On Mondays and Wednesdays, Allison Massey attends a freshman English class at Motlow State Community College’s campus near Lynchburg, Tenn. On alternating days, her “learning support” instructor helps her prepare for that class by tackling run-on sentences and punctuation problems. A tutor, also employed by the college, reads the essays she writes for her freshman class and offers tips.
If it weren’t for this one-two punch — paired college and remedial classes — Ms. Massey, like thousands of other students across Tennessee, would have to wait at least another semester before she enrolled in college-level English.
Tennessee is the first state in the nation to eliminate its free-standing remedial classes and give just about everyone a chance to dive right into classes that count for credit.
Tennessee is in the vanguard of a national movement spurred by aggressive lobbying by groups that argue that the traditional approach to remedial education is a dead end.
It’s in the vanguard of a national movement spurred by aggressive lobbying by groups that argue that the traditional approach to developmental, or remedial, education is a dead end.
The “corequisite” model puts a student who would normally require remediation first — like Ms. Massey — directly into a credit-bearing mathematics or English course. Learning support is wrapped around it, through additional coursework, tutoring, or labs.
It’s an approach that has proved highly effective for years for students who narrowly miss the cutoff for college-level courses.
What’s different today is that the idea is being expanded and applied across college systems, and even some states, for the vast majority of underprepared students.
The rollout in Tennessee comes at a challenging time for the state’s community and technical colleges, which are straining under an influx of about 15,000 new students.
Many of those who have enrolled under the Tennessee Promise program, which offers two years of free tuition and fees for the state’s high-school graduates, would not otherwise have attended college. Not surprisingly, many arrive with especially shaky academic backgrounds.
“The uptick in the very low ACT scores poses unique challenges,” said Tony Kinkel, president of Motlow’s Smyrna campus, where enrollment jumped by 42 percent this fall. The convergence this fall of the two approaches — free college and corequisite remediation — “are like two currents colliding,” he said.
The convergence this fall of the two approaches — free college and corequisite remediation — ‘are like two currents colliding.’
Tennessee’s Board of Regents adopted a statewide corequisite approach because of concerns that too many students were being placed into remedial courses, and way too few were moving beyond them.
The shift raised some tricky practical issues. Moving more students into college-level courses meant hiring more instructors with advanced credentials. A master’s degree, for instance, isn’t always required to teach remedial classes, but accreditors usually require it, at a minimum, for teaching college-level classes.
Instructors teaching the credit-bearing and remedial sections of a corequisite course had to coordinate their schedules — meeting on alternating days, for instance. They also had to communicate about lesson plans so students could get the specific support they needed throughout the semester.
‘The Results Are In’
Corequisite remediation is one piece of a reform agenda that Tennessee’s government and education leaders have promoted with the help of Complete College America, a nonprofit group that gets much of its financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That agenda also includes basing a significant portion of state funding on graduation and other performance measures.
Complete College America published a blog post in June describing how the corequisite approach had spread across several states, including Colorado, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia. “The results are in. Corequisite remediation works,” the headline announced. “The time has come,” the post continued, “to leave behind the practice of stand-alone, prerequisite remedial education and make the bold transition” to a corequisite model.
The tone of that message irks William G. Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California whose research includes increasing college access for low-income youth.
“Not so long ago the ‘results were in’ that small schools were the answer,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Charter schools also were the answer.” Faced with such proclamations, educators rush to make changes only to find that the results are more complicated, Mr. Tierney said.
For students who are not prepared for college work, the status quo, he agreed, is not acceptable. “We should also have learned by now that assuming an answer exists without necessary study and analysis is also unacceptable.”
A national leader in developmental education also contends that Complete College America’s lobbying push isn’t backed by solid data.
“They’re making wild and unsubstantiated claims, and no one’s calling them on it,” said Hunter R. Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education and a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University.
“Legislators aren’t in the position to do the research, to find out where the pitfalls are,” he said. The corequisite approach “is a good idea, but it’s one in a field of good ideas,” he said, and it may not work for everyone.
‘You don’t take a car off the drawing board and sell it right away. You field-test it, do design reviews, run it on the road.’
Mr. Boylan thinks Tennessee jumped too quickly into making the switch statewide without adequately studying how corequisite approaches affect students across the academic spectrum.
“You don’t take a car off the drawing board and sell it right away,” he said. “You field-test it, do design reviews, run it on the road.”
Bruce Vandal, a senior vice president of Complete College America, said there is no shortage of evidence that the corequisite approach works. It helps minority students who are disproportionately placed in remedial-course sequences that they usually drop out of before they can make it to a credit-bearing class, he said.
While he agreed it would be helpful to have more research on how the least-prepared students fare, Mr. Vandal asked, “Should we stop a reform movement because of concerns about a small segment of the student population, or should we move ahead with a laser focus” on an approach that removes barriers for many?
A pilot study of corequisite remediation in the 2014-15 academic year looked at about 1,000 students in math and 1,000 in writing at nine community colleges in Tennessee. Across the spectrum of ACT scores, student success rates increased by double digits, said Tristan Denley, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the Tennessee Board of Regents.
“We kept hearing stories from students who welcomed the fact that they signed up for college,” he said, “and college is what they got.”
Maintaining the Rigor
Mr. Denley agreed with skeptics, though, that quality control is important so that standards in credit-bearing classes don’t slip.
“We have to have measures in place to ensure that when we make the transition, we don’t just water down the rigor of those classes,” he said.
Angela Boatman, an assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, has studied successful course redesigns across Tennessee.
Her studies looked at students who were close to the cutoff for needing remediation. More study is needed, she agreed, on the approach’s impact on the least-prepared students.
“If you’re going to move the needle on college completion, that is the group you need to reach,” Ms. Boatman said. “If we start to see data that these students aren’t succeeding, that’s a problem.”
With so many changes taking place this year at Tennessee’s two-year colleges, it won’t be easy to determine what role corequisite remediation, or any other policy shift, is having on student success, Ms. Boatman said.
But a top researcher whose studies of developmental education are cited by proponents of the corequisite approach said large-scale changes were needed.
‘We’ve been taking a piecemeal approach for some time, and it hasn’t gotten us very far.’
“We’ve been taking a piecemeal approach for some time, and it hasn’t gotten us very far,” said Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “Tennessee is sort of the poster child for comprehensiveness.”
The research center has concluded that many students are placed in remedial courses on the basis of faulty tests and that few students who take remedial math or reading go on to pass the corresponding introductory courses. That research has been used, in some cases, to justify eliminating remedial classes — an approach Mr. Bailey thinks goes too far.
“In general, too many people are placed in remediation and many more could be placed in college-level courses, even without the extra support,” Mr. Bailey said. “But I don’t think that every single student who comes into a community college is ready for a college-level course.”
Two other Tennessee Promise students at Motlow State insist that they are.
Joshua George told The Chronicle last week that he likes the fact that the self-paced modules in his English learning-support class, which include computerized tutorials, allow him to zero in on the skills he’s particularly weak in. “Subject-verb agreement — I never was a big fan of that,” he said.
For Kevin Mabudi, the learning-support class is helping him vary his vocabulary in writing. “Our professors have been telling us we can’t use the word ‘like’ 40 times in a paper,” he said. “You have to use different words to make it flow. I’m pretty good with using big words, but I’m trying to deviate them.”
Taking a few extra classes, along with the ones that count for credit, means a bit more work, he said. “But at least I’m in college and taking regular classes like everyone else. I can’t complain.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
