PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL, TWICE.

A commenter asks me to square my assertions about where higher education's excess capacity is with the recession-induced increases in community college enrollments. A Brookings Institution position paper that purports to make the case for greater support for community colleges (which need not be the same thing as greater support for College Lite) states my case for me.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

Presumably those students had the option of attending community colleges during more prosperous times. It's the recession, not some new enthusiasm for access-assessment-remediation-retention, that's shifting the demand. I therefore repeat this suggestion.

Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

The Brookings essay puts it slightly differently.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

That's what the high schools used to do, but I want to hold that thought for now. (I've never fully grasped that first-generation notion anyway. There are plenty of first-generation collegians in the flagships and the mid-majors.)

JOINING THE DEBATE.

The dean at Anonymous Community responds to my suggestion that higher education go out of the remediation business.

The mischievous part of my mind likes it, which is usually a sign that it’s a bad idea.

For reasons that boil down to the Stiglerian argument that, no matter how much of a mess higher education is in, it is the best of all possible messes. Perhaps so. There is a strong presumption that the existing configuration of an industry, including a service industry, is an efficient configuration in the presence of sufficient choices. Newmark's Door reminds us, however, that alternatives, even alternatives that look bad, are sometimes out there against the day when they might be desirable.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

(Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, courtesy John J. Miller on The Corner.)

Messy as reality might be, the reality also is that higher education is in a crisis in which people engage in positional arms races to get away, not always successfully, from the remediation muddle. The dean recognizes some of this, yet comes off sounding much like a curmudgeon ("They despise change, even though they complain about the status quo.")

First, and most obviously, it’s unenforceable. How far back do we go? What if the student goes out-of-state? What if a cc raises its tuition, and the high school doesn’t have the money for the increase? What if the student only needs remediation in one subject, but needs to take 12 credits for the coveted “full-time status” that keeps them eligible for financial aid and/or their parents’ health insurance? (This is incredibly common.) How long before evil proprietaries swoop in, and offer to allow students to do an end-run around the forced march to the cc? (I ask that one as a former employee of a proprietary.) How many four-year schools would have the intestinal fortitude to send half of an incoming class away? How many would they actually get back? (In reality, we’d see exceptions for athletes, then for legacies, then for people willing to pay extra, then for the litigious, then for…) A college forced to choose between teaching remedial courses and laying off swaths of employees would probably choose the former, if past practice is any guide.

He's buried the lead in that "in reality" parenthetical. These are the steps by which higher education became corrupted. But corrupted it has become, and perhaps it is time to root out the current corruption before having conversations about how much integrity ought to be compromised in favor of better alumni relations.

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

Wisconsin state representative John Jagler (R-Watertown) introduces a bill requiring the state universities of Wisconsin to identify the high schools from which students requiring remedial courses graduated, with counts of students from those schools.  His motive appears to be to help parents identify weak high school systems.  The editorial board of Racine's Journal-Times endorses.

With all the talk of school accountability, this is one basic measure to show how schools are doing. When these reports come out they should recorded as a percentage of students, not strictly a number because obviously larger schools will have more students that need remedial courses simply because of population.

Approximately 20 to 30 percent of students need remediation, according to minutes from a December 2013 Board of Regents meeting. It’s in line with national standards, according to the minutes, but still concerning.

Yes, regular readers might recall seeing this idea nearly ten years ago.  Sage say "if you sit by the river long enough, the corpses of your adversaries will float past you."

And I continue to suspect that such reports will surprise people.  I was unable in a few minutes running the search engine to find how much greater the proportion of twentieth percentile graduates of high schools in wealthy districts who start college is than the proportion of eightieth percentile graduates of high schools in poor districts who do so: this Forbes essay alludes to that phenomenon.

