Fewer than one in 10 community-college students who start in remedial courses completes an associate degree within three years. Nearly four in 10 fail even to finish their remedial sequences. Advocates for reforming remedial, or developmental, education often cite such statistics as evidence of a broken system. “A bridge to nowhere,” they call it—one that just might need to be torn down.
But those who have dedicated their careers to helping underprepared students succeed in college call the figures misleading and the reformist groups touring the country misguided. That frustration erupted here this month at the annual meeting of the National Association for Developmental Education, where leaders in the field urged their colleagues to fight back against a national movement to eliminate many remedial courses.
“We need to promote the real truth about developmental education,” the association’s president-elect, Taunya Paul, chair of developmental studies at South Carolina’s York Technical College, told about 1,400 educators here. “To no longer let those outside the field define it, distort the facts, and reduce access to developmental education.”
While acknowledging that students’ completion rates are far too low, speakers said those numbers don’t tell the full story. It’s time, they said, for those in the trenches to collect data for themselves—not only graduation rates, for instance, but also job-placement rates—and to shine a spotlight on their successes.
Groups promoting national college-completion goals have taken aim at remedial education, armed with marketing campaigns and talking points on the failings of the existing system. In statehouses and state higher-education systems, proposed reforms are gaining traction. Spurred by nonprofits like Complete College America, which is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, lawmakers in a growing number of states have passed laws intended to move as many students as possible past noncredit remediation directly into credit-bearing courses. Some leaders of community-college systems have followed suit.
Among the recent changes, Florida has made placement tests and remedial courses optional for recent high-school graduates and active-duty military members. In Connecticut, students are now limited to one semester of remedial instruction, except when it’s built into college-level classes. North Carolina’s community-college system decided that recent high-school graduates with at least a 2.6 grade-point average are “college ready” and don’t need remediation.
Under such models, students who still need to catch up can get tutoring and other support alongside their credit-bearing courses. The goal: to avoid a remedial-education system that waylays too many students.
Complete College America travels from state to state to drum up support for making introductory college-level courses the default placement for nearly all students, with simultaneous, focused remediation for those who need it. That approach, says Stan Jones, the group’s president, would work for at least 85 percent of students.
Defenders of the existing system are “in denial,” says Mr. Jones. It’s being perpetuated by “a huge, entrenched interest,” he says, and it doesn’t work.
Developmental instructors, most of whom are adjunct faculty members, say they are the ones up against a powerful adversary: groups connected with major philanthropies like the Gates and Lumina foundations, drowning out the voices of those on the ground.
Putting underprepared students straight into college-level classes is like throwing someone who can’t swim into the deep end of a pool, instructors contend. Many, they say, will flail—poor and minority students probably the most. Meanwhile, professors in intro courses, faced with a flood of underprepared students, may have to dumb down their material.
The dismal success rate of students who begin in remedial classes stems more from other risk factors than from the classes themselves, practitioners argue: being poor, coming from a bad school, working full time. Still, everyone agrees that there’s plenty of room for improvement.
“Over all, nationally, we are not doing nearly as well as we can with developmental education,” Hunter R. Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education and a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University, told his colleagues here. “The difference is that I want to fix it. I don’t think eliminating it is the right answer.”
Beyond Failure
Researchers whose work is showcased by the reform movement don’t always support its strategies. The Community College Research Center, for instance, has found 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.
But using those studies to justify eliminating nearly all developmental education, as Connecticut did, is going too far, says Thomas R. Bailey, director of the center, at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The weakest students need more support than they’ll get in a single semester of remediation, he says, or from tutoring alongside a college-level course.
Still, Mr. Bailey appreciates the attention. “It’s good for us to raise these questions,” he says. “For better or worse, these discussions are pushing people to try new approaches.”
A new model for remedial math developed by Philip Uri Treisman, a professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has been promoted by Complete College America as well as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. But that doesn’t mean existing models are worthless, he told remedial instructors at the meeting here.
“The work you’re doing is being devalued by the Gates foundation and other folks,” said Mr. Treisman. “We have to be careful about the rhetoric of failure. We need to know the data, but we’d damn well better know the data on the people who have been successful, whose lives have been transformed by remedial education.”
Dorothy Perfecto, who was a 61-year-old widow and great-grandmother when she enrolled at East Central College, in Union, Mo., last year, also spoke at the meeting here.
First placed into remedial courses, she welcomed the slower pace, patient instructors, and study partners who helped her catch up after more than four decades away from the classroom. Without that option, she said in an interview, “I never would have dared to go back.”
Now Ms. Perfecto hopes to have her associate degree in two more semesters. After that she plans to transfer to Central Methodist University, to pursue a bachelor’s in accounting.
‘Silver Buckshot’
Stories like Ms. Perfecto’s challenge the narrative of remedial failure, practitioners have said, and could influence public opinion.
Mr. Boylan, of the National Center for Developmental Education, urged his colleagues at the meeting to collect data from their campuses and states: demographic information, students’ success rates in individual courses, job placements.
Maybe a student takes only one developmental course, another speaker said, and it helps him land a job with a local energy company. He should be considered a success, not just a dropout.
“Legislators are being bombarded,” Mr. Boylan said, “with someone else’s data.”
Meanwhile, colleges are responding to pressure to reform with a flurry of new programs. Some instructors say they feel overwhelmed by the pace of change, with many programs untested.
Mr. Boylan urged his colleagues not to get discouraged as they retool. “We’ll adopt the best parts,” he said, “and find ways to overcome the worst.”
Rather than resisting reforms, practitioners should join forces with those who are pushing for progress, Mr. Treisman, who also directs the Charles A. Dana Center on the Austin campus, told the audience here. The center, dedicated to helping underserved students succeed in college, has joined Complete College America and several other groups in calling for an overhaul of developmental education.
In politics, Mr. Treisman said, “everyone’s looking for the silver bullet. We have to think of it as silver buckshot.” Students need different approaches, and drastic solutions may do more harm than good. That, he said, is what policy makers need to hear.
Many colleges are already pursuing promising new models, such as breaking courses into modules, so that a math student who needs help only with fractions and decimals doesn’t spend time repeating other material he’s already grasped. In “contextualized courses,” a welding student might work on his writing with an essay on why he chose welding for a career.
Within a few years, as the consequences of accelerating or eliminating remedial courses start to become clear, policies may be tweaked, and compromises reached. By expanding what’s working and halting failed experiments, those who share the goals of helping underprepared students succeed may find that for more of them, the bridge leads somewhere.
