Leaping Nine Years in One Semester?

Do you think there should be a comma anywhere in this sentence: “I like bananas apples and grapes”?

If my memory serves me correctly, the rules on the use of commas (and all basic punctuation) were taught in third grade when I was a kid. They weren’t just taught. They were learned. The rules aren’t difficult and I’m sure that not a single student entered fourth grade without knowing how to use punctuation pretty well.

Today, sadly, large numbers of American students graduate from high school without knowing the rudiments of writing and simple math, as this article from Education News  shows. Because the United States embraces the idea that almost everyone needs to go to college, most of our colleges and universities have to spend lots of money on remedial classes where the students (supposedly) get ready for “real” college coursework.

You have to wonder what goes on in school in grades four through twelve for these students not to have even learned such elementary matters as the use of punctuation. (Roughly 40 percent of the recent high school graduates in Texas have to take one or more remedial classes.) And as you ponder that, keep in mind that those schools are staffed with teachers who have degrees from schools of education, and run by administrators who often have advanced degrees from schools of education.

Yes, there are lots of excuses such as poverty and broken homes. Still, why can’t the students learn third grade material by the time they’re ready to leave high school?

The Education News article also informs us that it costs the taxpayers of Texas some $80 million annually to pay for all these “developmental” classes and we also discover that even with them, relatively few of the students who complete them ever finish their college degrees (about 38 percent).

How to improve remedial education is a problem that has been around for decades, but to my knowledge there is no research on the point that is at the exact heart of the matter: Do students derive lasting benefit from remedial classes? In order to pass the courses, the students have to pass the usual tests and exams. Even when they do so, are we sure they have made lasting, substantial gains in academic ability?

Just how demanding are the requirements to pass? Undoubtedly, some of the professors who teach remedial courses are sticklers for correctness—just as my third grade teacher was. Keep in mind, however, that there’s a very strong “student retention” mentality at work in many schools, including community colleges. That is, they like students to stay enrolled so they can collect money. If the typical English 101 (freshman composition) course at a college can be a joke (the Pope Center’s paper English 101: Prologue to Literacy or Postmodern Moonshine? showed that it can be), why believe that the remedial English 90 course is tough as Marine Corps boot camp?

My personal experience to suggests that remedial English doesn’t necessarily accomplish much. Back in my own teaching days, I had a significant number of students in my economics and business law courses who had taken and passed remedial English. If that improved their ability to write, however, the improvement was extremely slight. I used to get essays from such students that were so poorly written that you might suspect that English wasn’t their native language—but it was.

Even if we assume a high degree of motivation by the students (a dubious assumption, as the article makes clear), is it really possible to make up for twelve years of educational neglect and malpractice in one semester? Can bad habits (or no habits) in reading, writing, and arithmetic be rectified so quickly? From the evidence of my own eyes, I doubt that they usually can.

We read in the article that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is funding research into the best ways of handling remedial education. I’d like to suggest that the Board include a project like this: Give students a test of reading and writing proficiency to see which ones need to be in a remedial course. Then, a few months after those who take the remedial course have completed it, give them the same test again.

Merely passing (whatever that entails) a final exam in the remedial course doesn’t tell us anything about lasting gains by the students. Whether they have such gains or not is a crucial point—and that’s what we do not know. Just because we call the courses for students who are too academically weak for college work (low as the standards often are) “remedial” doesn’t mean that they actually remedy their weaknesses.

Ideally, we’d improve K-12 schooling to the point where nearly all students could write correct sentences and use English with proficiency, do basic math, and read prose with good comprehension. If we could manage that, remedial classes wouldn’t be necessary. Doing that, however, is almost inconceivable, for reasons that would require another essay to discuss.

Therefore, we’re going to be stuck with remedial courses for students whose K-12 schooling was deficient. Let’s find out if those well-intentioned courses actually succeed.