Enrollments in remedial courses dropped by half at many of Florida’s community and state colleges this fall, but not everyone is cheering. Just as many poorly prepared students are showing up, but thanks to a new state law, many are jumping straight into college-credit classes.
The optional-remediation law is forcing professors in college-level composition classes to spend time on basic sentence structure, while mathematics teachers who were ready to plunge into algebra are going over fractions. It’s also raising questions about how the dwindling number of students who do sign up for remedial classes here will perform when those catch-up lessons in math, reading, and writing are compressed, embedded into credit courses, or offered alongside them.
The shakeup in remedial education, also known as developmental education, is badly needed, most educators in Florida concur. But that’s about all they agree on as they begin to assess the impact in its first year.
Alarmed by the high dropout and failure rates for college students who start out in remedial classes, Florida lawmakers voted last year to make such courses, and even the related placement tests, optional for anyone who entered a Florida public school as a ninth-grader in 2003 or later and earned a diploma. Students who are actively serving in the military can also opt out.
The legislation affects the 28 open-access colleges known as the Florida College System.
“The law is based on the assumption that students know better about what they need,” said Shouping Hu, a professor of higher education and director of the Center for Postsecondary Success at Florida State University. Some faculty members and administrators aren’t so sure, said Mr. Hu, who leads a research team that received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the Florida law’s impact.
Enrollment in remedial classes has dropped by 50 percent or more in some colleges this fall, he said. Many of those students are heading instead to so-called gateway courses, causing headaches for some professors.
“Faculty members in these courses mentioned that they had to do substantial restructuring and alter their instruction strategies because they needed to consider a bigger variation in terms of preparation,” Mr. Hu said.
“They understand that developmental education, as it was offered, wasn’t working and that they needed to do something. But the changes happened quickly and they had little time to prepare.” He said he had no idea yet how many underprepared students might have dropped out this fall after finding themselves in over their heads.
Revamped Options
Across the state, cadres of newly hired advisers are scrambling to encourage students to give their hurriedly revamped remedial classes a try. Refresher classes that used to take 16 weeks are now compressed into eight (one requirement of the state law), and on some campuses, students can tackle their weak spots in modules that zero in on just the skills they’re missing. On some campuses, “corequisite” courses allow students to take a remedial class alongside a credit class.
Some colleges started phasing in the changes last year, but for most, this is the first full semester the changes have been in effect.
The good news, according to Patti Levine-Brown, a professor of communications at Florida State College at Jacksonville and a past president of the National Association for Developmental Education, is that students seem to do just as well on her campus when remedial classes are squeezed from 16 weeks into eight.
But the jury is still out on whether all of the credits transfer from the compressed and tweaked remedial classes when students move on to four-year degree programs, said the Jacksonville college’s provost, Judith Bilsky. That, she said, remains “a major challenge” for the system’s 28 campuses. The concern, Ms. Bilsky said, is that “progression for mobile or transient students isn’t hampered by creative new options for preparing students for college-level work.”
One College’s Challenges
At Miami Dade College, the nation’s largest community college with more than 160,000 students, enrollment in remedial classes has dropped about 40 percent this fall. While the changes have shaken all of the state’s community colleges, they’ve been particularly challenging for Miami Dade, where in the past nearly three-quarters of the college’s students typically needed at least one remedial course, based on the placement tests that students are no longer required to take.
The college’s demographics explain why that figure is much higher than state and nationwide averages, which are closer to 50 percent. Seventy-one percent of Miami Dade’s students are Hispanic, 41 percent call Spanish their main language, and two-thirds are from low-income families. More than half are the first in their families to attend college.
The college hired dozens of additional advisers to counsel students about their options and steer them toward academic-support programs. While the advisers can’t require anyone to start in remedial courses, they’re strongly encouraging some students to do so if their high-school transcripts and test scores look weak.
So are the professors teaching the college-credit courses where many underprepared students are landing. Many instructors are starting the semester with diagnostic examinations that give them an idea of their students’ skill levels. Students who reject their advice that they consider a remedial class first might be required to attend tutoring or computer-lab sessions if the classes call for them.
Asked whether higher-education leaders were likely to appeal to lawmakers for a break from the remediation-optional law, a Miami Dade administrator said that depended on what the data show after another semester.
“Are we inadvertently shutting the door on students who, when given the proper support, can succeed, and instead setting them up for failure?” asked Lenore P. Rodicio, provost for academic and student affairs. If that turns out to be true, “we’ll have a responsibility to inform our legislators that it isn’t working.”
But, she said, “maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised and they’ll say, ‘I told you so.’”
‘Give Them Support’
Remediation reform was a hot topic in Miami this week at Complete College America’s annual gathering of its “Alliance of States.”
The Florida law was influenced by the nonprofit group’s call for making college-level classes the default placement for the vast majority of students. It told state lawmakers that fewer than one in 10 students who start in remedial courses graduate within three years.
But even Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, worried that the Florida law had gone too far. The nonprofit is pushing the corequisite model, which offers remediation alongside of, instead of before, college-level classes, especially for the weakest students.
“Our point has never been to put them in college classes and let them fail,” Mr. Jones said in an interview this week. “Our point is to put them in and give them support.”
Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, agreed. His research has been cited by states eager to cut back on remedial instruction.
“Remediation didn’t work and needed a radical overhaul, but I’m not sure I would have made it voluntary,” Mr. Bailey said during a break in the Miami meeting.
Colleges need to focus on helping faculty members who teach college-level classes and who are now dealing with an even wider range of abilities, he said.
“The challenges of teaching heterogeneous classes aren’t just a Florida problem,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think about this, obviously under stressful conditions.”
