Community colleges planning to offer remedial classes in violation of law, report says
At least one-third of California's community colleges are still unnecessarily enrolling students in noncredit remedial math classes — a practice that could come to an end if new state legislation is signed into law, a new analysis found.
At 38 of the state's 115 degree-granting community colleges, students with strong high school records are being enrolled in remedial math classes, according to a report released by the California Acceleration Project, a group advocating for the elimination of remedial classes. This fall, those colleges are among 47 colleges that are planning to continue offering remedial classes, which cannot be used for transferring to a four-year university.
The report says the colleges are violating the intent of Assembly Bill 705, a law passed in 2017 that says colleges must allow students access to transfer-level classes unless they are deemed highly unlikely to succeed in those courses.
According to the report, none of those 38 colleges could justify their plans to continue offering remedial math courses. All the colleges “inappropriately allowed multiple groups of students with strong high school performance to enroll in remedial courses,” the report states. The California Acceleration Project considered students to have strong high school performance if they had at least a 2.3 GPA or a 2.6 GPA, depending on their math pathway. A student with a lower GPA could also be considered highperforming if they took precalculus in high school.
At those 38 colleges, even students with the lowest high school GPAs who were able to bypass remedial classes and enroll directly in transfer-level classes were more likely to complete the transfer-level classes within one year, according to the analysis.
Critics of remedial education say that under the law, those classes should either not be offered at all or offered only in very limited circumstances. They also say the problem would be fixed with Assembly Bill 1705, proposed legislation that builds on AB 705 by creating stricter rules dictating when colleges are allowed to enroll students in remedial classes. The legislation has already cleared the state Assembly and is expected to be considered in the state's Senate Education Committee this month.
The main opposition to the legislation is the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, a statewide advocacy group that has argued the bill creates too many new rules and will prevent counselors from being able to do their jobs.
Supporters of the bill say the rules are necessary because, in their view, counselors should have to use objective measures like high school grades when determining where to enroll students. Otherwise, the bill's supporters fear that counselors may rely on their own personal beliefs or biases when making those decisions.
Remedial classes have been shown to often derail community college students from completing their degrees and transferring, a trend that was the main impetus behind the adoption of AB 705 in 2017. Research also showed that students would be much more likely to complete transfer-level coursework within a year if they were allowed to enroll directly in those classes.
Groups like the California Acceleration Project have questioned whether all colleges are complying with that law since many are still offering remedial classes. Last fall, the statewide Chancellor's Office issued a memo to all colleges instructing them to fully implement the law by this fall.
In the new study, the California Acceleration Project found that the majority of colleges are on track for full implementation by this fall: Sixtyeight colleges do not plan to offer any remedial classes and will instead enroll all students directly in transfer-level classes. At most colleges, students will have the opportunity to take transfer courses by simultaneously enrolling in co-requisite courses, which offer extra support such as tutoring for the transfer-level coursework.
Of the 47 colleges planning to continue remedial math enrollments this fall, five did not submit data to explain why they planned to continue offering those courses and four colleges didn't submit adequate data.
Like past studies, the analysis also found that colleges with higher numbers of Black and Latino students are more likely to offer remedial classes in the fall.
The new legislation, AB 1705, would make it more difficult for those colleges to enroll students in remedial courses. The law clarifies that colleges must rely primarily on high school transcript data when determining where to enroll students. It also says that any one measure from a transcript can demonstrate that a student is ready for transfer-level coursework and that low performance on a given measure should be offset by higher performance on another measure. For example, if a student earned a low GPA but performed well in their math courses, that would be sufficient reason for them to enroll in transfer-level math.
The law also clarifies that colleges cannot make students repeat coursework that they have already completed in high school or college.