A Bridge to Nowhere or to Success?

Diverse, a magazine and website that reports on diversity, access, and opportunity for all in higher education, had a great article summarizing the advancements in developmental education.

The transition from high school to higher education is a nightmare for many students. With a diploma in hand, they think they are ready for college only to find out that all the As, Bs, and Cs on their report cards don’t have much to do with what they actually know how to do.

How does this situation develop? Last week, I listened to a group of teachers struggle with the A-F grading system. All of the teachers wanted to boost grades for effort, but none of them were willing to tell students the truth that their academic levels were well below grade level, and a few didn’t have any idea how to assess at which academic level their students were currently performing. It’s a terrible, terrible betrayal. Then, once students enroll in developmental courses, the likelihood that they graduate drops to less than 10 percent.

In the article Colleges Find Success With New Approaches to Developmental Education, the author Kenneth Cooper summarizes different approaches to developmental education that are showing promise.

1. Co-enrollment or co-requisite: According to the article, this model “scraps tradition by allowing students to enroll in a developmental math or English course at the same time they take a first-year college course in that subject. While they are catching up, those students build college credit.”
2. Self-paced, competency-based approach: In this model, students are expected to “acquire only the particular math or English skills they lack ... Students can spend less than a full semester getting up to speed and skip lessons on skills they have already mastered.”
3. Expanding gateways: Some colleges are abandoning “the insistence on algebra as the gateway math course for all community colleges. Some are allowed to take statistics, a course more closely related to an intended field of study in, for example, the social sciences....”
4. Accelerated Learning Program: One of the most well-known approaches, students take an accelerated developmental language arts program concurrently with English 101. The author highlights Community College of Baltimore County, where “81 percent of the program’s developmental students earned college credits within a year, while 68 percent of other developmental students did. Moreover, 50 percent of the accelerated students enrolled in English 102 in 2012, compared to 13 percent of other developmental students.” However, it’s worth noting that this approach is targeted to students at the top three levels of developmental English. 

With the Common Core of State Standards rolling out across most of the country, we have an opportunity to look more closely at the practices that allow students to graduate with a diploma but without adequate skills.

Why should students have to pay for remediation courses for skills they should have learned in high school? Will districts start to shift towards standards-referenced grading for English language arts and mathematics so students know how they are doing on basic skills? Stay tuned!