Reformists din their lament that America’s public schools turn out so few graduates who are ready for higher education, witness the number (presumably unprecedentedly higher) of students who must take some sort of remedial (bonehead) classes. Academic standards are in free-fall. The public schools, which once served well the nation’s youth, are in precipitous decline. Immediate and drastic measures are the nation’s only hope, the Reformists tell us. Public education must be re-invented from the ground up. If you watch television, or listen to the radio, or read a newspaper or a news magazine, you know the litany.
Yet, in The Journal of Higher Education, January, 1957, we find an article by Kenneth E. Eble, “The Burden of Bonehead.” Even in 1957, Eble says that “remedial courses are nothing new in the college curriculum… But in recent years, more and more of a college faculty’s time has been devoted to meeting the needs of entering Freshmen who read badly, write poorly, and figure inaccurately, if at all.” Eble goes on to say “The problem of the deficient student is one that appears at all levels of American education. With the greatly expanding college enrollments, it promises to become one of the major problems of higher education.” Blame elementary and secondary public education? “That rationalization has too long provided an easy out… for all those who know what is wrong with the public schools.” He says that the unprepared student is becoming a problem at all levels of education, including post-secondary. “The public school teacher has always had to work with the dullard.” http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.2307/1978095?mlt=true
This was 1957. But the problem has gotten so much worse, Reformists tell us.
Perhaps. Yet in another article, “What Happened to the Boneheads,” The News Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, August, 1960, Eble tells us that in 1956-57, 1100 out of some 2300 Freshmen at the University of Utah were in some remedial class. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1346296
I am not suggesting that high school graduates not ready for college are not a problem. I am suggesting that it is by no means a recent problem, and it is not without its complexities. Today’s alarming figures are often based on community college remediation rates. These are students who wouldn’t have sought post-secondary education before such institutions were available and might well not have been accepted by a university. (The Boise, ID area, it should be noted, has had a two-year community college for only two years). Yet Eble was citing figures for The University of Utah, not for a community college.
Placement tests are usually norm-referenced, not criterion-referenced. Students are judged by comparison with other students on the bell curve, not competence in specific academic tasks. My teaching career began in 1963 with English A, “Bonehead,” at the University of Nevada. The English Department had its own home-grown multiple-choice, norm-referenced placement test with a cut score. Students also wrote an essay, but it is my recollection that it was seldom looked at. Students in my classes, based on their writing, ranged from semi-literate to “what are you doing here?” Thus it had been for many years, and it may still be. Several years ago, one of my students matriculated at UNR. On the basis of the placement test, she was relegated to a remedial section. When she complained to the Director of Freshman English, she was told that test result were final and the sole determinant – unless, of course, she could document her alleged proficiency by submitting a portfolio of past work for evaluation. Fortunately, she never threw away her old papers. Her mother sent her folders by overnight mail, and she assembled a portfolio that got her placed in an honors section. I was not surprised.
As ever, Demographic issues raise their ugly heads. Education News, Colorado cites remediation rates according to the high school that students graduated from. Five schools with the highest remediation rates of 50% or more also had poverty rates of 60% or more. Five schools with the lowest rates, 20% or less, had low poverty rates, 7.5% or less, with one exception, The Denver School of Science and Technology. I suspect that this school might not be truly comparable, if students must deliberately seek it out and/or if the school gets to select its students. Does Family Income Matter? Perhaps it does.