A Review of Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges: Inside and Outside of Classrooms, W. Norton Grubb with Robert Gabriner

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testing) but explore as well the range of institutional problems that stand in the way of these students’ success: outdated instructional methods to ineffective use of resources.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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Remediation at a Crossroads

My last few posts have dealt with K-12 school reform. With this entry, I shift to an important and pressing area of post-secondary policy and reform, one that has particular relevance to the more vulnerable among us. This was originally published in Inside Higher Ed, April 21,2011.

The young woman in the hoodie behind me whispers “cried” to her friend, whose head is resting on her folded arms. “Wrote,” head-resting woman whispers to herself as the teacher goes down a list of sentences on an overhead screen. “Repeated,” “ate,” “swam,” they and the two other students in their row answer softly, in between light chatter.

I am visiting the most basic class of a community college remedial English sequence, and the teacher is reviewing verb tense by having her students convert a list of verbs from present tense to past. No one seems to be having any trouble with the exercise. The quartet behind me does it under-breath while catching up on their day-to-day. They might make errors in tense in their writing, but they won’t be writing anything longer than a paragraph until they take the next course in the remedial sequence. Unfortunately, a number of students in such classes won’t make it through the series to get to fuller writing assignments of the kind they have to do in their other classes.

This little episode reveals some of the problems with college remediation as it is typically executed. It is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate, like the belief that focusing on isolated grammar exercises will help students write better prose. The work students are doing isn’t connected to the writing they are required to do in their other courses, academic or vocational. Going beyond the standard remedial playbook—if the instructor were so inclined—would be a big challenge, not only because she lacks training, but also because she has no time; like so many of her peers, she is teaching at two other colleges to try to make a living. The sequence of three, even four, lockstep non-credit courses established to help students build proficiency is based on the same flawed notion of language growth that limits the curriculum of the courses in the sequence. The textbook market, college requirements, and departmental structures all further reinforce the standard remedial model.

For quite a while some teachers of basic or remedial writing have been working against the grain, creating challenging curricula that directly foster the kinds of writing skills and habits of mind needed for success in college. Or developing programs that link a writing course to a content course to provide a meaningful context for writing. Or placing those students who test low into credit-bearing freshman composition and providing additional support.

But now we are at a watershed moment when not only individuals and programs are trying to do something fresh with remediation, but national attention—public and philanthropic—is focused on the issue as well.

The big question is whether we will truly seize this moment and create for underprepared students a rich education in literacy and numeracy, or make some partial changes—more online instruction, shortened course sequences—but leave the remedial model intact. To make significant change, we’ll need to understand all the interlocking pieces of the remediation puzzle, something we’re not oriented to do, for our disciplinary and methodological training and public policy toolkit work against a comprehensive view of the problem.

Most higher education policy research on remediation does not include historical analysis of the beliefs about cognition and instruction that inform curriculum. In fact, there’s not a lot of close analysis of what goes on in classrooms, the cognitive give and take of instruction and what students make of it. And I’m not aware of any policy research crafted with the aid of people who actually teach those classes. Finally, we don’t get much of a sense of the texture of students’ lives, the terrible economic instability of some of them, but even less of a sense of the power of learning new things and, through that learning, redefining who you are. Profiles of students in remedial classes, when we do get them, are too often profiles of failure rather than of people with dynamic mental lives.

Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos. Let me give you one example of how mind-boggling, and I think harmful, this intellectual isolation can become. In all the articles I’ve read on remediation in higher education journals, not one cites the 40 years’ worth of work on basic writing produced by teachers and researchers of writing. There is even a Journal of Basic Writing that emerged out of the experiments with open admission at CUNY in the 1970s. Not a mention of any of it. Zip.

In addition to disciplinary silos, there are methodological silos. You won’t find a randomized control trial in the 130-plus issues of the Journal of Basic Writing, and that for some is sufficient reason to ignore them. But if we hope to really do something transformational with remediation, we’ll need all the wisdom we can garner, from multiple disciplines and multiple methodologies, from multiple lines of sight.

Along with a wider scope of inquiry we will need a bountiful philosophy of education –and the leadership to enact it. At the same time that there is a push to get more low-income people into postsecondary education, cash-strapped states are cutting education budgets, leading colleges to limit enrollments and cut classes and student services. In my state of California (and I’m sure in other states as well) some policy makers are wondering—not fully in public—if we can no longer afford to educate everybody, if we should ration our resources, directing them toward those who are already better prepared for college. We have here the makings in education of a distinction the historian Michael Katz notes in the discourse on poverty, a distinction between those deserving and undeserving of assistance. In the midst of a powerful anti-government, anti-welfare-state climate, will there be the political courage to stand against the rationing of educational opportunity?

