Rhetoric vs. reality: colleges confront quagmire of issues associated with remediation - Statistical Data Included

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 6, 2001 by Kendra Hamilton

There's no getting around it. Remedial education -- also called developmental education -- suffers from an image problem. The fact is all too evident at the macro level -- the California State University (CSU) System, for example, expelled 2,009 students in January for failing to master basic math and English skills during their freshman year and won kudos from legislators and the media.

"Oh, yes, it's a hot potato," says Dr. Ansley Abraham, director of the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB) Doctoral Scholars Program of remedial education. "Nationally, about a third of the students entering college need remediation. Educationally, that's probably higher than it should be, and emotionally, that's unacceptable to a lot of people."

But Dr. Hunter Boylan, professor and director of the National Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, points out that the hottest flashpoints in the debate over developmental education are limited to just two systems -- the City University of New York system and the CSU system.

"Those cases get the lion's share of the media attention," Boylan explains, "but what goes unacknowledged and certainly unmentioned is the fact that, between 1990 and 2000, 32 states introduced legislation proposing rolling back or eliminating remedial education. And 27 of the 32 states defeated that legislation."

That is to say, despite the overheated rhetoric -- the accusations that remedial and developmental programs prevent students from graduating within four years, that too much financial aid goes to support the program, that taxpayers are, in effect, paying twice for education that should have occurred at the K-12 level -- the vast majority of states considering elimination of the programs decided they were worth salvaging.

And the whys and wherefores of that apparent disconnect between rhetoric and reality have to do with the fact that "nothing is more poorly understood, period," says Dr. Robert McCabe, president-emeritus of Miami-Dade Community College and a senior fellow with the League for Innovation in the Community College. And the misapprehensions begin at the most basic level.

First of all, McCabe says, "Nowhere in America is there a match between the requirements to graduate high school and the requirements to begin college work."

Indeed, only 43 percent of America's high school students complete a college preparatory curriculum, adds Boylan, while 65 percent go on to college. "So there's a substantial percentage of students -- 22 percent -- who enter college without having taken the curriculum that would properly prepare them."

Furthermore, SREB's Abraham adds, some of the remedial numbers are composed of returning students -- adults who have been out of school a year or more. And even the recent high school graduates are highly diverse. While many failed to complete a college prep curriculum and others completed the curriculum but had poor grades. Still others completed the curriculum and appeared to do well, but still couldn't handle college-level work.

"That's the group where we as educators need to take an especially close look," Abraham says. "If the student has taken the requisite courses, and they're still coming through needing remediation, we need to know what happened in that classroom, what happened in that school. We need to be asking the question, `Why, in spite of our best efforts, are they still underprepared?'"

And this analysis doesn't even begin to take into account the rule of immigration and second language acquisition -- or that of students with deep deficiencies.

Of course, many critics of the courses are quick to play the race card, pointing out that minorities comprise around one-third of those in developmental and remedial classes. These students are the ones stigmatized in debates about the "decline of standards" and "dumbing down the curriculum."

But the converse of that statistic is that, "nationally, about two-thirds of the people in developmental courses are White," Boylan points out. Yes, minorities are disproportionately represented compared to their numbers in the general population -- but Whites are still the majority in such courses by far.

"It's got nothing to do with affirmative action. It has to do with educational opportunity. Some students have to build their skills in order to be productive in college," Boylan adds.

It also apparently has very little to do with costs. When politicians began clamoring about the cost of financial aid to remedial students back in the mid- 1990s, the General Accounting Office undertook to study the issue. The study concluded the amount expended was "a single-digit number, and they wouldn't save enough by changing anything to make it worth the while," Boylan notes.

A second study by the Brookings Institution, authored in 1998 by Dr. David Breneman of the University of Virginia, provided a rough national estimate of the costs of remediation. Breneman found that the amount budgeted for remediation in the total higher education budget was around 0.9 percent.