Episode 170: When States Cut Remediation Classes, Who Pays The Price?

I break down why states are restricting remedial math and English courses in college and what that means for students who still need a bridge to credit-bearing coursework. I weigh the money and completion-rate arguments against what families care about most: real skill-building, fair placement, and a genuine pathway to a degree.
• Why California limits remediation through AB 1705 and expands tutoring support
• The unanswered questions behind tutoring metrics and “faster completion” claims
• How transition courses in high school try to close college readiness gaps
• What Tennessee’s results suggest about credits earned versus math knowledge gained
• Why remedial education costs students money without earning college credit
• How placement tests misidentify students and how transcript-based placement can help
• The disproportionate impact of remediation decisions on students of color
• Examples that work better, including dual enrollment partnerships and early remediation
• My recommendations: keep remediation available, improve placement criteria, start support by middle school, strengthen tutoring partnerships

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Transcript

The Push To End Remediation

California Laws AB 1705 Explained

High School Transition Courses Tested

Placement Tests And Equity Gaps

Models That Build College Readiness

Math Pathways Beyond Algebra Funnels

My Bottom Line And Takeaways

Subscribe Share And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Welcome to another episode of K-12 Public Education Insights, Empowering Parents of Color Podcast. The podcast that converges at the intersection of educational research and parental actions. It's about making the trends, topics, and theories in public education understandable so that you can implement them into practical, actionable strategies that work for your children. My name is Dr. Kim J. Fields, former corporate manager, turned education researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microaggressions that I faced as an African-American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress. This battle-tested experience is what I provide as action steps for you to take. It's like enjoying a bowl of educational research with a sprinkling of motherwood wisdom on top. If you're looking to find out more about the current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, and the action steps you can take to give your children the advantages they need, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K-12 public education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. Give me 30 minutes or less, and I'll provide insights on the latest trends, issues, and topics pertaining to this constantly evolving K-12 public education environment. Okay, so this situation caught me a little off guard. It's about a move that California and other states have made regarding discontinuing remediation courses for high school students and college freshmen? The question becomes: should those who want to pursue a college education be allowed to build their foundational skills through remedial courses? Since college is not for everyone, should states pursue this financial decision to save students' tuition costs, which contribute to students accruing debt, falling behind, and dropping out of college, since these courses carry no credit, as well as for the financial decisions of community colleges and universities, to earn money faster without students falling into the remediation course black hole? Or should they just eliminate remedial courses and disregard a large population of students of color who aspire to have a college degree? Should these students abandon their dreams? Or should public high schools step in to support them with high quality remedial or transition courses? You may have experienced during your first semester of your freshman year in college the gap between what you learned in high school and what was required for freshman level courses in science, English, and mathematics. It was quite an adjustment, right? You may not have needed to take a remedial class to fill in the gaps, but the struggle was real. The same holds true for today's students. In this episode, I discuss the benefits and detriments of remediation courses, who ultimately is impacted by the disappearance of remedial courses and how high schools are trying to fill in the knowledge gap by addressing remediation early in the process. Let's gain some insight on this. Here's the background scoop on why this topic is so volatile and needed to be discussed. Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed Assembly Bill 1705, which set into motion changes that will severely restrict the ability of community colleges to offer remedial math and English courses. The intent of the bill is supposedly to reform remedial education. He also signed Assembly Bill 1187, which expands tutoring at community colleges. The expanded access to tutoring is purported to help millions of California students complete their education faster. Assembly Bill 1705 builds off of a 2017 law, Assembly Bill 705, that said colleges cannot place students in remedial classes unless they are deemed highly unlikely to succeed in transfer-level coursework. The latest bill, AB 1705, goes further by limiting colleges to enrolling only certain populations of students in remedial classes, such as English language learners and students in some career and technical education programs. Officials with the statewide chancellor's office suspect that with this latest legislation, almost none of the dozens of colleges that still offer some remedial courses will be offering them beyond twenty twenty three. That was three years ago. This legislation is still in effect. The legislation though leads to several open questions to be pondered. One, how will tutoring success be measured? Two, does tutoring guarantee faster completion of degree coursework? Three, what criteria will be used to enroll only certain populations of students in remedial classes? And four, who or what will fill in the gap since the disappearance of remedial courses? This is also a cost savings mechanism for community colleges and universities since they no longer have to pay for teachers who provide services for those remediation courses. It's also about making the graduation rates of community colleges and their numbers look better as well as meeting increased profits for their bottom line. College remediation is a big expensive deal. The courses that two-thirds of students take in two-year colleges and roughly 40% of those in four-year colleges are costly for the students who pay for them since they don't get college credit for taking those classes. Some researchers debate whether these classes do anything to prepare students or whether they are just a roadblock to attaining a degree. Several years ago, Tennessee tried out a novel solution to this problem by creating a transition course in the senior year of high school where students could master the math skills that colleges require and then enroll them directly into college-bearing