The democratic philosophy I envision would among other things guide us to see in basic skills instruction the rich possibility for developing literacy and numeracy and for realizing the promise of a second-chance society. Such a philosophy affirms the ability of the common person and guides instruction that goes beyond the acquisition of fundamental skills and routine toward an understanding of their meaning and application, the principles underlying them, and the broader habits of mind that incorporates them. In such instruction, error becomes an intellectual entry point. If a young adult is having trouble with fractions, for example, how did his misunderstandings and flawed procedures develop? What formal or informal mathematical knowledge does he have that can be tapped? How does one access that cognitive history and lead the student to analyze and remedy it?

The de facto philosophy of education we do have is a strictly economic one. This is dangerous, for without a civic and moral core it could easily lead to a snazzy 21^st century version of an old and shameful pattern in American education: Working-class people get a functional, skills-and-drills education geared toward lower-level work. To be sure, the people who are the focus of current college initiatives are going to school to improve their economic prospects. As one woman put it so well: “It’s a terrible thing to not have any money.” But people also go to college to feel their mind working, to remedy a poor education, to redefine who they are. You won’t hear any of this in the national talk about post-secondary access and success. For all the hope and opportunity they represent, our initiatives lack the kind of creativity and heartbeat that transform institutions and foster the unrealized ability of a full sweep of our citizenry.

The Smithsonian of Basic Skills

This is a commentary that was published earlier this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve been involved in college-level remedial or basic skills education for most of my career, as a teacher, developer of curriculum, program administrator, or researcher. And I am once again participating in a study that includes basic skills instruction. After all these years, I continue to be struck by the way social class biases and disciplinary and institutional status dynamics keep restricting our pedagogical imagination. We need a sea-change in the way we think about instruction in basic skills.

In this commentary I try to jostle us into thinking differently and particularly to see the class bases at play in our society’s typical approach to remedial education. I draw on some of our grand symbols of intellectual achievement—the Smithsonian, Nobel Laureates—to help in this tweaking of perception. See what you think.

* * *

The nation has woken up to the fact that a large number of Americans of high-school age and older are unable to read, write, or do mathematics beyond an elementary level, and that the limitation profoundly restricts their opportunity to pursue further schooling or occupational training. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently completed an in-depth study of the problem in California community colleges, and the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have been committing research-and-development money to help underprepared young adults succeed in college. The issue is also on the agenda of the president and the Department of Education.

But, important as such efforts are, they do not get to the heart of the problem. We need something grander and more comprehensive, something that will lead to a conceptual sea change in the way the nation understands and deals with the issue of academic underpreparation.

I propose that a wealthy foundation or consortium of foundations support with great fanfare a National Center for the Study and Teaching of Basic Skills. Such a center would have a long-term effect on education, social justice, and economic prosperity.

I have worked in and studied what is variously called "basic skills," "remedial education," or "developmental education" for 40 years, and it is clear to me that—on par with inadequate financial support—the biggest problems facing the work are status and status-quo thinking. Many people, particularly in the academic departments where future instructors do their graduate study, see the teaching of basic skills as grunt work. Furthermore, basic skills are taught to the intellectually stigmatized, those students who, unlike their instructors, have done poorly in the subjects and possibly failed them. To make matters worse, a significant amount of basic-skills teaching is done by part-time instructors—people with little status themselves.

Such problems of status and institutional structure interact with flawed beliefs about cognition and motivation that run throughout basic-skills instruction. One of those flawed beliefs is that the way to remedy a problem is to focus on the smallest units of the problem—in the case of writing, it would be rules of grammar, often treated out of context in a workbook or in an entire course focused only on the sentence. In such settings, students don't get to work with language in a way consonant with the intellectual and rhetorical demands of the writing they will have to do in college. Another false belief is that underprepared students' motivation and self-esteem will be hurt by a more-challenging curriculum. That is a one-dimensional, not to mention patronizing, understanding of motivation. There's no scientific basis for such beliefs, but they persist.

I can say without reservation that basic-skills work represents as rich an area of study and as intellectually engaging an arena of teaching as you'll find. If a young adult is having trouble with fractions, for example, how did his misunderstandings and flawed procedures develop? What formal or informal mathematical knowledge does he have that can be tapped? How does one access that cognitive history and lead the student to analyze and remedy it? How, then, does one proceed to teach in a way appropriate to an adult with that history? Suddenly we are dealing not only with a challenging instructional problem, but also with a number of fascinating issues in mathematics education, cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and social theory.

