COMMUNITY COLLEGES ARE NOT PRODUCING GRADUATES

70% of community college students fail to earn a certificate, AA degree or transfer within six years. Main Culprits? Math and English (Surprise!)

“...Math is an aggressively cumulative enterprise; miss a few teeth in your motive gears and higher gears will never turn.”

Nearly 2.8 million students are enrolled in the state’s 112 community colleges this year, making it the largest higher education system in the world. However, in their 2010 report, “Divided We Fail: Improving Completion and Closing Racial Gaps in California’s Community Colleges,” researchers Colleen Moore and Nancy Shulock found that six years after enrolling in a community college, “only 30% of degree-seeking students had completed a certificate or degree, or had transferred to a university. Most of the other 70% had dropped out; only 15% were still enrolled!

A major reason for the dramatic fall-off is the huge number of students who are unprepared for college work. According to a brief from the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, about 85% of incoming community college students aren’t prepared for college-level math, and some 70% aren’t ready for college English, even though they’ve passed the California High School Exit Exam and graduated from high school, often with respectable grade point averages. According to the aptly named report Diploma to Nowhere, four out of five students who place in developmental education had a GPA above 3.0 in high school. Kyle, a first-year student at Foothill College in Los Altos when I spoke with him a while ago, told me that his GPA was 3.7 and he nailed the exit exam on his first try as a sophomore in high school. A classmate of his had a 3.5 GPA and considered herself one of the “smart kids” in high school. Both of them flunked the math placement exam and wound up in basic skills math. “It was a shock when I came to this class and the first thing I was learning was addition and subtraction,” said Kyle.

The higher the level of developmental education, the more likely students are to try to continue.

Basic skills classes can take students anywhere from one to five semesters to complete – and that’s before they can even enroll in regular college courses needed for an AA degree or to transfer into Cal State or the University of California. Most students don’t stick with them.

An EdSource study commissioned by the state Community College Chancellor’s Office found that 54% of students who passed the lowest level of freshman composition enrolled in the next level up. But continuing that pattern over time doesn’t look so good after all. Myra Snell, a math professor at Los Medanos Community College in Pittsburg, describes spending five years revamping the school’s basic skills algebra sequence in order to boost the success rate by 10%. They did it. “I was so proud of it,” recalls Snell, but then she asked the office of institutional research to do a persistence study to see how many students who started in elementary algebra continued on to a college-level course. It was 17%.

Devastated, Snell began thinking about what happened and realized “that a student who starts in elementary algebra has five exit possibilities because they have to pass elementary algebra, choose to enroll in intermediate, pass intermediate algebra, choose to enroll in the transfer level course, and pass the transfer level course.” Along the way they lost 83 percent of their students.

What to do?

Here is a comment from a veteran math professor:

Statistical quality control might readily highlight the fact that a previous individual failure to learn the intended curriculum reverberates continually for about ten years, from the first alienating failure in long division and other decimal ” carrying ” curricula to the repeated failure to accumulate key insights and skills( math is an aggressively cumulative enterprise; miss a few teeth in your motive gears and higher gears will never turn). The late Walter Denham of the CDE used to preach this same gospel, and it seems things haven’t changed much in 20 years. As a general proposition, the evidence argues that we do not understand quite how to imbue into more than 30% of our students the antecedent schema and archetypes for Algebraic reasoning, and this fact has been stubbornly true for the 17 years now that I have been teaching HS math.

I don’t know what to do about teaching math, but there are some wonderfully good and frightfully smart math teachers among us, including many in elementary schools. I think we need to focus like a laser beam on both these great math teachers and our elementary schools to try to wrench some drastic improvement at scale in student’s math skill.

Or, you could enroll in Pinecone at any age and commit to the program for 2-3 years until you have mastered all the shaky concepts that comprise the missing teeth in your gears.