the home of the brave" without making reading and writing income dependent. Even my parents' newspaper stops short of the idea that poor children should be shoved up chimneys - but only just - they simply use Sir Alan Sugar (like an English Donald Trump) as a reason why everyone should be millionaires without any Govt funding.

Odd, when they're pulling down paltry journo salaries.
If it was possible for everyone to do everything and get paid top dolllars, how come they still have a job?!

FTR - if Jamie is right and the system is failing nearly 50% of children, then it needs to be fixed. Even given a margin of error we should know better by now. That's the issue. It's not WORSE (as Labour claimed under the Tories; as the Tories caimed under Labour) we just have more tests now.

I had a first class education at two state schools.
Didn't get me anywhere.
But I got a love of learning.

I'm talking about changes over the last 25 years Sundae. The National Curriculum was introduced when we were at school.

And that's kind of the point I was making anyway: you fix one problem and another problem springs up. It was absolutely necessary to get a grip on what schools were doing, and ensure that there was parity across the system, so that kids in a particular school, or town weren't disadvantaged: particularly important given the lack of choice at that time. It was and is necessary to be able to form some sort of picture of individual children'sprogress and learning journeys, and likewise to have some kind of measurable standards on which to judge the performance of teachers and schools.

But there is a price to increased monitoring, particularly when so much else gets tied into those achievement levels. The SATs in particular seem to have changed primary education, putting enormous pressure on teachers and schools to teach to the test instead of more generalised learning skills.

Can't let a chance to post this pass by:

Unfotunately, the most cost-effective way to ensure that no child is left behind is to make sure that none get too far ahead.

Even cheaper to shoot the lowest 20%.

Like piercehawkeye45 said it is a shared responsibility. New York State does, however, have very well thought out standards and highly educated teachers outside the very scary places. They also have large sub-populations that actively oppose learning. You could shoot <10% and turn things around. As noted NCLB is part of the problem because the cookie cutter education destroys motivation... I'm just grouchy because I have parents who only send their kids to school to get them out of their hair and we had another visit from Child Protective this week regarding maybe the sweetest little kid in my charge.


* instead of shooting you could drop mandatory attendance.

Indeed, standardised testing - especially when the teacher's career depends on their class doing well - leads to rote learning of what is needed for the test and nothing more. All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.

Dropping mandatory attendance would lead to the production of an uneducated underclass with no prospects of betterment, no chance of a livable income, and little reason to be part of society. That would suck. That was why universal education was mandated in the first place. I'm not saying everyone should go to college or university, or be all academic and stuff, but everyone should get enough education to make them able to support themselves and be engaged with society around them. The latter is why I am opposed to home schooling.

NY would appear to have achieved that permanent underclass with mandatory ed. The only difference is the ineducable are in a position to suppress the learning of those around them. In some ways the home-schooled are more engaged in their communities than kids bused and stored in age leveled classrooms. (they are however usually teh nutz)

I dont believe any child is 'ineducable'. Some may be harder to reach than others, and some may be unreachable by those teachers, in those classrooms, under that system.

Unfortunately, if education is not mandated the kids that lose out on an education aren't necessarily the ones who would be difficult to reach.

I see two ways to improve. 1) Highly Coercive and Less Free - strip incompetent parents of all rights and responsibility. Put the kids in decent homes 2) More Free- let them go their own way and teach the ones who stick around.

I don't see either being found acceptable so we'll continue with the status quo except that probably 10% of the teachers across New York will be laid off next year because the budget crisis is very real.

Isn't it the responsibility of the jr. high schools to get kids ready for high school?

Isn't it the responsibility of the elementary schools to get kids ready for jr. high school?

Isn't it the responsibility of the parents to get kids ready for life, of which school is a subset?

:applause:

Don't stop your circular list there foot. Let's add the responsibility of birth control, since 65% of the nations parents don't have the deep insight you do.:rolleyes:

Trust me Sky, a walk through the ocean of my insights wouldn't get your feet wet. But, I am homeschooling...

Begging the question, irony, slight of hand.( or is that foot ) I know. You are all that and so much more. Just a fun guy. It's all good.

I'm with footie. It is your responsibility as a parent to make sure your offspring is ready for life. Schools are an excellent tool, but they are no more than that. Parents need to make responsible schooling choices and monitor their children's development as learning, functioning human beans. You don't expect a car to get you from A to B without you putting anything in to the operation. Why would you expect a school to do that for your kid?