Furthermore, basic-skills instruction, if done well, requires a serious consideration of disciplinary basics that tend to be taken for granted. In teaching remedial writing, I have found myself thinking about and trying to explain the origins and purpose of the conventions of literacy—such as grammar and other mechanics, and written forms like the list, the chart, and the narrative. And there's the connection between the solitary act of writing and the audience. And the complex relationship between speech and writing. But we tend not to appreciate the intellectual content of the work, because of professional and institutional bias.

Thus we need an institution devoted to basic-skills education that is equal to our great national intellectual and cultural institutions. A Smithsonian of Basic Skills. A National Science Foundation of Remediation. We should start with a news conference at the White House. Place the center in a grand old building. Pack its advisory board with Nobel laureates. Do whatever it takes symbolically to unsettle our entrenched class-based tunnel vision about this work.

But the real action would come once the center was up and running. Educators are doing effective and exciting work in basic-skills classrooms and programs across the country, and the center would document and disseminate those exemplars. The center would also bring together subject-area experts and successful teachers to develop curricula, particularly across disciplines. Today there is great interest, for example, in integrating mathematics and reading-and-writing instruction into diverse subjects—introductory social sciences, health care, the construction trades—but it is hard to do in a substantial way. English majors aren't trained to talk with sociologists, let alone welders, so the center would become a think tank in teaching across disciplines.

Along with the limitations of standard-fare curriculum, underprepared students often get stuck with an ossified sequence of remedial courses. So a number of colleges are experimenting with an accelerated sequence, or with the aforementioned attempts to embed basic-skills instruction into subject-area courses, or with various concurrent-enrollment arrangements with local high schools. The center would provide guidance to colleges trying to create such structural change.

It would also take the lead in bringing to the policy arena the fundamental but neglected issues of teaching and learning, for the basic-skills constituency alone has little political clout. And the center would award teaching fellowships and stipends, both to recruit promising young people into the field and to enhance the career development of those with proven talent.

Like the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the center would support or organize programs for the public. Some of those programs would be regional, perhaps in libraries or occupational centers. And some would be national—including public-radio and -television productions, like documentaries on exceptional basic-skills programs; or, in another vein, animated specials with Pixar-style whimsy: A Brief History of Punctuation or The Short, Happy Life of the List.

Some people will contend that our nation's efforts should go toward eradicating the need for remediation, not enshrining it. Of course we need to be doing everything possible to improve elementary and secondary education. But it is magical thinking to believe that all children will be "at grade level" or "college ready" in a decade, as promised by Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, the two major federal school-reform initiatives of our era. At no time in our history, or the history of any industrialized nation, has that goal been achieved. As long as we have inequality of resources and opportunity in America, we will need to provide multiple occasions for people to gain what eluded them earlier.

If we do this work well, with adequate resources and serious intellectual commitment, we would improve our ability to democratize knowledge without trivializing it, and make it accessible to a broad sweep of our citizenry.

EXCERPT FROM WHY SCHOOL?: A STUDENT IN A COMMUNITY COLLEGE BASIC SKILLS PROGRAM

Here is a passage from Why School?, a portrait of a man with a disability in a community college basic skills program. I hope you like it.

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Food wrappers and sheets of newspaper were blowing in the wet wind across the empty campus. It was late in the day, getting dark fast, and every once in a while I’d look outside the library – which was pretty empty too – and imagine the drizzly walk to the car, parked far away.

Anthony was sitting by me, and I was helping him read a flyer on the dangers of cocaine. He wanted to give it to his daughter. Anthony was enrolled in a basic skills program, one of several special programs at this urban community college. Anthony was in his late-thirties, had some degree of brain damage from a childhood injury, worked custodial jobs most of his life. He could barely read or write, but was an informed, articulate guy, listening to FM radio current affairs shows while he worked, watching public television at home. He had educated himself through the sources available to him, compensating for the damage done.

The librarian was about to go off shift, so we gathered up our things – Anthony carried a big backpack – and headed past her desk to the exit. The wind pushed back on the door as I pushed forward, and I remember thinking how dreary the place was, dark and cold. At that moment I wanted so much to be home.

