I’ve
known Norton Grubb for some time and have long admired his wide-ranging and
keen intelligence on so many issues in American education: from vocationalism
to finance to remedial education. He and I have been thinking about remedial
education for decades and pretty much agree down the line – though, as he once
pointed out to me, I tend to see things in more of a glass half-full kind of
way. But this new book of his has that glass-half-full quality to it, for as
critical as it is, it is also full of suggestions – for we are at a time when a
lot of terrific people are doing innovative work in remedial education, and
Grubb and his coauthor, Bob Gabriner, draw generously on it.
Basic
Skills Education in Community Colleges is one of the rare studies of higher
education that takes us inside the classroom, in this case, community college
basic skills classrooms. (“The classroom is a complex place, with much more
going on than the simple interaction of teacher and student—and even that
interaction itself is far from simple.”) Grubb has written extensively on the
community college, and Gabriner has a long career working in higher education.
Together they provide in just over 200 pages a comprehensive overview of the
problems with instruction in remedial writing, reading, English as a second
language, and mathematics and a set of recommendations for improving
remediation.
In
the book, Grubb and Gabriner discuss the range of issues that land students in
remedial classrooms (from poor previous education to erroneous placement
testing) but explore as well the range of institutional problems that stand in
the way of these students’ success: outdated instructional methods to
ineffective use of resources. The book is rich in both policy analysis and
snippets of interviews with students, faculty, and administrators. The reader
gets a palpable sense of the complexity of what the authors call “the quandary
of basic skills.”
But
the book also offers a number of ways out of the quandary. Drawing on work that
is currently being done in the community colleges across California (home to
about one-tenth of all the community colleges in the United States), Grubb and
Gabriner detail a wide range of innovations in curriculum and instruction, in
assessment, in the use of student support services, and in budgeting. So Grubb
and Gabriner’s book is not only a critique but is also a guide to improvement.
At
its core, Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges a call to
thoroughly reassess remediation in a way that will lead to more students
receiving an education that befits a democratic society. The authors’ closing
paragraph nicely sums up this vision:
In
the end, the educational institutions we build as a nation reflect the
priorities we have, particularly for publicly supported education. If we want
schooling to serve simply as a filter, identifying the students whose prior
preparation has been the strongest and whose family and community influences
are the most consistent with academic success, then we can develop—indeed, we
have developed—a system that acts as a series of gates or barriers to success
for those who are least prepared. But if we want our institutions to be truly
developmental at every stage and level, then we need a system that takes
improvement in basic skills education as seriously as any other activity. Such
a system would produce and support institutions worthy of being considered
truly educational.
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