Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges

Inside and Outside of Classrooms

W Norton Grubb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415634748
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136206078
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Nearly two-thirds of students require some form of remediation before taking college-level classes, and community colleges have become increasingly important in providing this education. Unfortunately, relatively few students complete the developmental courses required to make a transition to college-level work. Based on a three-year study of over twenty community colleges, Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges analyzes developmental education practices, exploring what goes wrong and what goes right, and provides a series of recommendations for improved practice.

Including both classroom observations and interviews with administrators, faculty, and students, this valuable book balances critique with examples of innovation. Part One explores the instructional settings of basic skills—the use of drill and practice and remedial pedagogy in math, reading, writing, and ESL, as well as innovations in colleges that show developmental education need not follow remedial pedagogy. Part Two examines institutional factors shaping basic skills and provides recommendations for improving the quality of basic skills instruction. The research-grounded observations and recommendations in Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges make this an invaluable resource for scholars, administrators, and faculty aiming to help students progress through developmental education to college-level work and beyond.

1

UNDERSTANDING THE QUANDARY OF BASIC SKILLS

Framing the Issues in Community Colleges

Yet another “crisis” has been building in U.S. education, though the language of crisis is often overused as a way of getting people to pay attention.¹ At many levels of the system, students enter unprepared for the appropriate level of academic work, and then need to participate in remediation in some form, which is called variously, basic skills instruction, developmental education, academic skills, intervention, skills for success, or foundational skills to avoid the unavoidable stigma of “remediation.”^* In K-12 education, this happens at several transitions: in the ninth grade; at the transition to middle school; and perhaps much earlier in third or fourth grade, as teachers progress from teaching basic literacy and numeracy skills to using them to develop content knowledge. The transition from high school to community college suffers from another crisis or quandary of remediation, as I will document, but the problem seems almost as acute in the 4-year regional colleges of the country.² Short-term job training, welfare-to-work programs, and adult education are other places in the vast system of education and training where basic skills instruction takes place.

All these manifestations of the remediation problem are serious, but the transition from high school to community college is especially difficult. In an era when a college credential seems necessary for middle-class jobs and achieving the American Dream, increasing numbers of students are being pushed, or counseled, toward college as the only route to individual advancement. The pursuit of equity in this country for low-income students; for African Americans, Latinos, and other racial or ethnic minorities; and for immigrant students has led to promoting higher education as the appropriate policy, rather than, for example, trying to equalize the distribution of earnings or eliminate racial discrimination in employment. And the overheated rhetoric about the centrality of education to economic growth and competitiveness, which I have critiqued as the Education Gospel (Grubb & Lazerson, 2004), has been extended to community colleges, too. As Barack Obama said at the Community College Summit:³

Given these relationships [with business, industry, and government], community colleges are uniquely positioned to raise the skill and knowledge base of our workforce. The President recognizes the critical role colleges play in developing our nation’s human capital.… The President’s plan will also improve college access and completion by supporting programs and activities designed to boost college persistence and increase graduation rates.

But none of these goals for individual advancement or developing the nation’s human capital can be realized without mastery of basic skills.

The quandary of community colleges can be divided into two issues. A large and increasing fraction of students who enroll in community colleges, and who take initial assessments to see if they are prepared for college-level courses, are directed into basic skills courses; one figure often bandied about at the national level is about 60%. Based on a national sample of students tracked between 1988 and 2000, Attewell, Lavin, Domina, and Levey (2006) found that 58% of students attending community colleges took at least one remedial course. Another data set, based on 83 community colleges surveyed by the Achieving the Dream project, found that 59% of students enrolled in at least one developmental course over a 3-year period (Bailey, 2009). Various data problems—students who manage not to go through the assessment process, as well as students directed into remediation who do not take recommended classes—mean that this figure is subject to considerable uncertainty. Overall, however, several sources indicate that the figure is well over 50%.

In California, where the research for this book took place,^** the figures are somewhat higher. Peter Bahr (2011) has found that, in the cohort entering in Fall 2002, 49.7% of entering students enrolled in one or more remedial courses (Perry, Rosin, & Woodward, 2010, p. 26). More recently, many people in the colleges we visited claimed that about 80% of entering students are assessed into developmental education; at certain individual colleges, this number is as high as 95%—implying that virtually no entering students are ready for college-level work. I sometimes refer to this as the magnitude or extent of the remedial problem. These high proportions are not, of course, the fault of community colleges (though there are issues in the assessment process that may artificially inflate or deflate these numbers, as examined in chapter 7). Many instructors blame high schools—indeed, California is near the bottom of all states in the quality of its educational system.⁴ Other factors specific to California include low tuition levels in colleges (meaning that fewer students select themselves out because of financial reasons) and the existence of many community colleges with every possible mission and, therefore, highly heterogeneous students (the subject of chapter 2). But with a few exceptions, colleges have concentrated not on preventing such high numbers of remedial students—for example, by working closely with high schools—but on increasing and improving their own developmental education.

