MOVING AWAY FROM REMEDIAL
Group of community colleges having success letting students with middling test scores move right into regular classes
“My papers and everything show I’m a good student. But I’ve always been bad at taking tests.” — Skyline College’s Paulo Romero, who’s taking a revamped course
For the last two years, a group of community colleges in California have been revamping their approach to remedial math and English courses, and students like Paulo Romero are starting to feel something his friends at other schools are not: hope.
A native of Peru who moved to the U.S. when he was 12, Romero knows what it’s like to be told you’re not ready. But a new report shows California community college students like Romero are succeeding when they are thrown into the deep end instead of into remedial classes that offer no credit and often lead struggling students to give up.
“The students rise to the level of challenge you give them,” said Karin Spirn, an English instructor at Las Positas College in Livermore, one of about 20 California schools that have adopted a new approach that could change the way the Golden State’s community colleges integrate tens of thousands of students.
Instead of requiring students to pass a placement test for college-level English classes, the school now allows those with at least a 2.5 high school GPA to enroll, even if they don’t pass the test. Under the old model, only 35 percent of students qualified for the class. Now, it’s 78 percent, and the students are just as likely to do as well as their peers who are good test-
takers.
If a bill currently before lawmakers in Sacramento passes, that model could spread to every community college in the state.
At Skyline College in San Bruno, Romero — whose GPA showed more promise than his test scores — started with an English course that required rigor, but also offered credit, additional classroom time and more guidance on writing assignments.
“My papers and everything show I’m a good student,” the 23-year-old said. “But I’ve always been bad at taking tests.”
‘Just lose hope’
The revamped course is challenging but not excruciating, Romero said, and he’s earning good grades on his assignments. His English teacher, Christopher Gibson, “likes to give us opportunities to succeed.”
When he talks to friends at other schools who were placed into remedial courses, they seem discouraged. “A lot of them just lose hope,” Romero said, “because you just go into an English class you feel like you don’t belong in and you just lose your interest.”
That’s a feeling Katie Hern wants to get rid of. She is an English teacher at Hayward’s Chabot College and co-founder of the California Acceleration Project, which helps colleges rework remedial education. “I feel like it is a really promising step for the state,” she said.
That doesn’t mean overhauling remedial coursework statewide is a slam dunk. The California State University system has also been working to eliminate non-credit classes. This month, the chancellor’s office announced a plan to find alternatives to placement tests that have traditionally forced some 40 percent of students into costly remedial courses.
CSU also irked Hern and others recently by suggesting that community college students whose majors require statistics also need to take intermediate algebra before transferring.
“Each year over 170,000 students begin in a remedial math course in a California community college. More than 110,000 of them will never complete the math requirements for a degree or transfer to a four-year university,” reads a letter signed by more than 130 community college administrators and faculty. Loren Blanchard, CSU’s executive vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, the recipient of that letter, was not available for comment.
There are concerns that students who aren’t ready for college-level classes will not keep up. For older students decades out of high school, some worry GPA might not be a good indicator of success.
Reforms working
But there is mounting pressure to do something. An almost $900 million push to increase communitycollege completion rates has had little impact. Just under half of students who enrolled in the six years before the 2010-11 school year finished community college, and the number barely budged by 2015-16. There’s a bit of a sense of “hurry up already” among lawmakers, Hern said.
The reforms seem to be working; more students are going straight into classes where they can earn credit, which advocates say will improve their chances of earning an associate’s degree or transferring to a four-year university. And they’re succeeding at the same levels as their peers not marked for remedial classes.
Before Las Positas started relying more heavily on high school GPA, about 80 percent of students passed introductory college-level English. After the shift, the success rate was virtually unchanged at 79 percent. That was only part of the good news: The students admitted based on their GPA succeeded at a rate of 77 percent, which quelled fears the new approach would put unprepared students into classes they couldn’t handle. “That was really exciting to us,” Spirn said.
If the idea becomes law, advocates say the implications could be huge. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38 percent of jobs will require at least a bachelor’s degree by 2030. But just 33 percent of the state’s working-age adults are set to have them. Only around 1 in 10 people who enroll in a community college transfer to a fouryear university. One reason is that many young people get hung up in remedial courses.
“We don’t want anyone left behind,” Gibson said.