I do not homeschool (for everyone's sanity) but I picked a school that emphasised learning skills and human bean development rather than learning facts by rote. And I got involved and made sure it was performing the way I wanted, and where I saw gaps, I picked up the slack. That's my responsibility. It's every parent's responsibility. But sadly too many see school as this great gadget that's there to make their lives easier and take away the responsibility. Like the urban legend about the guy who set his winnebago to cruise and then went in the back to sleep/make coffee and was surprised when it crashed and he sued the manufacturers. no-one expects the cars to get the passengers from a to b without careful guidance and lots of input. Some cars are stick shift and require more input, some cars cost a lot of money and do almost everything for you. But none work without a driver.

Not everyone has the same school choices, but there are always choices. School is not a childminder. You have a kid, the local school is crap, there are no other schools, you need to go to work, you find a way to work and homeschool or you move. If you can't do that, you need to hand the child over to someone who can.

Birth control would be easier, but since their kids can't read, probably the parents can't either, so scratch that idea...and we'll just go the adoption route. Like you said. They'll only need to be able to make a huge X when social services come to take the kids away.

there is no perfect educational system. Remedial courses in community college respond to a wide variety of needs. Maybe your hormones went beserko as a teenager and you couldn't concentrate on algebra. Maybe there were domestic difficulties in your homelife (abusive parents, alcoholism, yadda) that you can surmount as an adult ready to learn. Maybe you are gonzo with language skills, but never paid attention in math 'cause you sucked at it, and now need to pass a course for breadth requirements. These days, community colleges really respond to their communities by offering a wide range of vocational and lifestyle courses, in addition to the type of "junior college" prep courses traditionally offered. Perfectly acceptable and appropriate imo, for them to offer remedial courses.

Nicely said cloud, and they are. I just wonder if it will be a continuing and expanding trend?

maybe, but . . . colleges have always offered a variety of remedial classes for those who need them. Hell, I went to Berkeley 35 years ago, and it offered remedial classes then.

I do think high school and elementary school students should actually learn what they're supposed to. There was an article in our local paper saying that something like 60% of our police officers failed the written entrance exam the first time. Pretty scary.

holey!

I took remedial algebra/trig at Purdue my first semester at Purdue. My verbals were much higher than my maths.

An Indonesian student I am working with told me that half of their practising teachers fail the teacher qualification test - and are still practising, because they don't have any others.

Very different situation, though.

I hadn't thought about the differences in college/uni here and over there.

When your kids go and do an undergraduate degree, they are expected to undertake a much broader education than over here.

I am appalling at maths. I have a barely respectable C grade at O-level (end of high school aged 16/17) but that wasn't a problem when I enrolled on my degree course: as long as I was literate and had good grades in relevant subjects (History and English) I could be innumerate and that wouldn't be a problem in a History degree.

We had some exchange students over from the US doing a year of their degree over here. When they talked about their studies in the US they said they were expected to do a much broader degree, with courses from across academic disciplines. At degree level, we are expected to specialise in our chosen subject right from the start: you can take 'elective modules' from other subjects, but they are a very small part of the course.

Had there been any requirement to show competence across other subjects (maths, languages, sciences, philosophy, statistics etc) I'd have had go and get remedial courses.

Lil' Pete is looking at degree programs now. There are a lot of course of study options depending on the profession you're looking at. She is into visual arts, design, architecture that sort of thing. She could go the straight professional route with little or no liberal arts study or flip it and pursue liberal arts first then focus on professional development. American education is very flexible at higher levels, which can mitigate the inflexible primary and secondary education, but only for the college bound.

NCLB is at it worst mandating that kids who should be in a construction program somewhere are repeatedly tested for things which they cannot do. The Special Ed kids I serve are particularly susceptible to getting beaten down by all the government testing. I do assessments on all my kids for placement purposes and to spot weaknesses to mitigate. A lot of them dislike it but it serves the purpose of guiding instruction. The government testing does not serve them at all.

Amen.

It's all very well saying it's the parents' responsibility...but what about when parents fail in that responsibility? Whose job is it to step into the gap?

It becomes the teachers' to the detriment of the other students. In an ideal world education would have a flexible option for the kid whose parents failed but schools that are failing actually get less funding because it feels good to certain Glenn Beck demographics. NCLB takes public education back to its totalitarian roots, but the need for cannon fodder isn't what it was so it doesn't even suit its original purpose.