The second issue in the quandary of developmental education involves the proportion of basic skills students who complete a remedial sequence, move into college-level coursework, and complete a credential of some sort or transfer to a 4-year college—the “success” of remediation. The Achieving the Dream data indicate that, of those referred to a developmental reading course, only 44% completed the full sequence. The figures are even worse for math, where only 31% of those assessed into developmental classes entered college-level math. Many more students have missed being assessed at all, and their success rates are unknown. Of the least prepared students, only 22% completed sequences in reading and 16% in math; that is, those students who enter three or more levels below college-level math.

For California, again, the figures are worse. One source found that only a quarter of students enrolling in a basic reading class ever enroll in transfer-level English, and only 10% of students enrolling in basic math end up in transferable math (Center for Student Success, 2005). Bahr (2010) has calculated that of all students who initially enroll in a basic math course, only 24.6% successfully enroll in a college-level math course within 6 years. The rates for racial groups vary widely, from 29% for Whites and 33.7% for Asians, to 20.3% for Latinos, and 11.8% for African Americans. Rates of success are related to other obvious factors indicating that both preparation in high school and students’ own behavior affect success rates; for example, the extent of deficiency in math, students’ academic goals, success in the first math class, persistence in enrolling (instead of “stopping out”), and delaying the first math course. In addition, most students assessed into remediation advance only one level (in rare instances, two levels). Therefore, if students are assessed three or four levels below college level, there is very little chance they will complete a developmental sequence.

When success rates are calculated for individual colleges, they vary substantially. In data collected by the California Chancellor’s Office for the 2005-2006 cohort, the rates of progressing from developmental education into college courses in English varied from 57% for one middle-class suburban college to 17% in several urban colleges, and 16% in an urban college with a high proportion of career-technical students. Rates of progress in math, usually lower than those in English, varied from 32% to 43%. Again, because of differences in data quality and how students are categorized, there is some uncertainty about the precise magnitude of these numbers. However, there is little question that these success rates are low; indeed, many administrators and instructors worry about how low they are. As one chair of counseling said:

What we see is a revolving door with that level of student coming in. And so, it makes recruitment extremely difficult and frustrating because, obviously, you have a lower retention rate [in basic skills courses]: you recruit a bunch of people, they come in, they fail, they leave. You recruit another bunch of people, they come in, they fail, they leave—so it’s just a constant revolving door.

Until success rates can be improved, the promise of the community college as the route to success for nontraditional students, or as the locus of equity for low-income and racial minority students, or as a pathway to the American Dream cannot be realized.

The consequences of such high rates of developmental education and low success rates primarily affect students, of course, who come to college for education to become successful economically, only to find they have to retake many of the courses they have passed earlier in K-12 schooling. (As will be seen in chapter 2, this is a source of considerable anger.) But these consequences have effects on community colleges too, because they have turned into places where increasing amounts of remediation take place:

Basic skills accounts for 90%, I’d say, of what we do. If you take a look at just the courses that are offered, we have very limited offerings. Over the years, we have gotten narrower and narrower in terms of what we’re actually offering, and these are always basic skills classes, paring down, paring down to the core gut-level basic skills classes. Pathetic—not what anyone wants.

Several colleges in our sample have suffered crises of identity in the process. One used to be a transfer-oriented institution for African American students. With a shift in its population to increasing numbers of Latinos and immigrants, it found itself providing more developmental courses, including English as a second language (ESL) for immigrants. As one faculty member described the shift, “You’ve got in excess of 90% of students who are, quote, ‘basic skills,’ below college level. Without a basic skills component, the college does not exist.” This left the college in a dilemma: while many faculty wanted to address basic skills issues, others (particularly older faculty wedded to its transfer mission) didn’t want to be just a “remedial campus.” At another institution, the vice president of academic affairs pointed out the tension between providing basic skills instruction and college-level courses, and said that “while we don’t wish to become a basic skills institution,” they had to recognize the needs among incoming students and strike a balance among its offerings. Yet another college has been debating this issue for over a decade: 10 years ago, they convened a basic skills task force, but “we didn’t really understand that those [remedial] students were such a big part of our campus, and there was more a sense of ‘Well, we’re more of a transfer institute.’” But the upsurge in the need for basic skills in the past decade has forced this college, like so many others, to reevaluate its priorities.

