Before too much time goes by, I want to give kudos to Nancy Mitchell and Burt Hubbard of the Rocky Mountain News for their excellent story Monday about remediation rates for Colorado high school graduates enrolling in college. The crux of the problem is captured in this sentence:
At (Denver’s) Abraham Lincoln High School, the number of graduates attending a Colorado college or university over three years has nearly doubled – along with the school’s remediation rate.
Exactly. In typical school reform fashion, schools have felt tremendous pressure to ratchet up their college matriculation rates. It’s all the rage around the nation, and in theory, it’s a good idea. But unless and until high schools actually change what they’re doing with kids, the results will be exactly what the Rocky story points out. More kids enrolling, but most of them needing remediation and many of them quitting in frustration.
In addition to providing extra tutoring and basic skills instruction to get kids to proficiency, how about also increasing Career and Technical Education offering for kids who might not be college bound? Every kid should have the opportunity to go to college, but it’s foolish to act as though they will all go. There have to be other pathways to a successful life.
I’ll leave you with one final statistic from the story:
For example, consider that Denver’s West High School enrolled 569 students in fall 2004. Four years later, 52 West graduates enrolled in a Colorado college or university. Of those, 42 students needed at least one remedial course. That leaves 10 graduates of West who attended a state school who were fully prepared for college classes.
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