In a world where a Hartland Arrowhead High follows up on its $600K locker room by building new soccer practice fields, and as an austerity measure, only one of those fields rates artificial turf, it might concentrate a few minds to see how many of those students wind up in MATH 099 (or whatever the University of Wisconsin system refers to its junior-high arithmetic course as these days) and it would be delicious to see the district be presented a bill, in the Tennessee fashion, for those services.

SEND THE BAD DEBT TO THE HIGH SCHOOLS.

I've long been of the view that higher education's "retention" problem is a self-inflicted consequence of admitting unprepared students and calling it access.  "The problem in higher education is not one of insufficient entry, the problem is one of excessive entry, excessive remediation, and reality checks deferred but not diminished."  My preferred solution has been for the universities to identify the high schools that are turning out students who have to take remedial courses and send them the bill.  I'm prepared to be patient, at least one state now has a law requiring the state's universities to identify the high schools.

It's Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren who gives me the next development of that idea.  It's on a television show called "The View," and somebody asked her whether forgiving outstanding student loans was less than equitable to students who worked their way through college, or paid off their loans, or to people who hadn't even been to college.  The senator had an instructive deflection.  "In fact, 40 percent of the people who have student loan debt do not have a college diploma. Think about that."  Let's say that argument isn't going over so well. "Warren makes very clear there are no good answers to this question. Instead she points to the 40% of debt holders who never finished degrees - what a great argument for targeting relief instead of a massive bailout for doctors, lawyers, and members of Congress making 6-figures."

It's not surprising that she made it, though, the argumentum ad misericordiam is a pet distraction for self-styled progressives, as it has the effect of guilt-tripping people, suggesting that somehow Sandy's case for living at Lindsey's expense is more meritorious because of the sad state of Sandy's existence.

It's possible that the senator has only begun.

It won’t take Warren long to come up with a plan to expand her debt-forgiveness plan into a broader reimbursement for anyone who took out student loans, even those who paid them off. Warren will call it “educational justice,” or maybe “predatory loan reparations,” even though (a) they’re hardly predatory in either terms or enforcement, and (b) politicians like Warren have been pushing these programs for decades.

It won’t take long before Warren and her pals will shift from student-loan forgiveness to full and retroactive reimbursement for college educations, followed by zero-tuition access paid for by everyone else.

That's not as crazy as it sounds, particularly with as much of that bad debt being racked up by students enrolling at proprietary institutions of higher education.

It should be clear by now that any such widespread spending will be of deflated dollars printed by Democrat-controlled congresses.  Reality will have a say.

In The America That Worked^(TM), the common schools understood their mission to include preparing informed citizens and inculcating the habits of the upper middle class. Yes, that America was more sanguine about young people who didn't develop those habits opting out. On the other hand, forty years of enabling fecklessness and calling it inclusion puts us in a position where a respected public policy shop is calling for federal money to make community colleges more effective at doing what the high schools used to do as a matter of course. Perhaps the liquidity constraint that is going to bite on the government will encourage policymakers to look at restoring the older order, for lack of resources.

Perhaps that will include recognizing that making student loans to young people who haven't been properly prepared to finish high school is setting them up to be in arrears on loans for degrees they weren't properly prepared to start.  Put those high schools on the hook for their failure.

CODIFY THE LIABILITY, CONSERVE THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Sometimes I'll speak in riddles, and with all the algorithms combing through Cold Spring Shops these days, maybe now is a good time to serve an oldie up.  Twenty years ago, frustrated by Student Affairs types continually putting more special education responsibilities on faculty, I proposed to codify the liability the common schools were saddling higher education with.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content.

Impractical?  Perhaps.  Get pushback?  I did.  "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working."

WHY I STAY ON THIS MESSAGE.

"If you set the bar high, people will rise to the occasion," notes Katie at A Constrained Vision, with a link to Today's Big Surprise, Not: Public High School Grads Unprepared for College, Work.

The harshest assessment of recent graduates' preparation came from college instructors. Only 18 percent of professors polled felt students came to college "extremely" or "very well prepared," while a quarter reported students are "not too well prepared" or "not well prepared at all."

