Two studies (haven't read them yet, so...) have concluded that too many students are being put into remedial classes unnecessarily.


This subject came up here once before. I'm torn. On the one hand, there seems to be increasing evidence that this trend is bordering on a scam (whether intended that way or not).

Yet I taught a community college, and most of my students could barely string two paragraphs together in an essay. Yet...the colleges don't seem to really teach writing these days anyway, so it's reasonable to assume that the definition of "ready for college-level writing" has changed.

Yes, it's obviously bad to put students into remedial courses unnecessarily. But the article says that putting unprepared students into harder classes is less of a problem. Given the level to which classes have been watered down (starting way before college), I have to disagree with this idea. If too many unprepared kids enroll in a given course, it ends up being focused on material that's easier than it should be. We've discussed the fact that new high-school math textbooks are made "accessible" by removing the hard stuff. This approach may "give everyone a chance" but it cheats the capable students and ultimately harms the nation.

I agree with you that there are a few culprits at work. As a teacher, I despise the textbook/test-making publishing companies. I loathe the fact that everything is watered down. Even my lower performing students could perform at much higher levels if the bar was set higher. With my gifted students, I just have to completely throw the book out the window. Yes, I agree that the curriculum has been watered down to a ridiculous level. This is a battle I fight tooth-and-nail everyday.

I also think that some of these remedial classes are a scam. It all boils down to profits. It even happened to me during my undergraduate days. I was triple majoring in Early Childhood Education, Elementary Education, and English. It was my last year of college and I had completed my English requirements. I was taking 21-24 credit semesters and received honors from the English Department. The Education majors were required to do a writing sample. If you did not meet the requirements, you had to taking a writing course. Over half of the education majors failed, myself included. I could find nothing wrong with my paper. I scheduled a meeting to discuss the results. I brought the Dean of the English Department with me and the Dean of Education's face turned white. Long story short, she backpedaled so quickly she was about to break the sound barrier.

?!?

Wow.

What reason did they give for failing you? Or did they just write "F" with no explanation?

Totally agree with Saturday on both counts. I'm a former community college and state college history instructor (and public school history teacher too). I despise the textbooks too. They're obsolete and inefficient way to learn today. They're watered down to a ridiculous level. I think the high school history textbooks are aimed at a 4th/5th reading level where I taught.

Remedial classes are a scam; higher education boils down to profits.

There are so many problems with education today. We're still stuck in paper mode when we live in a digital world that is constantly changing and evolving. Schools are primarily stuck on auditory teaching methods. Many teachers cling to the textbook or to tests and have a fixed mindset on teaching. I could go on and on.

I think this is perhaps one of the reasons why the homeschool/unschool movement is growing so much. With a more individualized, self-directed approach to learning, a child is able to make more decisions for themselves, follow their interests, and become more self-aware of their potential and abilities. Yes, a child may to this in a formal, traditional educational setting, but it's more challenging with digital content and technology becoming more relevant in our lives.

Formal, traditional educational settings do not always encourage or foster independent or divergent thinking by their nature. Some teacher do, but many do not. It's Russian Roulette. I think most children learn (and I think are conditioned) not to question the teacher or textbook; remember you get detention or insubordination in school. Yet independent, critical thinking or divergent thinking is increasingly needed in a digital world. So this is a complex issue.

They said I had made more than two errors with punctuation. In each case the punctuation was correct or subjective. I don't think they were expecting anyone to object. Thankfully, I had taken a few English/Lit. courses with the Dean of the English Department. If I didn't have him in my corner, I would have had to sit through a remedial course.

The special ed teacher in my DD's class (3rd/4th grade loop), using her personal time, teaches classes that help prepare for the state tests...$99 for four 1 hour classes for 3/4/5 grades in ELA and math.

The tests are in about six weeks with a vacation breaking up the time. The class has spent barely two weeks on multiplication so far this year, with no written tests coming home after the 3x table, no division, and DD's math homework yesterday was "explore shapes in your home".

?!?

High school History textbooks aren't just poor because of their reading level. They're also chock full of false narratives and inexcusable omissions.

