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testing) but explore as well the range of institutional problems that stand in the way of these students’ success: outdated instructional methods to ineffective use of resources.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

            This is a companion piece to “Saving the Poor with Science.” An abbreviated version of it was published in Education Week on January 16, 2013.

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Giving Cognition a Bad Name

            Cognition traditionally refers to a wide and rich range of mental processes, from memory and attention, to comprehending and using language, to solving a difficult problem in physics or choreography or living with someone. But over the last few decades cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, cognition in education policy has increasingly come to mean the skills measured by standardized tests of reading and mathematics. And as economists have gotten more involved in education, they’ve needed quantative measures of cognitive ability and academic achievement for their analytical models, so they’ve used I.Q. or other standardized test scores (like the Armed Forces Qualification Test or AFQT) as a proxy for intelligence or achievement. From the Latin cognoscere, to come to know, or cogito erqo sum, I think therefore I am, we’ve devolved to a few digits on the AFQT.

           

            As if that were not enough, there is now emerging on a number of fronts – nicely summarized in Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed – a belief that our nation’s educational focus on cognition has been misguided. Rather than focusing our energies on the academic curriculum – or on academic intervention programs for the poor – we need to turn our attention to the development of qualities of character or personality like perseverance, self-monitoring, and flexibility. As much or more than the cognitive, the argument goes, it is these qualities that account for success in school and life.

            It is healthy to be reminded about the fuller scope of education in our test- and grade-obsessed culture, and I must admit a guilty pleasure in watching someone as smart as Nobel Laureate James Heckman (one of the advocates for character education) go after our current Department of Education’s reductive academic policies.

            The importance of qualities like perseverance and flexibility are indisputable, but what concerns me is that the advocates for character accept without question the reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies, and by accepting it further affirm it. The problem is exacerbated by the aforementioned way economists carve up and define mental activity. If cognition is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not captured in those scores – like the desired qualities of character – is, de facto, non-cognitive. We’re now left with a pinched notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot.

This downplaying of the cognitive and the construction of the cognitive/non-cognitive binary will have some troubling implications for education, especially the education of the children of the poor.

To begin with, the labeling of character qualities as “non-cognitive” misrepresents them – particularly if you use the truer, richer notion of cognition. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state – a profoundly cognitive activity. Flexibility demands a weighing of options and decision-making. This is not just a problem of terminology, for if you don’t have an accurate description of something, how can you help people develop it, especially if you want to scale up your efforts?

Furthermore, these desired qualities are developed over time in settings and relationships that are meaningful to the participants, which most likely means that the settings and relationships will have significant cognitive content. Two of the classic pre-school programs that have provided a research base for the character advocates – the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian Projects – were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language use, and activities that required thought and cooperation.

A very different example comes from a study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they were doing and help others do it. You could be by inclination the most dogged or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with a garment or an engine, you’re tendencies won’t be realized in a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.

 Also, we have to consider the consequences of this cognitive/ non-cognitive binary in light of the history of American educational practice. We have a powerful tendency toward either/or policies – think of old math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given this tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away from the academic and toward character education. And over the past fifty years attempts at character education as a distinct pursuit have not been particularly successful.

Finally, the focus of the current character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive domain. There’s a stirring moment in Paul Tough’s book where a remarkable chess teacher decides she’s going to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an admissions test for New York’s selective high schools. What she found was that this stunningly bright boy had learned pitifully little academic knowledge during his eight years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a strong academic education for children like him.

By all means, let us take a hard look at our national obsession with tests and scores and grades, and let us think more generously about what kinds of people we want our schools to develop. Part of such reconsideration would include a reclaiming of the full meaning of cognition, a meaning that is robust and vitally intellectual, intimately connected to character and social development, and directed toward the creation of a better world.

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