classes rather than remedial classes. The idea of the transition courses caught on among many states that were eager to save students and taxpayers money. This first large-scale study of Tennessee's initiative found that there was some good news for the program, but it also raised questions about its underlying purpose. The study found that the initiative did help participating students enrolled directly into college math and earned a few more credits compared with those who didn't take the class, but the new course did not seem to boost students' actual math knowledge. The aim of the transition courses was to smooth out the transition between K-12 education and higher education. These remediation courses are given to high school students who may have opportunity to work closely with educators and support staff. The rigor in transition courses comes from coordination between higher education professors and high school educators. Many high schools used the same exact remedial course that was taught in college. Researchers in this Tennessee project pondered that although high school transition classes may be a good first step, perhaps remediation needed to begin earlier in students' high school trajectories. Tennessee is not the only state that's created transition courses. Other states include California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and West Virginia. Now it's not surprising to me that West Virginia would try pretty much anything to help improve student educational attainment, since, according to a recent ranking of educational outcomes for all 50 states in the United States, West Virginia was ranked 50 out of 50. And yes, Mississippi is in the 49th place. For those of you who may be wondering who took the top spot, it was Massachusetts. Now back to this discussion. More than 60,000 students have enrolled in Tennessee's MAP Transition class called Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support, or Sales. Students who received a score on the ACT College Entrance Test below 19 were recommended to enroll in sales. Students enrolled in this program improved their attitude about math's usefulness as well as their preparation in math, yet it did not noticeably boost performance on the math test. In other words, students who participated in the math transition class did not appear to be any stronger in math than their peers who didn't participate in the math transition class. The overriding sentiment in discontinuing remedial classes is that when students take these classes, they often fail to complete their studies. The overarching game plan is about money, increasing the number of associate degrees for community college students or bachelor's degrees for college students instead of students mastering the material that the degrees are supposed to certify. More than half the community college students take at least one remedial class, according to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University. The reason so many students are in these classes in the first place is because high schools permit them to graduate even though they have not learned the material. Some would argue that because college is not for everyone, students who lack the ability to satisfy the minimal requirements for both an associate's degree as well as a bachelor's degree would be better served by a certificate or apprenticeship program. And that's valid. And thank goodness for trade apprenticeships programs. But what about students who dream of pursuing a college degree? Interestingly, a significant portion of students who test into remedial classes do not actually need those classes. The way colleges are using standardized placement tests can misidentify students. So secondary schools and universities need to work to develop a more comprehensive profile of students' strengths and weaknesses in performing college-level work. The problem is being highlighted now as more states move to align their academic standards for college and career readiness, and as more high schools receive data on how their graduates are faring in colleges. According to recent data from the National Center on Education Statistics, roughly 5 million new students enter higher education each year, and half of those students take at least one catch-up course while they are enrolled at a cost of nearly$9 billion a year overall for non-credit bearing classes. One researcher who analyzed the high school transcript information, college placement test scores, and collected progress of more than 50,000 students in a large unnamed urban community college system and a separate statewide college system in the same state found that three out of every four students of color were assigned to at least one remedial class. Nearly 80% of all those who took the mathematics placement test were assigned to a remedial course. Research also found that 20% of students placed in remedial math and 25% of those placed in remedial reading were severely misidentified, meaning that they not only could have passed the college entry courses in that subject, but they could have done so with a grade of B or better. 30% lower rates of severe misidentification occurred when placement decisions utilized high school transcript data, including a student's GPA, total courses taken and credits earned, honors classes taken, total classes in English and math, and the number of F grades received. Not surprisingly, these results were uneven for specific racial groups. While fewer Hispanic students were placed in remedial courses using high school information, more young black students were assigned to remedial courses. These results indicate that remedial education in America is broken right now, although it does not indicate that there are still students who need to take remedial courses to give them a chance at a pathway to college graduation. It's also important to keep in mind that nearly one-third of all entering college students are not coming directly from high school. Here's another example of a remediation course that gives students college credit. The South Los Angeles Math or SLAM project was created to see what would happen if high school teachers and college professors work together to help at-risk students pass Math 109, a one-semester credit-bearing, challenging math course that is offered at California State University, Los Angeles. This course helps students enroll in college and avoid remedial classes at much higher rates than their peers, and helps students get the skills and the credit they need to attend and succeed in college. Students can take the class for free during their school day and earn concurrent high school and college credit. Passing the class is a guarantee that they can skip remedial work at Cal State LA. The students eligible for SLAM or South Los Angeles Math were middle-of-the-road students, not those who needed intensive remediation. The pool of students from which participants were chosen had grade point averages of between 2.3 to 3.1 or had passed algebra 2 with a C or better. The students showed a 33% gain in their mathematical practices skills, yet one-third of the students who judged themselves to be