I didn't fully understand why until this year, when I was having a discussion with my DD's school, and the district GT coordinator declared the purpose of education: "To successfully integrate children into society." Which apparently means "brainwash."

I really shouldn't ask this question, but...

...which "false narratives" and "inexcusable omissions" are we talking about here?

For just one example, read this story, or just do a search for "texas history textbook controversy." You'll get way over a million results (!).

Or just grab a high school math book that's aligned to state standards and see for yourself. Why prove the law of cosines when you can just write it out in boldface text and announce that it's true? That way, no one has to worry!

History in general is imbued with this narrative of things moving in a steady progression from primitive to sophisticated, nevermind that the steam engine was invented first in Alexandria by a Roman. It's also imbued with an overwhelming Western bias, exhorting the superiority of Western culture, when it was far inferior to various other cultures for most of recorded history.

For false narratives and omissions as they relate specifically to US History, I recommend this: Lies My Teacher Told Me

It's the universe that's imbued with the narrative of things moving in a steady progression from primitive to sophisticated. Well, more specifically from interstellar soup to people.

History didn't even start recording itself until a few millenia ago.

Now, that being said, I agree that it would be pretty funny if The Archdruid Report was added to history textbooks:

"The structure of empire anatomized in last week’s post is a source of considerable strength for any imperial nation that manages to get it in place, and a source of even more considerable difficulty for anyone who opposes the resulting empire and hopes to bring it down. Nonetheless, empires do fall; every empire in history has fallen, with one present day exception, and for all its global reach and gargantuan military budgets, the American empire shows no signs of breaking that long losing streak. Thus it’s important to understand how empires fall, and why.

It sometimes happens that the fall of the last major empire in any given civilization is also the fall of that civilization, and a certain amount of confusion has come about because of this. The fall of Rome, for example, was the end of an empire, but it was also the end of a civilization that was already flourishing before the city of Rome was even founded—a civilization that had seen plenty of empires come and go by the time Rome rose past regional-power status to dominate the Mediterranean world. The example of Rome’s decline and fall, though, became so central to later attempts to understand the cycles of history that most such attempts in the modern Western world equated empire and civilization, and the fall of the one with that of the other.

That’s the principal blind spot in the writings of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, the two great theorists of historical cycles the modern Western world has produced. Both Spengler and Toynbee argued that the natural endpoint of what Spengler called a culture and Toynbee a civilization was a single sprawling empire—a Universal State, in Toynbee’s phrase—in which every previous movement of the culture or civilization that preceded it reached its completion, fossilization, and death. A barely concealed political subtext guided both authors; Spengler, formulating his theory before and during the First World War, believed that the German Empire would become the nucleus around which Faustian (that is, Western) culture would coalesce into the rigor mortis of civilization; Toynbee, who began his A Study of History in the 1920s and saw its last volumes in print in 1954, believed that an Anglo-American alliance would become that nucleus. In each case, national aspirations pretty clearly undergirded scholarly predictions."

The Archdruid Report

The Times has an editorial on these studies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/a-better-chance-to-succeed.html
A Better Chance to Succeed
New York Times
March 2, 2012

The Obama administration is rightly pushing colleges to raise graduation rates and to make sure that more students graduate on time. To help achieve those goals, the community college systems that enroll about 11 million students need to end the practice of shunting students who are prepared for college into non-credit remedial classes that chew up financial aid while making it far less likely that they will ever graduate.

This problem is underscored in two new studies from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College that examine remedial education policies at two unnamed systems: one large urban community college system and one statewide community college system. The studies, which look at tens of thousands of students over several years, found that more than a quarter of those assigned to remedial classes based solely on standardized test scores could have passed college-level classes with a grade of B or better.

What makes this especially disturbing is the fact that remedial courses are often a dead end. According to federal statistics, less than a quarter of students who start out there go on to earn two-year degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. This is sometimes because of poor skills, but frustration likely plays a significant role.



Some discussion at Inside Higher Education is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/...re-placing-remedial-classes-studies-find .

The papers are at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=1030 and http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=1026 .

Colleges are being pressured to improve graduation rates, but if most people are not college material, as I believe, the only way to greatly increase graduation rates is to lower standards.