That leaves 57% of the sample otherwise classified, which means I still have a lot of work to do pointing out the "access" fiction and the "retention" hustle.

Instructors estimated half of all students who arrive at their schools are inadequately prepared for college-level math and college-level writing. In addition, large percentages of instructors felt the public high schools are failing to adequately develop students' abilities to do such things as "read and comprehend complex materials" (70 percent), "think analytically" (66 percent), and "do research" (59 percent).

Ayup. But it calls for an administrator with some stones to announce, "Upward Bound University will hereafter not teach any high school courses under the rubric of 'remediation,' or to foster 'access.'" To do so would be to risk an immediate outcry from the not insubstantial membership of the faculty and support staff earning a modest living by teaching such courses or by shuffling paper in the Diversity Boondoggle, let alone from the bursar who is counting on the churn to make the interest payments on the administration's monuments.

Such intestinal fortitude, however, is likely to be appreciated by the students.

Large percentages of students, employers, and college instructors alike agreed students need more challenging course work in high school, translating into widespread support for raising standards. Eighty-two percent of college students, and 80 percent of working graduates, reported they would have worked harder in high school had their schools demanded more of them.

Per corollary to Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the available time) the high schoolers are likely to find the time to make the extra effort should they properly recognize the stakes. Katie notes of the high schools (this would be true of not a few professors as well),

They are often content not only to ask the minimum of students but also to ask it half-heartedly, passing students through classes when they don't deserve it. When students, professors, and employers alike are calling for higher expectations, it's time for a change.

Under the existing dispensation, the kids who have strong self-motivation, or noodgy (is there an adjectival form of noodge?) parents are the ones more likely to prosper, which ought to put some of Centerfield's reflections (via Dean's World) on social mobility in perspective.

I personally am a case of meritocratic advancement. I grew up in a working class family. I'll tell you straight out that my late father, who I loved, was not particularly bright or hard-working. He was a high school dropout who did not take advantage of the GI Bill after WWII. I am convinced my intellectual abilities come from my mother, who was a housewife. Because of the American system, I was able to go to MIT, marry a similarly educated working woman, and live a fairly affluent lifestyle.
I believe in meritocracy, but I also think that over generations, meritocracy could calcify into a class system. I think we should keep this in mind when we consider proposals to abolish the inheritance tax, privatize schools, and other proposals which might be justifiable on narrow policy grounds, but could contribute to an overall climate which limits social mobility.

Research project: to what extent has the recent evidence (such as it is) on social stratification, or intergenerational heritability of status, coincided with the Softening of the common schools?

SECOND SECTION: Here we go again with the Softening, yet again of those red marking pens.

"It's not an argument we want to have at this point because what we need is the parents' understanding," [Connecticut elementary school principal Gail] Karwoski said. "The color of the message should not be the issue."
In many other schools, it's black and white when it comes to red. The color has become so symbolic of negativity that some principals and teachers will not touch it.

What rot.

The disillusionment with red is part of broader shift in grading, said Vanessa Powell, a fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary School in Wasilla, Alaska.
"It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,'" Powell said. "It's not that we're not pointing out mistakes, it's just that the method in which it's delivered is more positive."

What rot. Do you feel better because I changed the color?

That is a sound approach, said Leatrice Eiseman, a color specialist with a background in psychology who has written several books on the ties between colors and communication.
"The human eye is notoriously fickle and is always searching for something new to look at it," she said. "If you use a color that has long been used in a traditional way, you can lose people's attention, especially if they have a history of a lot of red marks on their papers."

You think the problem might be with a failure to pay attention, giving rise to that history?

In Charles County, Md., reading and writing specialist Janet Jones helps other teachers lead their lessons. The students at Berry Elementary School in Waldorf, Md., use colored pencils to edit each other's papers. By the time teachers get to grading, Jones said, the color they use isn't that important.
"I don't think changing to purple or green will make a huge difference if the teaching
doesn't go along with it," Jones said. "If you're just looking at avoiding the color red, the students might not be as frightened, but they won't be better writers."