You're stuck in a rut here. Not using birth control is not all about not being able to read. Being able to read does suddenly give a person the skills/intelligence to act on what they've read. it's like the difference between hearing and listening. Not using birth control is often about religion and about having something that belongs to you, something that you are the boss of. And when you see the schools "looking after" those somethings once they get past the small cute stage and becomes something you can't handle, you don't worry about the responsibilities you have because you don't see any.

If the parents fail, then it is the job of society. But not by giving the failing parents more money or sending them to "parenting" or remedial math classes and falling back on the schools -they've already demonstrated that system of education doesn't work for them. That's a cop out. Society needs to take the failed child on and parent them properly. If adoption is the way, so be it. Give the money to a family who will do that job and turn that child around. I'd prefer the failing parent and the child to be adopted, but I'm a dreamer. This is America. We don't really help the nasty dirty losers, we throw (tax deductible) money at the problem, so they can spend time being "educated" out of sight or clothed in nice new winter coats so they look more acceptable, while we feel good about our charitable donations. And then when they finally break the law because they don't know how to survive legally and have no life skills, then we get to lock them up out of sight. Excellent.

#awaitsthedaywhenreproductivesystemscanbeturnedoffuntilparentinglicenseisissued

True dat, about the reading.

Reading as a skill is entirely unrelated to intelligence. I have taught highly intelligent adults who found the reading skill almost impossible to master. By the same token it is a proven fact that someone with profoundly low IQ levels (including children born with severe downs syndrome) may well be able to acquire the reading skill: they may not be able to interpret or understand what it is they're reading, but the mechanical act of associating the visual symbols with the appropriate sounds, and the technical understanding of how those sounds go together are things anybody might be able to learn. And anybody might find difficult.

You must not be from around here, why your attitude is almost Un American...;)

Laughed out loud - and added to my quotes file.

Possibly. But crack babies come pretty close.

Disagree.
Just don't shout me down because of my lack of children; that was a choice.

No. You've been reading too much Kurt Vonnegut. Or been in America too long. Okay I hold my hands up and say I don't know that system, but it's over-used as a clarion call by the right - who don't use the state system anyway.

Pete - crack babies are not part of this discussion. In the same way that children incapacitated by cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome and autism aren't. It's an interesting point, but not relevant.

Personally I am for mandatory birth control for underage girls. Shriek! Shriek! This is against religion and the law of free will! [not here, in the wider world]
Well if intercourse has an age limit, surely it is legal. It might not keep children in school, but such is human nature. Many girls were married before 16 in teh olden days.

I had a hundred things to say, but have been watching a documentary at the same time.
The way some people preach Jesus' message of peace, love and understanding makes me pretty sick. Too sick to carry on with this (no Dwellar was involved)

Abort all your children while they are still tadpoles. You will burn for all eternity, but the cells you loved before you even knew they existed will only be in Limbo. Serves you right for taking the Pill (technically an abortion as it rejects fertilised eggs) which is an abomination.

Then again having 13 children who go home to God via starvation and disease is much more worthy. God will then love you for the protracted suffering of each drawn, desperate face you send him. His will is done.

Not over here--in America the crack babies have to go through the same standardized testing rigamarole that the other kids do. That's the kind of situation that Griff was referring to with his own students. You can work to get certain concessions as part of their special ed status, but along with that comes the right to special education services themselves, which there is often not money to provide, so the concessions don't get made, unless the parents are pushing for it (and in the case of crack baby parents, they're not likely to push for anything other than a longer school day.) The crack babies are precisely the ones that "cannot be left behind," and yet there's no money to give them the separate classrooms with appropriate (lower) levels of skills expectations that they need.

The educational system is passing 65% of students who cannot pass a compass exam.
Yes it is the parents responsibility, but to say so, as if that is an excuse, in light of the huge percentage, is so laissez-faire. It's like saying the dog ate my homework.


ahwell

I was being facetious about the birth control. btw

It solves the problem as about as much as saying it's the parents fault.

OR, I'm being overly cynical in a very Brit way.

That said, No Child Left Behind is the name of an act here which -imo- has very little to do with ensuring no child is left behind and a whole lot to do with seeing education as an exercise in passing age-specific standardised tests.