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.

Professor X Redux: A Condescending Essay Becomes a Condescending Book

Several years back, Atlantic Monthly published an essay by an anonymous “Professor X” (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”) lamenting the quality of “non-traditional” students and questioning our nation’s push to send increasing numbers of people to college, even though they might be academically underprepared. I wrote a series of blog entries on the essay and on the issues it raises (see entries from June 8 to July 24, 2008. As well, see a later entry “Unpacking the College-for-all versus Occupational Training Debate” October 8, 2010.)

I also wrote a letter to Atlantic Monthly which the editors did not publish. Let me print it here, for it turns out that the essay has grown into a book, just published. And the letter suits it.

Dear Editor:

Like Professor X (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” June, 2008), I too am frustrated, weary, at my wits’ end—but by the ever presence of articles like his. Almost every time “nontraditional” college students appear in the pages of magazines such as The Atlantic…or Harpers, or the NYT magazine, they are represented as failures who are compromising the integrity of post-secondary education.

I taught writing and literature for a number of years in a variety of programs for nontraditional students. People like Professor X’s open-faced cop and the ill-prepared Ms. L. populated my classes. Some didn’t do so well, but many did. And my experience is not at all unique.

Professor X seems well intentioned and attuned to the struggles his students have with his curriculum—and he is on the money in his criticism of his institutions’ culpability in his students’ dilemma. But he never turns a critical eye to his own curriculum. Take, just as one example, his use of the traditional research paper, an assignment that, in his words, few people would ever have to replicate in their workaday lives. If what he wants his students to achieve is some skill in doing systematic research and a sense of the complexity of history, there are a lot of other assignments he could devise, ones that draw on—rather than resist—his students’ backgrounds and career goals, that bring the humanities more meaningfully and deeply into their lives.

Since the professor teaches literature, let’s also consider his depiction of the characters in his set piece. His students have no, or severely limited, mental lives. Their emotions register on their faces, they groan or quip in boredom, they struggle haplessly, they haven’t read many books. But these people solve problems daily; navigate work and school and family; write and read (despite the professor’s characterization of them as semi-literate) as part of their jobs, hobbies, religious observations, and interactions with the state. None of this is tapped in the professor’s tale, and some of it could be turned to literary ends.

There are a lot of people who enter some form of post-secondary education poorly prepared. But their stores are more complex, more varied, richer than the chronicle of despair that we so often get. Please do better by them.

Mike Rose

Los Angeles

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I get guilty pleasure imagining the publicity campaign for the book. Will the author’s publicist arrange masked book signings? Will he appear behind a curtain on television or have his voice disguised on the radio? This kind of anonymity befits a spy, or a high-class madam, or a whistle-blower (though movies have been made about Erin Brockovich and the guy who revealed price-fixing at Archer Daniels Midland). But a college professor who can’t connect to his students and criticizes the state of higher education?

There’s a slew of books and reports that are brutal on the state of higher ed. Professor X’s observations are hardly new; in fact, it seems almost ritualistic for college faculty to wring their hands about the sorry preparation of their students. “Students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar.” That line could easily come from In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, but it was voiced by the president of Brown University in 1841.

The thing—the gimmick really—that makes the essay and now the book tangy is the sense that we’re getting the real inside scoop, the un-politically-correct but accurate assessment from the front lines—an assessment so bold that anonymity is required.

Professor X’s experience—his love of his subject and his frustration in trying to teach it to those who don’t share his background or passion—is a legitimate story to tell. And he can tell it in as snarky a way as he wants. It’s a free country. What is exasperating is that we rarely, if ever, read accounts in high-brow media of teachers facing the same kind of class who develop ways to reach their students or of students like Professor X’s who succeed. One reason for this absence, I’ve come to believe, is that most editors don’t come from the classes Professor X teaches. They don’t see the world from those desks. They can more easily identify with Professor X and the story line he offers. They have no reason to doubt it or to see it in a different light.

There are moments in Professor X’s account where he finds a kind of common ground with his students. Like him, they are trying to make ends meet. Like him, they have had their share of disappointments. And both professor and students don’t have much power in their compact. He, after all, is an adjunct faculty member. He would claim his status as justification for his anonymity—and, ok, he might be right. (Though if colleges are as indifferent as he claims, they might not care as long as they can staff one more section of freshman comp.) I only wish that these moments of emotional and existential connection could have translated into an intellectual grasp of the real pedagogical challenge before him and led him to a more generous and creative response to the students struggling to make sense of Joyce, and Faulkner, and the traditional research paper.