At last, somebody gets to the heart of the matter.

RUNNING EXTRA. Education Wonk also sees what counts.

I can understand that parents are concerned about the self-esteem of their kids. We all want students to have a positive outlook when it comes to school. But perhaps in this case the parents' concern is misplaced. Shouldn't they be more concerned about the poor performance of their child rather than wasting their energies on such nonsense as criticizing some teacher's choice of ink color?

Hear! Hear!

WHERE IS MICHIGAN'S JOHN JAGLER?

Mr Jagler is the Wisconsin legislator who sponsored a bill requiring state universities to identify the high schools that were sending unprepared students their way.  (The resulting law, unfortunately, does not allow universities to send the high schools the bill for having to staff and offer high school courses in college.)

Now comes Michigan Public Radio.  Wayne State has fastest improving graduation rate in the nation.

Wayne State University has the lowest graduation rate for public universities in Michigan, but federal data shows it's improving in that area faster than any public university in the country.

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System shows that Wayne State’s graduation numbers went from 26 percent in 2011 to 47 percent in 2017.

The graduation rate for black students has tripled during this time, while the rate for first-generation students also improved rapidly.

Monica Brockmeyer, the Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success at Wayne State, says it took a lot to improve the six year graduation rate from 26 percent to 47 percent.

“The biggest single part of it was the hiring of 45 academic advisors, and so we doubled our advising capacity on campus,” Brockmeyer said.

A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results.  And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings.  I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?

SISU.

Finland's students used to place poorly on those international comparisons.  That has changed, for a number of reasons.

In 2009, Finland's students scored third in reading, sixth in math and second in science out of 65 countries that participated in the exam.

American students scored 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.

But looking at the Finnish system comes with caveats - some characteristics of the country head in the opposite direction from the way things are moving in American education.

For example, Finnish education and government leaders downplay standardized testing. They place more value on developing creativity and independent thought, and don't believe in judging schools by test scores. The country's internal testing of students is so light that the PISA scores came as a surprise for most; many teachers say they knew their students were doing well, just not that well.

Finland has a relatively homogenous population; the country is predominantly white and Lutheran. The U.S. has a diverse population of people from different cultures, with different values and priorities, especially when it comes to education.

Strong believers in equality, the Finns have long supported a system where wealth is distributed more evenly, making it nearly impossible to live in abject poverty. The income ladder ranges more greatly in the U.S., with intense wealth at the top and intense poverty at the bottom.

Some schools in Finland do serve a predominantly low-income population, and the pace of instruction at those schools is indeed slower than at the schools in middle-income areas. But the low-income schools are supported in other ways to try to give all students the tools needed to reach a basic level of education by the end of ninth grade.

Apparently, when one treats teachers like professionals, and requires advanced degrees as evidence of intensive preparation rather than as a credential for a pay raise, one gets results.

[Taneli] Nordberg got his master's degree in English. His thesis focused on the way English core modals (can, must, may, etc.) are portrayed in Finnish upper secondary school textbooks. He also had to do a thesis for his bachelor's degree. And another specifically for teacher training.

"It was agony," he recalls of his master's thesis. "But I did it."

Like other applicants to teacher-studies programs, Nordberg had to have high academic marks, pass an entrance exam and pass an in-person interview before he was accepted to the program.

Once in the profession, teachers have a lot of autonomy over their classroom. A national curriculum set by the local government - with input from the national teachers union - explains what should be learned but not how to teach it.

Teachers have control over that part.

"In Finland it's very common for us to write our own textbooks or choose the methods and curriculum or textbooks we want to buy," said Sepoo Nyyssönen, a philosophy teacher at Sibelius High School, an arts-based school in Helsinki.

"I think that's why I feel that teaching is good - you are like the king or queen of your own classroom," Nyyssönen said.

