Students eager but unready

This article demonstrates just how badly schools are preparing students for life. I was struck by how surprised the students were by their inadequate skills. With grade inflation and the self-esteem movement, students lacked accurate feed back on their performance.


AT 2-YEAR COLLEGES, STUDENTS EAGER BUT UNREADY


Written by DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Saturday, 02 September 2006

At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?


Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton's anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.


"I flipped out big time," Mr. Walton said.


Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.


Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation's 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.


Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses...

Cal State appears nowhere close to its goal. In reading alone, nearly half the high school juniors appear unprepared for college-level work....



The efforts, educators say, have not cut back on the thousands of students who lack basic skills. Instead, the colleges have clustered those students in community colleges, where their chances of succeeding are low and where taxpayers pay a second time to bring them up to college level...



Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of a report on the gap between aspirations and college attainment, said that 73 percent of students entering community colleges hoped to earn four-year degrees, but that only 22 percent had done so after six years.

“You can get into school,” Professor Kirst said. “That’s not a problem. But you can’t succeed.’’

Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.


According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.


For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce...

These "so called" graduates have a false sense of their own competency. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident incompetent. (Say that three time fast).

At Cal State, the system admits only students with at least a B average in high school. Nevertheless, 37 percent of the incoming class last year needed remedial math, and 45 percent needed remedial English.


"Students are still shocked when they're told they need developmental courses," said Donna McKusik, the senior director of developmental, or remedial, education at the Community College of Baltimore County. "They think they graduated from a high school, they should be ready for college."


Across the nation, federal and state education officials are pressing for a K-16 vision of education that runs from kindergarten through college graduation. Such an approach, they say, would help high schools better prepare students for college...

Am I the only one who finds this a scary thought? A government program for K-16? They have already screwed up K-12.

Starting at a Deficit


As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college's interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover....


The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide. Not all those students come directly from high school. Many have taken off a few years and may have forgotten what they learned, Dr. McKusik said.


More than one in four remedial students work on elementary and middle school arithmetic. Math is where students often lose confidence and give up.


"It brings up a lot of emotional stuff for them," Dr. McKusik said.


She told of 20 students who had just burst into tears on receiving their math entrance exam scores and walked out on college. Mr. Walton remembers a fellow student who failed to hand in a math assignment for the fourth time in the last week of class and learned that he would fail. The student lunged toward the professor and said, "I'll kill you."


"You can say whatever you want, but this really isn't helping your grade," the professor replied, Mr. Walton said.


The student stormed out the door with a final expletive, leaving the professor shaken....

See how dangerous a false sense of competency can be?

The biggest challenge, professors say, is trying to engage students, to persuade them that ideas matter. Dr. McKusik suspects that behind the apathy is a fear of appearing ignorant....


“That’s why we’re trying to use pop culture in the classroom, to get their attention,’’ said Betsy Gooden, an English teacher who, in a remedial reading class one day last spring, tried to coax students to discuss a television documentary.

Two or three students in a class of 10 women carried most of the discussion, which seemed more like Ricky Lake than Lit 101, with students reacting to the film almost exclusively in terms of their personal experiences.

They covered love, sex and cheating boyfriends. Before the class was over, two women disclosed that they had been raped. About half the students said nothing at all....

This is scary. They can't process complex thoughts. Bringing "pop culture" into a Lit 101 class is another example of dumbing down.

Professor Olson says teachers should stop making “unrealistic assignments’’ like chapters from “600-page textbooks’’ and should meet students at their level, raising abilities by degrees.

In her class, she assigns more manageable readings and carves up the load, so no student is responsible for doing it all....

Ah.....yeah. That's going to help. This is an example of how people get college degrees they didn't earn. Students are supposed to be resposible for ALL the work. That's why they put the student's name on the diploma.

Another part of the solution at community colleges is in Student Success Centers. They are actually tutoring centers. Dundalk’s is open 63 hours a week.

Along a wall is a rack of handouts explaining points of grammar that might have last been explicitly taught in middle school, a measure of the immense ground to be made up. One covers comparative adjectives, explaining “more” vs. “most” or “smarter” vs. “smartest.” Another discusses using pronouns and verb tenses.

At one table, Kirn Shahzadi, 20, once an A student at Parkville High School, was being tutored a few hours before her final in remedial algebra. In addition to math, Ms. Shahzadi needed remedial courses in reading and one in helping with basic skills like note taking, researching and organizing schedules. By the second week of that course, she said, half the students had dropped out.

Focusing on grades and teaching to the test does NOT provide students with the skills they need to be successful in life.

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Related Tags: remedial education, community college, grade inflation, dumbing down, college drop outs