The Old College Lie

Over the weekend the Dallas Morning News ran a well-reported but gut-wrenching story about high school graduates unprepared for college-level work:

Nelda Contreras stood at the whiteboard and wrote: I like bananas and apples.

“Does this sentence need a comma?” she asked her students.

No, they said.

Next, she wrote: I like bananas apples and grapes.

“What about this sentence?”

Students learn that punctuation rule in grade school. But this is college. A few months earlier, most of these freshmen graduated from high schools in Dallas, Lewisville, Carrollton and elsewhere. They passed their TAKS exams.

Yet here they were at Brookhaven Community College in Farmers Branch taking remedial writing. Over the semester, they’d review “your” vs. “you’re,” how to craft a two-page essay, and other fundamentals they should have already mastered.

Each year, tens of thousands of Texas students land in this academic purgatory – no longer in high school but not ready for college. About 40 percent of recent high school graduates in the state’s public universities and colleges need at least one remedial class.

Statistics show those students take longer to earn a college degree, if they do at all.

Essentially, these high schools, and the state of Texas, have been lying to their students. Officials certified the students as ready to leave high school, only for huge numbers of students to find out later that they were ready for nothing.

States have responded to similar stories in their own states in a couple ways. Forty-five have convened some form of P-16 or P-20 council in the hope of fostering collaboration between the education sectors, but those have been more or less toothless to force any real reforms. Absent much progress there, nearly half the states already have or are in the process of adopting some form of graduation or end-of-course exams for high school students, as a way to certify those students as ready for college. Texas happens to be one of those states; note the reference to TAKS, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, in the article. These are students who passed the TAKS and were still labeled as unprepared by the local community college.

Think about this for a second: It is foreseeable for a student to be required to take four separate exams on their path into college. At the high school level, they might take one set of tests for the state’s accountability system. That is supposed to hold their district and high school responsible. The student might take another set of tests to fulfill their graduation requirements. This is supposed to hold the student responsible. These first two could be linked together, but the student still faces the possibility of two more exams, one to get into college and another to determine if he or she needs remediation once there. Four separate exams, all to determine if the student is college-ready.

Everyone loses in this game. The state has to pay for the student to take the classes twice. High schools and teachers live in a world of uncertainty around standards for preparation. The community and regional colleges that enroll the vast majority of students needing remediation are blamed for the poor persistence and graduation rates. Most importantly, the student is implicitly lied to, pushed out the door of one school unprepared for the next. It’s the old college lie.

Update: Linda Perlstein came to pretty much the same conclusion with some perspective from her time writing about schools and students.

Tagged as: Alignment, College- and Career-Ready, Remedial Courses