The curriculum offers students options, without replicating existing social stratification.

Finland sought to eliminate a tracking system that divided students after fourth grade, at age 10. Children who seemed college-bound were offered a more rigorous curriculum, while others were ushered to less academic classes. The Finns instead implemented a comprehensive nine-year system of schooling that goes from age 7 to 16. At that point, students can decide for themselves if they want to go to the college-prep lukio to complete upper secondary school, or if they want to spend the next three years in the vocational high schools, where they can start to learn a trade.

Students can switch between the high school options, however, and choosing the vocational track does not preclude a student from getting into a university.

Recently, there's been more discussion in Wisconsin of breathing new life into vocational training options for high school students, and acknowledging that not all students need or want to pursue an expensive four-year bachelor's degree.

A bill batted around in Madison this legislative session called for more flexibility in substituting vocational classes for certain academic high school credits.

Local advocates of vocational education, such as Tim Sullivan, the former CEO of Bucyrus International Inc., have said that Wisconsin manufacturers have jobs to fill, but can't find qualified local graduates.

Apparently in Finland you don't shunt the burnouts and troublemakers into shop class, the way too many U.S. districts do (if they even have a shop class any more), and restoring the blue-collar aristocracy means discovering the youngsters with the aptitude and the enthusiasm to do impromptu engineering and proper tolerance-setting.

The article suggests Finlanders still see room for improvement, and it raises the possibility that the high-achievers might be neglected, but No Child Gets Ahead does the same thing, while focusing too heavily on high-stakes tests, and it crowds out recess.

Being outside is also important - many schools in Finland are flanked by vast playgrounds and forests that allow children to spread out and play before, during and after school.

"If children don't have a good home background, we think they need sports and arts and other activities to help them feel good about themselves," said Irmeli Halinen, head of curriculum development of general education for the Finnish National Board of Education.

The article notes that Finland has a more comprehensive welfare state, and a top marginal tax rate of at least 51 percent. It's up to the reader to evaluate the article, and the supporting evidence, and decide whether that's a course worth emulating.

IDENTIFY THE SOURCES OF DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

The editorial board of New York's Times says "it's not what you, in your privilege, would expect."

The idea that schools in privileged communities are failing to prepare significant numbers of students is borne out in a striking new study showing that nearly half of the students who begin their college careers taking remedial courses come from middle- and upper-income families. Not only do remedial courses add more than $1 billion each year to students’ bills for tuition, but students who start out in these classes take longer to graduate and are far more likely to drop out.

Doesn't surprise me. What happens when the capital improvements are to the athletics fields?

The study does not indicate the specific places where these higher-income students grew up. But the income data suggest that many come from suburban communities whose schools did not prepare them for college-level work. Part of the problem is that high schools offer a rigorous curriculum for relatively few students and often use a grading system that masks underperformance.

Wealthier districts have been strongholds of the movement against standardized testing and the Common Core learning standards, which have been adopted by more than 40 states and set ambitious goals for what students should learn as they move through school.

As the study notes, many elected officials, parents and teachers have become complacent about the quality of their schools. This complacency is making it harder for the country to build the kind of education system it needs — one that provides high-level instruction for all children.

All the more reason, particularly where public monies are concerned, for the universities to identify the high school districts sending their graduates to remediation, and for the universities to send the high schools a bill for having to provide the do-overs.

THE CHRONICLE OF NO LONGER HIGHER EDUCATION.

Katherine Mangan's reporting on the changing nature of high school classes remedial courses in college will do nothing to hurt the sales of those U. S. News guides.

At a time when growing numbers of first-generation, minority, and older adult students are going to college, the California State University system, the nation’s largest public-university system, this year eliminated all freestanding remedial courses. Next year, the state’s entire community-college system will do the same. The moves, which are being watched by reformers and instructors nationwide, will have especially far-reaching consequences for open-access colleges and those that accept the vast majority of students who apply.