Just then a man in a coat and tie came up quickly behind us. “Hey man,” he said to Anthony, “you look good. You lose some weight?” Anthony beamed, said that he had dropped a few pounds and that things were going o.k. The guy gave Anthony a cupping slap on the shoulder, then pulled his coat up and walked head down across the campus.

“Who was that?,” I asked, ducking with Anthony back inside the entryway to the library. He was one of the deans, Anthony said, but, well, he was once his parole officer, too. He’s seen Anthony come a long way. Anthony pulled on the straps of his backpack, settling the weight more evenly across his shoulders. “I like being here,” he said in his soft, clear voice. “I know it can’t happen by osmosis. But this is where it’s at.”

I’ve thought about this moment off and on for twenty years. I couldn’t wait to get home, and Anthony was right at home. Fresh from reading something for his daughter, feeling the clasp on his shoulder of both his past and his future, for Anthony a new life was emerging on the threshold of a chilly night on a deserted campus.

These few minutes remind me of how humbling work with human beings can be. How we’ll always miss things. How easily we get distracted – my own memories of cold urban landscapes overwhelmed the moment.

But I also hold onto this experience with Anthony for it contains so many lessons about development, about resilience and learning, about the power of hope and a second chance. It reminds us too of the importance of staying close to the ground, of finding out what people are thinking, of trying our best – flawed though it will be – to understand the world as they see it… and to be ready to revise our understanding. This often means taking another line of sight on what seems familiar, seeing things in a new light.

And if we linger with Anthony a while longer, either in the doorway or back inside at a library table, we might get the chance to reflect on the basic question of what school is for, the purpose of education. What brought Anthony back to the classroom after all those years? To help his economic prospects, certainly. Anthony wanted to trade in his mop and pail for decent pay and a few benefits. But we also get a glimpse as to why else he’s here. To be able to better guide his daughter. To be more proficient in reading about the events swirling around him – to add reading along with radio and television to his means of examining the world. To create a new life for himself, nurture this emerging sense of who he can become.

Colleges Need to Re-Mediate Remediation

My entry this week is a reprint of something condensed from my new book (Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us) for The Chronicle of Higher Education, published on August 3, 2009. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recognize some of this text from an entry on remedial writing that I posted in July 2008.

***

Kevin had a story similar to those of many young men from my old neighborhood. He was a good student in poor schools with dated textbooks, scarce resources for enrichment, and high teacher turnover. Seduced by street life, he got into trouble and spent most of his 16th year in a juvenile camp.

Upon release, he went back to school, worked hard, graduated, did miserably on the SAT, and went to college through a special-admissions program. I had helped develop the writing component of that program, and I taught in it. Kevin's first piece of college writing, the placement exam, was disorganized, vague, and peppered with grammatical errors. That is the kind of writing that we see in news accounts of remedial students and that politicians cite as an example of how higher education is being compromised.

And such writing is troubling. If Kevin's writing remained the same, he—like many students taking remedial classes today—would probably not make it through college. But a good part of the problem results from how we approach remediation in the first place.

The traditional remedial writing course typically begins with simple writing assignments and includes a fair number of workbook exercises, mostly focused on grammar and usage.. The readings are fairly basic, in both style and content. Powerful—and limiting—assumptions about language, learning, and cognition drive such a curriculum, although they might not be articulated: Students like Kevin must go back to linguistic square one, building skills slowly through the elements of grammar.

Simple reading and writing assignments won't overly tax such students' abilities and will allow a concentration on correcting linguistic errors. Complex, demanding work and big ideas—college work—should be put on hold until they master the basics.

No wonder remediation gets such a bad rap.

At my institution, we created another type of remediation program for students like Kevin—one that held to a different set of assumptions, which we had come to from reading current research on language and cognition and from our classroom experience. We certainly acknowledged the trouble Kevin was in and wanted to help him improve his writing in all aspects—grammar, organization, style. But we didn't believe we needed to carve up language into small workbook bits and slowly build his skills. And in Kevin's case, we were right. By the end of the 20-week program, he was comparing the approaches to reading presented in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and analyzing the decision making in the Cuban missile crisis.

My co-workers and I first surveyed a range of lower-division courses to get a sense of the typical kinds of assignments students like Kevin faced in that crucial first year. We found similar readings from various disciplines and created assignments that helped students develop the skills to write about them. Then we sequenced the assignments from less to more difficult and made them cumulative: What a student learned in the first week fed into an assignment in the fifth week.

For example, Kevin's early assignments required him to read a passage on the history of eugenics and write a definition of it, and to read a passage with diagrams about income distribution in the United States and summarize it. That practice in defining and summarizing would come into play when he had to compare systematically the descriptions of becoming literate in Malcolm X's and Ben Franklin's autobiographies.