The issue of increasing basic skills coursework is, in turn, part of the discussion of mission. If community colleges become “remedial campuses,” then they may not be able to fulfill their academic or transfer roles, their role in preparing students for employment, or their economic development role in providing short-term training for employers. Colleges may then be put in the devilish position of either resolving basic skills issues before students can take advantage of transfer or occupational missions, or (in effect) turning away students because they don’t address the need for remediation. As one president said of basic skills, they become a prerequisite for the college’s occupational responsibilities:

As far as the economic well-being of this area, it’s all tied to having an educated, trained workforce. If we wish to be a player, our part would be to support the economic expansion of opportunities here. So, that’s where basic skills sits for me. It isn’t to prepare them all to go off to transfer; that’s not real, especially in this community. What they want to do is prepare themselves to have a better life.

So, the magnitude of remedial education has, in some cases, changed the missions of colleges, though this change may have been too fast for the colleges and instructors to keep up with it.

Some aspects of the “crisis of identity,” or comments about basic skills accounting for the “90% of what we do,” are exaggerated (as claims in educational “crises” often are). Even while a large majority of entering students may assess into basic skills courses, this does not mean that overall enrollments in basic skills courses are overwhelming other offerings. In the fall of 2009, for example, only 7.9% of enrollments in California colleges were in basic skills courses (including 7.1% of enrollments in English courses); the only real exception came in math, where 29% of all math students were enrolled in developmental math.⁵ So, even if there is a serious problem with entering cohorts needing more developmental education, the other academic and occupational missions of community colleges still account for the vast majority of enrollments. The comprehensive community college is alive and well—it’s just that developmental education has become a larger part of its mission.

This book represents my effort to figure out what might be responsible for such low levels of success in basic skills sequences. There are many potential causes, and everyone has his or her favorite explanation. But with the current state of knowledge and data, no one, absolutely no one, has any idea about which reasons are more important than others, and no one has the quantitative data that might enable a statistical analysis of which causes are more important. Until such data and results emerge, we are left looking at a broad range of issues to illustrate the enormous variety of ways in which basic skills instruction could be improved.

My efforts in this volume are based on 3 years of research in community colleges. By the end, a team of fellow-researchers and I had visited about 20 colleges, observed 169 basic skills classes, and interviewed 323 instructors and administrators—as the methodological appendix describes in detail. These data provide the sources of all the quotations and classroom observations used in this book; they underlie all the conclusions we make about the current state of developmental education. For reasons that will become clear, this methodology reflects the conviction that observations inside classrooms, as well as an understanding of the institutional context, are necessary to analyze teaching and learning activities in any educational setting.

But before I can launch into such an analysis, it is essential to frame the dilemmas of basic skills, both to provide some immediate understanding of the dismal numbers presented above, and to clarify fruitful areas and methods of investigation. Accordingly, in this chapter, I first examine the admirable tendency in U.S. education to develop second-chance efforts for students who are lagging behind, but where second chances necessarily operate under difficult conditions. The analysis of second-chance efforts makes it easier to understand, if not accept, the low success rates of developmental education.

Like much of education and training, basic skills instruction is, by definition, an instructional encounter. The simple model of an instructional setting presented in the second section of this chapter, “The Triangle of Instruction,” and illustrated in Figure 1.1 can help tease apart the different elements: It is the triangle of the student, the instructor, and the content, all residing within a complex set of institutional influences.

In this research, the dominant instructional setting is obviously the basic skills classroom (see chapters 3 and 4). If the research underlying this book had included apprenticeships, for example, the instructional settings might have also included workshops and workplaces. Other instructional settings include student services such as tutoring, brief workshops, and “student success” courses (see chapters 5 and 6). These settings led to the research design employed in this work, especially its emphasis on classroom observations as the principal way to know what happens inside instructional settings. In addition, the so-called triangle of instruction helps identify some of the potential causes of low success rates in remedial education. The final section of this chapter provides an overview of the book’s central argument, along with a roadmap to subsequent chapters.

Second-Chance Programs: Their Promis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Understanding the Quandary of Basic Skills: Framing the Issues in Community Colleges
• 2 Developmental Students: Their Heterogeneity, Readiness, and Perspectives
• Section I Inside the Classroom
• Section II Institutional Effects on Classrooms
• Appendix The Methodology of the Study
• Notes
• References
• Index