Public schools only have one job: prepare students for college or a career.
Yet, far too many students are being shortchanged because the majority of them are not ready for college when they arrive.
Florida required unprepared students to enroll in classes intended to help them catch up with their peers – until 2014, when a new law greatly diminished the role of developmental education, sometimes called remediation.
Basically, the new law left it up to students to decide whether they take remedial classes, (which carry no college credit.)
As a result, students who are not ready for college-level work nevertheless are allowed to plunge right into regular college courses.
How did that work out?
Last year, researchers at Florida State University’s Center for Postsecondary Success found that at Miami Dade College enrollment in developmental math classes decreased by 42 percent and pass rates declined from 55.7 percent to 46.8 percent in the same period.
Moreover, half the students at two colleges not only passed up remediation, they opted out of taking math, reading, or writing courses in the first semester completely.
Given that the main reason for revamping developmental education was the claim that not enough students succeeded after taking the classes, those are not good signs.
The primary problem is that college professors are expected to teach kids in eight weeks what the government schools did not teach them in 13 years.
Why lawmakers decided to assume that government schools suddenly would begin doing their job is puzzling. Apparently, they thought that if you are spending $20 billion a year on something you should get good results.
Before the new law, 78 percent of Florida's community college students and 55 percent of all college students took at least one developmental education course (in 2005-2006). However, only about one in four managed to finish college in eight years.
Legislators apparently considered that an indication that developmental education was not working.
But, how well will the least prepared do without even that effort?
The new push is “co-requisite remediation,” meaning students go into regular courses in which they also are brought up to speed. But what is that presumably slow pace going to do to the attention level of brighter students?
FSU continues compiling data it hopes will answer such questions.
Toby Park, assistant professor at FSU, said the multi-year study already is showing that the net proportion of incoming cohorts of students passing college-level courses has increased. However, developmental education may still benefit students who come to college significantly unprepared. They expect to issue a new report in the next few weeks with the latest data.
To date, the evidence “paints a nuanced picture of decreased student success on some measures and increased success on others,” one FSU report said.
In the Utopia that socialists keep promising, colleges may not need to repeat the work of the K-12 schools. Until that happy time, those the system has failed need help and it is not yet clear that the 2014 changes are working.
Lloyd Brown was in the newspaper business nearly 50 years, beginning as a copy boy and retiring as editorial page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. After retirement he served as a policy analyst for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
