Another semester has come and gone, my classes at
half-strength by the end and the numbers for next fall looking shaky. The first weeks of summer break give me time
for reflection on how to go about my business better.
People from across the profession wring their hands,
wondering how to help students be successful and finish AA degrees or
certificate programs or transfer to four-year schools. Money and jobs and a great deal of emotional
investment are at stake. And, as anyone
in the business world will tell you, keeping customers, as our students all too
often are called these days, is easier and cheaper than winning new ones.
The so-called achievement gap is not new, however, arising
out of the sixties as more young people entered college, abetted by open
enrollment in community colleges and expansive financial aid programs. Persistent gaps between races and classes
have troubled us, many solutions tried, but none have altered the fundamental
situation.
We recognize that students growing up in poor or working
class homes lacked the mentoring and expectations middle class parents
provided. Studies of family life reveal
that parents of different classes interact with their children differently,
middle class parents much more engaged verbally with their children than the
poor and working class parents, who are happy when they can pay their bills and
sit down for an evening to relax (Hart & Risley, 2002; Lareau, 2011). Paul Tough has recently suggested that “we”
train those parents to interact more verbally with their very young children
(2016) to overcome class differences that begin before Kindergarten.
The relative lack of verbal interaction means youngsters of
working class and poor families frequently lack knowledge and skills required
to progress with classmates in reading and math. As early as the fourth grade, this knowledge
gap asserts itself, and many never
catch up. Think about that for a
moment. Fourth grade!
Reinforcing the larger environmental issue is a recent
release of a book by Richard Rothstein, a research assistant at the Economic
Policy Institute and former NY Times Education columnist, co-published by EPI
and Columbia University’s Teachers College, former home of John Dewey.
The announcement summarizes Rothstein’s argument: “blaming the [achievement] gap mostly on failing
schools is a mistake because it diverts attention from the need to address the
economic and social gaps between children that thwart academic potential long
before school starts.” What a
surprise!
My view of the matter is that focusing on schools as the
solution for the fallout from economic and social inequities allows
us to avoid a real discussion about the justice of capitalism as we currently practice it. With the Marxist alternatives discredited,
the critique by the Church the subject only of occasional headlines, the
worship of wealth in some of the evangelical community, the impending
nomination of a braggadocio billionaire, Hilary's dalliance with Wall Street, the bombast from Bernie, we might get angry, but we aren’t conversing about what to do. Recently, Thomas Pickety made some
suggestions about interrupting the inevitability of what he claims is an inherent concentration of wealth. Since they involve taxing the wealth as well
as the income of the upper 5%, it’s no wonder Pickety is yesterday’s news.
So, with typical American can-do thinking we find ourselves
working on the margins of the problem, trumpeting successes which are often
overstated (e.g., Tough, 2011). Composition
Studies is undergoing a national recalibration, transitioning to co-requisite
remediation for those who need it. For
me at North Hennepin, it means I teach a 25 student Comp I class, with 15
students who have tested into the regular class and 10 students who would
otherwise be taking a remedial or developmental writing class before being
admitted to the regular Comp I. Those 10 have me for an additional hour in a computer lab twice a week for tutoring and extra attention on assignments. The
acceleration model we’ve adapted is inspired by the folks at Community College
of Baltimore County, which claims the change promotes student persistence.
Their statistics appear to indicate this. To take the latest of three cohorts they
publish numbers on, 2012, 37% of their ALP (Accelerate Learning Program)
students earned 24 credits over a two-year period vs. only 14% of students who
did not opt for the ALP approach ("New CCBC Student Data," 2014).
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that mature programs elsewhere would
accomplish comparable feats, 2.5 times more students would complete 24 credits
than would otherwise, a boon to the students reaching for a college degree and
to their colleges and instructors who are scrambling for warm bodies these
days. Additionally, the co-requisite
approach, according to a preliminary study by the Community College Research
Center, appears to be a more efficient, therefore more cost-effective,
instructional approach (Belfield, 2016).
All good news, of course.
Any increase is good.
However, questions remain.
Since CCBC’s numbers only account for the intervention, there is no
analysis of possible confounding factors that may be in play. The English Department is playing the
correlation equals causation game, which even English teachers should know is
logically fallacious. Since fewer than
half of CCBC’s students opt for ALP, we would want to know what differentiates
them from the others. We would want to
know if there are differentiators associated with retention and achievement in
the more successful group versus the less successful, and so on, before we
could conclude that ALP is the reason
for their success.
Secondly, while twenty-four credits in two years is great
for part time students (89% of CCBC’s students), it’s less than half way to an
AA degree. Unlike Minnesota, which
features a “transfer curriculum” that enables students a straightforward
transfer into four-year state colleges (supposedly), Maryland apparently lacks
a formal approach to easing students’ path to a bachelor’s degree. Consequently, CCBC doesn’t appear to have
information on such a program. In
Minnesota it is 40 credits, requiring if applied to CCBC students another semester plus for those students
moving on and up. We don’t know from
CCBC’s numbers how many students in this cohort were able to take that
option. We actually aren’t given any
completion or transfer statistics in the ALP web page.
Undoubted success, significant in some ways, but not likely
to be a panacea. A step forward, though. Can the gains be carried forward
long-term? We need to wait and see. In the meantime, we look for ways to improve,
both in the classroom and in the institution, but in the larger socio-economic
ecology? Not likely.
References
Belfield, C.,
Jenkins, D., & Lahr, H. (2014, September). Is Corequisite Remediation
Cost-Effective? Early Findings From Tennessee. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from
http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/can-community-colleges-afford-to-improve-completion.html
Hart, B., &
Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the Everyday Experience of
Young American Children. Baltimore: P.H. Brookes.
Lareau, A.
(2011). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
New CCBC Student
Data: ALP Students Earning More Credits Than Students Who Take Traditional
Developmental Writing Classes. (2014, November 11). Retrieved May 27, 2016,
from http://alp-deved.org/2014/11/new-ccbc-student-data-alp-students-earning-credits-students-take-traditional-developmental-writing-classes/
Piketty, T.
(2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.).
Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Tough, P. (2011,
July 7). No, Seriously: No Excuses. New York Times. Retrieved May 26,
2016.
Tough, P. (2016,
May 21). To Help Kids Thrive, Coach Their Parents. NY Times. Retrieved
May 21, 2016.