Is it too much to ask that the people who want to influence higher education stop treating the nontraditional students as somehow less capable?  "It is a libel to think of first-generation or non-traditional as synonymous with less capable of handling college work."

THINGS DONE DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

Tonight's sermon is based on 1 Cor. 14:40.

Let us begin, because begin we must, with continuing coverage of the rape investigation at Duke University. Salon's Alice Bumgarner looks at the student culture and the university's response.

At last week's Academic Council meeting, [Professor Houston] Baker [of English and African-American Studies] says, "one of the faculty asked President [Richard] Brodhead directly, 'Will you say, I condemn Duke's culture of alcohol, violence and sexual assault, and make that a top-down statement?'

"He answered, essentially, I will not do that. His rationale? These things exist at tier one institutions. Causality is not certain, but we do know these cultures exist in high school, as well. I'm the leader, and how can I make that sort of focused statement for this entire institution?

This is the same Professor Baker whose rather intemperate letter to headquarters received the smackdown from his provost that University Diaries reported. But let us suppose there is some truth to President Brodhead's remarks. "These things exist at tier one institutions." To quote my dad, "Why compare yourself to the worst?" Is this remark simply a confession that there is such a thing as an upscale safety school? Is it an unwillingness to confront the hook-up culture and the MTV Spring Break construction of collegiate life and the marketing of a Jacuzzi U. or a summer camp, to name four themes that never fail to provide material for these pages? Are we seeing things being done decently and in order, President Brodhead?

THE GHOST OF PROGRESSIVES PAST.

A schoolteacher called Steven Singer takes umbrage at Bill Maher mocking him.

Maher disagrees with what I wrote.

In fact, the very idea annoyed him as a prime example of namby-pamby liberals taking their agenda too far.

What did I write in the article?

Only that standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

In fact, that was the title of the article, which seems to be about as far as Bill read because he ignored any arguments, facts or historical citations in the piece.

In part, we're still relitigating hoary arguments about the supposed cultural bias of the standardized tests, complete with "runner is to marathon as rower is to regatta," and look who Mr Singer trots out to support his argument.

It’s a real SAT question famously discussed in the infamous 1994 book, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray – a book that tried to use discrepancies in test scores to prove white people are smarter than black people.

The answer is C, and it relies on a test taker’s knowing the meaning of regatta – something more likely to have come up in the daily lives of affluent white students than in the lives of less affluent minority students. If you don’t live by a body of water and/or don’t have much experience with rowing, you’re probably going to fail this question.

Who knew that the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" quizzes in Reader's Digest were hidden tools of white supremacy?  Or that high school English classes attempted to create some familiarity with five-dollar words with the understanding that such words might be common currency in college, and those practice analogies quizzes (which younger readers don't encounter as the analogies don't have much predictive power and they've been off the test since 2005) were both test prep and college prep??

The high schools might not be doing much of anything else, either.

In fact, the College Board, the organization that develops and administers the SAT, tacitly admits its test is biased.

It now provides an “adversity score” for poor and minority students to adjust raw SAT scores to account for high schools and neighborhoods “level of disadvantage.”

In other words, they know that poor and minority kids get lower scores so they’re trying to fudge the results to give them a boost.

Which would be entirely unnecessary if the SAT assessed them accurately in the first place.

They are literally trying to make up for how biased their test scores are.

Am I being churlish to point out that those same school districts might not be assessing the role of misbehaving students in creating that adversity in the first place?  Easier to whinge about those unfamiliar words.

You can fix the tests.  You might be able to fix the schools.  You can reduce the production of Distressed Material showing up at college.

You can't change history.  "But if all this isn’t enough to convince you that standardized tests really are a tool of white supremacy, consider their sordid history. They are literally the product of the American eugenics movement."  Put another way, the self-styled progressive intellectuals of an earlier era created the objective conditions that the current cohort of self-styled progressive intellectuals want to change.