To assist students, we organized instruction to include much discussion of the readings and a good deal of writing in which they could try out ideas and get feedback on their work as it developed. And because many students, like Kevin, displayed all the grammatical, stylistic, and organizational problems that give rise to remedial writing courses in the first place, we spent a lot of time on errors—in class, in conference, in comments on their papers—but all in the context of their academic writing.

That is a huge point, and one that is tied to our core assumptions about cognition and language: Writing filled with grammatical errors does not preclude engagement with sophisticated intellectual material, and errors can be dealt with effectively as one works with such material.

Certainly not all students did as well as Kevin, but many did. People who want to purge college of remedial courses would say that Kevin doesn't belong. He proved them wrong. Those who hold to a traditional remedial model would worry that our assignments would be too hard and discourage him. He proved them wrong, too.

Some studies have emerged that confirm the approach we have taken. Successful remedial programs set high standards, are focused on inquiry and problem-solving in a substantial curriculum, use a pedagogy that is supportive and interactive, draw on a variety of techniques and approaches, are in line with students' goals, and provide credit for course work.

I have seen that approach work and even experienced it personally. I came out of elementary school with a dreary knowledge of mathematics and didn't pass high-school algebra. I had to take it over in the summer and barely passed it then. My SAT quantitative score was awful, my GRE score even lower. In college I avoided anything even vaguely mathematical.

Then came graduate school in educational psychology and a requirement in statistics. Educational researchers like Michael Cole, Peg Griffin, and Kris Gutiérrez refer to successful remediation as "re-mediation"—that is, changing the environment and the means through which students are taught material they had not mastered before. My story does not perfectly match the typical remedial tale: I was not retaking a course I had taken earlier in my educational career. But the situation is similar: I had failed, barely passed, or avoided math in the past and now faced a higher-level course with dismal knowledge.

The summer before I entered graduate school, I signed up for an introductory-level statistics course and hired a tutor. Having a tutor provided a major degree of assistance, some of it in basic math, although in the context of statistics. And—no small thing—she offered a relationship built around mathematics, a human face to a subject that had scared me my whole scholastic life. I was fortunate in that my graduate courses were taught by an excellent instructor who distributed to us draft chapters of a textbook he was writing, a clear and coherent text. In the text and in his lectures, the professor continually provided concrete, real-world examples. A few of us in the class formed a study group, providing another social context for learning. And during the first term, I kept in touch with my tutor, providing continuity and further, yes, remediation. I ended up doing just fine, to my great surprise and pleasure. So I know the feeling of re-mediating a subject in a manner that countered a dozen years of failure and aversion.

The key point is that remediation occurs in many ways, on many levels, involving most of us at some time or another. A fairly standard story about remedial students is one of young people with high-school diplomas or GED's mired in remedial math or English courses that they repeatedly fail. But there are other students, with different profiles. Some have mastered the material in question but need to revisit it. Some are immigrants who are building English skills. Others are seeking new careers or have served in the military and need a few basic courses. And some, like Kevin, have a less-than-privileged education but can catch up with the right intervention.

Legislators complain that they are "paying twice" for instruction in material that should have been learned earlier. Fair enough, but when remediation is done well, the material in a sense is encountered anew, in a new context, with a new curriculum and new pedagogy. For some of us, that makes all the difference in the world.

I don't deny the gravity of underpreparation or the concerns about cost—I spent too many years running programs to be blithe about resources. But the broader, important issue about remediation is the role it plays in a nation that prides itself on being a "second chance" society. An educational system as vast, complex, and flawed as ours must have mechanisms to remedy its failures. Colleges are integral to a rich system of educational development that reaches back through the schools and forward well beyond the point of graduation. It is terrible that so many students—especially those from poorer backgrounds—come to college unprepared.

But colleges can't fold their arms in a huff and try to pull away from the problem. Rather than marginalize remediation, they should invest more intellectual resources in it, making it as effective as it can be. The notion of a second chance, of building safety nets into a flawed system, offers a robust idea of education and learning: that we live in a system that acknowledges that people change, retool, grow, and need to return to old mistakes, or just to what is past and forgotten.

Remediation may be an unfortunate term for all this, as it carries with it the sense of disease, of a medical intervention. "Something that corrects an evil, a fault, or an error," notes The American Heritage Dictionary. But when done well, remediation becomes a key mechanism in a democratic model of human development.