college ready when the course began said afterward that they had underestimated how tough college classes are. If it's a good idea to make sure high school students who plan to go to college are on track to be college ready, why not find out even earlier with middle school students? In Colorado, the Early Remediation Project is helping struggling math students starting in the eighth grade to catch up and prove that they are ready to enroll in college-level courses. The program is called Colorado Gear Up, which is a federally funded program that focuses on college readiness for disadvantaged students. Students work with an online program that allows them to progress at their own pace through several math sequences, and a teacher is on hand to answer questions and provide support. When students complete the program, they are given a transcript from the university that documents their completion of the remedial course and demonstrates they are ready for credit-bearing classes when they arrive on a college campus. If students don't finish the course in the eighth grade, they can pick it up where they left off in the ninth grade or even into their sophomore year. Students have to take a diagnostic test going into the class to see how many topics they have mastered and to select lessons to work on at their own pace. These are not simple multiple choice questions. The problems require students to do calculations, put answers into points on a graph, and keep a record of their work in a notebook. Students find out immediately if their answers are right or wrong. The Early Remediation Project also includes field trips, practice tests for the ACT and SAT, and college campus visits, which help students look at the big picture of their future. Once students complete the course, they are eligible to take dual enrollment math courses by the end of their sophomore year to earn college credit. More often than not, students who dream of obtaining a college degree fall into the black hole of remedial math. How do they avoid this? Math is a notorious stumbling block that trips up students seeking college degrees. Every year, tens of thousands of young people fail to graduate because they cannot earn enough math credits. To help students get across This bumping terrain, math educators have started teaching math through real-world problems and reworking course content to better match with students' career goals. What happens in these courses is that the educators compress remedial and college level content into one year, allowing successful students to move into credit-bearing math classes more quickly than through the typical three-semester sequences that progress from lower-level algebra to geometry to algebra 2 to college level algebra. These courses focus on quantitative reasoning skills for the first and second semesters and then build on statistics skills in a year-long course. Connecting math to real-world scenarios helps students see the meaning of math in the bigger picture as compared to the traditional algebra 2 pre-calculus calculus course sequence. Now listen to these statistics. Over 80% of students who take remedial math classes in college fail to complete a college-level math course within three years. 59% of students in community college end up in remedial math versus 28% in remedial English. Providing students with an opportunity to take math reasoning courses can help them build their confidence in math skills as well as flourish in math reasoning. Some have even moved into the college algebra courses to pursue STEM-related courses. Those who struggle more in math and are not planning STEM careers can rebuild their foundational skills in math reasoning and go on to take the second semester course in quantitative reasoning. This helps them qualify to earn associate degrees and to transfer those credits to a university. At the end of the day, my thoughts on this topic are the following. Remediation courses should continue to be available for the students that need them. Criteria for entry into remediation courses need to be comprehensive so the only students who actually need the courses will be placed in those courses. Remediation courses andor transition courses need to be available as early as middle school for those students who have failed to master grade level requirements. And finally, middle schools and high schools should partner with organizations that provide tutoring and support services that fill the knowledge gap of students identified as needing remedial courses. Here are this episode's takeaways. College remediation is a big expensive deal. The courses that two-thirds of students take in two-year colleges and roughly 40% of those in four-year colleges are costly for the students who pay for them since they don't get college credits for taking those courses. Some researchers debate whether these classes do anything to prepare students or whether they are just a roadbloc to attaining a degree. The overriding sentiment in discontinuing remedial classes is that when students take these classes, they often fail to complete their studies. The overarching game plan is about money. Increasing the number of associate degrees for community college students or bachelor's degrees for college students instead of students mastering the material that the degrees are supposed to certify. More than half of the community college students take at least one remedial class. The reason so many students are in these classes in the first place is because high schools permit them to graduate even though they haven't learned the material. A significant portion of students who test into remedial classes do not actually need those classes. The way colleges are using standardized placement tests can misidentify students. So secondary schools and universities need to work to develop more comprehensive profiles of students' strengths and weaknesses in performing college-level work. More often than not, students who dream of obtaining a college degree fall into the black hole of remedial math. Math is a notorious stumbling block that trips up students seeking college degrees. Every year, tens of thousands of young people fail to graduate because they cannot earn enough math credit. Providing students with an opportunity to take math reasoning courses can help them build their confidence in math skills as well as flourish in math reasoning. Some have even moved into college algebra to pursue STEM-related courses. Those who struggle more in math and are not planning STEM careers can rebuild their foundational skills in math reasoning and go on to take the second semester course in quantitative reasoning. This helps them qualify to earn associate degrees and to transfer those credits to a university. Did you enjoy this episode? Then be sure to subscribe to my podcast on whatever service you're listening to this. Thanks for listening today. Be sure to come back for more insights on K-12 educational topics that impact you and your children. And remember to share my podcast with anyone you think would find it valuable. That includes your friends, family, and your community. Until next time, learn something new every day.