Like the cicadas of August, faculty kvetching about the lack of student preparedness signals the beginning of fall and the start of another school year, and now as the first snows silently fall, the drifts of final projects and exams only muffle the grousing. Besides mourning the passing of a golden age of student skill, however, faculty members are now registering a historic and demographic development: the advent of Grade 13. The promise of No Child Left Behind is manifesting in the shaky proficiencies demonstrated by today’s college freshmen. According to the 2009 ACT College Readiness Report, only 23 percent of high-school graduates have the requisite skills to earn at least a C in entry-level college courses in the four general areas of English, mathematics, science, and reading. That means 77 percent of all graduating seniors have serious deficiencies in one or more areas. Some institutions only admit students who belong to the elite cadre, but for the rest of us, those numbers confirm that we in academe are faced with a real problem.
Along with some of our colleagues—all untenured professors at a variety of institutions—we have taken to referring to the challenges of teaching students with such deficiencies as Grade 13. As in, “I didn’t get a Ph.D to teach Grade 13!” Or “I just don’t know how to teach these students. They don’t need college, they need Grade 13!” In some disciplines (especially composition and mathematics), students are tested, and those who receive low scores are sent to remedial programs. In others, students of all capabilities are mixed together. Neither situation seems to result in ideal outcomes for students or professors. For the purposes of this essay, we will use the term “Grade 13" to cover a broad range of phenomena resulting from the arrival, in our classes, of many students who are ill-trained in the basic skills needed for college. Although the students in Grade 13 hold high-school diplomas and have been admitted into our colleges, they are not ready. And yet here they are.
The challenges of teaching Grade 13 students vary depending on the discipline. The ACT report only hints at the range of potential issues for composition teachers. To meet the ACT benchmark score for English, students need only be able to match subject and verb tenses and know where to add a conjunction. That those are not college-level skills should go without saying. Nevertheless, we are teaching students who have not mastered much more, and are tasked to “bring them up to speed” while also teaching them the content of a college composition course. That double tasking threatens both students’ and faculty members’ success. In fields that lack testing and placement, faculty members find themselves in classes bifurcated between those who lack a basic understanding of how to pass a college class and those who are ready to excel. It’s not just writing or quantitative analysis. Only half of graduating seniors passed the “reading” benchmark in the 2009 ACT report. Teachers of such mixed classes face an untenable decision: Teach basic skills at the cost of one’s intended content, and thus bore the college-ready students, or ignore Grade 13 students.
Common institutional strategies now used to handle the challenges of Grade 13 have failed to redress the lack of basic skills. Remedial courses of various sorts seem to be the most popular solution in composition and math, but they are often only partially successful. Many remedial courses end up in curriculum limbo: They often do not count for college credit. Failing a remedial composition course, for example, may not bar a student from enrolling in a standard Composition 101 course the following semester. In our experience, remedial composition courses are rarely taught by subject-area experts, but more usually by graduate students, adjuncts, and faculty members who do not have training in basic writing pedagogy.
Although no panacea, remedial classes at least indicate an institution’s effort to help the students who struggle in math and writing. We cannot, however, create remedial tracks in all the disciplines, even if that would solve our problems. Yet enrolling poorly prepared students in mainstream classes fails both the students and the instructor because the instructor is so often overwhelmed by the impossible task of simultaneously teaching radically different skill sets. Tutoring can help bridge the gap in mixed-ability classes but does not solve the root problem.
Untenured faculty members find themselves particularly vulnerable when faced with the challenge of teaching Grade 13 students. “Retention” has become a buzzword with a sting: Recently state legislatures have begun suggesting that budgets might be determined by retention rates. Already, adjuncts’ contracts depend on positive student evaluations and retention. Junior faculty members’ tenure decisions are often heavily based on the same evaluations, retention numbers, and grade distributions. But once we admit these underprepared students, will we be pressured to pass them when they fail to measure up to college standards? Increasingly, assigning an F may be more of a privilege than a right, and failing students too frequently, or at all, may threaten job security. Those practices do not support academics. A student’s failure to make several years’ worth of progress in composition in 16 weeks, for example, should not be laid at the teacher’s door, and the student’s failure to measure up to college standards should be acknowledged.
So what do we do now? We believe that recognizing the pervasive nature of Grade 13 is a necessity and that the next step requires financing both small- and large-scale endeavors to see what works in given local conditions. One of our institutions is experimenting with a program in which advanced undergraduates work with Grade 13 students as course-specific skills coaches. Another of our institutions has a learning center that provides similar services as an alternative to more general tutoring. Not only can those programs save professors from being overloaded, but also some Grade 13 students might emerge as better readers, pass the classes in question, then ideally apply those skills to other courses. But will they apply those skills? Can this type of approach be replicated on a larger scale? We must find the answers to those questions.
One problem with such programs is that no matter how promising they might seem, neither undergraduate assistants nor most professors are trained to teach high-school-level reading and writing. Departments may even want to revisit the wisdom of asking faculty members whose entire training lies in literature to teach heavy composition loads, especially remedial composition. We need more tenure-track experts in basic skills to teach remedial courses and advise faculty members.
Universities must take a hard look at their entrance standards. If an institution is going to admit students who have only a basic grasp of core skills and knowledge bases, then it has a duty to educate them to a college level. That must include making up for students’ academic deficiencies. Universities must respect their faculty members enough to accept that most are not trained to teach the high-school level of their subject. Recession or no, Grade 13 students deserve to be educated by instructors who are trained to teach basic skills—experts who may not currently be on the staff. Along with more resources, universities must allow professors to fail students. Pressure to retain students does no one any good if they pass college humanities courses without being able to write even a five-paragraph essay.
The ACT report’s results should sound a warning clarion to American universities: If we want to make up for the disastrous effects of No Child Left Behind, then we must put our considerable talents and funds toward helping our faculty members teach Grade 13 successfully.