AFTER EVERYTHING ELSE HAS FAILED.

Has it been ten years since I proposed that higher education go out of the remediation business, and nine years since I suggested that colleges and universities identify the sources of Distressed Material and send them a bill for the remedial work?

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content. Some school districts might choose to outsource those classes directly to the community colleges. Fine. Outsourcing is a way of exploiting comparative advantages. Economics again.

That post elicited a response from Dean Dad, and a follow-up by me.  At the time, he was of the mind that putting the onus on the high schools would create some screwy incentives, and I concurred in part and dissented in part. "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working." (In my view, it's going on forty years of failure by the special-educationing of higher education.)

Now, courtesy Dean Dad, who I now refer to as at "Pioneer Valley Community" (technically inaccurate, geographically precise enough), has reacted to an actual legislative proposal to ... "require Tennessee public school districts to reimburse the costs of recent high school graduates who have had to take a remedial course."  It's not law, yet, and the reactions of government school administrators and members of the legislature suggest the proposal might be more symbolic than substantive.

But after forty years of failure ...

Here's part of Dean Dad's reaction.

Rather than punishing poverty, I’d prefer to see resources directed to ways to prevent the need for remediation in the first place.  Start by requiring four years of math in high school; I maintain that any state that fails to do that has no standing to criticize community colleges.  If the students are in high school anyway, why not teach them math?  It may make sense to use the senior year to solidify and review the basics for some students, but that’s a fair sight better than nothing.  If it sets the students up to succeed in college, it’s worth it.

Let's stipulate for the sake of discussion that poverty correlates with weak school districts.  But if you're going to require math (to precalculus? into calculus?) through the senior year of high school, implicitly you're insisting on stronger academic discipline beginning in kindergarten.  Let the conversation over whether the common schools ought be encouraging the work habits of the upper-middle class begin.

Ultimately, the solution to remediation will have to involve conceiving of K-12 and higher ed as part of a larger ecosystem.  Whether that means the Common Core or not, it’s counterproductive for the two systems to continue to talk past each other.  I’d prefer to start with voice, rather than invoice, but I’ll give credit for sparking discussion.

It is an ecosystem, whether legislatures grasp it or not.  And well-off parents perceive it as such, which is why good school districts come bundled with granite countertops, and why U.S. News guides sell so well.  All the same, it might be fun to implement the invoicing and see how much of the Distressed Material turning up at regional comprehensives is middling students from well-off districts being shipped off to extended summer camp, or to finishing school.

WHY ARE WE PAYING TWICE FOR THE SAME JUNK? Two posts address different dimensions of the university's remediation dilemma. Perhaps the Retention Pond will be drained when sufficient policymakers think about the cost-benefit ratio. Start with something I found at Joanne Jacobs's place.

College students, educators rue unpreparedness.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm called on the state Board of Education to adopt mandated graduation requirements. State Superintendent Mike Flanagan will make a recommendation to the board Nov. 15 on boosting graduation guidelines.

"Everybody feels they have to do something because the economy is so drastically changing and kids have to be prepared to work in a much more technologically advanced world," said Kathleen Straus, president of the state Board of Education.

The problem is clear in the enrollment for remedial math at Wayne State, which has soared 85% in the last four years. There are 1,200 students in 12 sections of the class, a computer-based course.

"These students are coming in at the level of ninth-grade math," said Patty Bonesteel, developmental math coordinator at Wayne State. "Without a doubt, the idea of being bad at math is perfectly fine in our culture, and that's unfortunate."

They're beginning to catch on.

One of the main problems is that high schools simply haven't kept up with the changing economic times, and that has left the United States lagging behind, said Beverley Geltner, superintendent for Southfield Public Schools. And it's not just a school issue.

"It's a national survival issue," Geltner said. "The American standards of education are simply not world class anymore."

Funny how incentives work, isn't it?

There's a related post over at Anonymous Community's place.

Instead, judging by the amount of remediation we have to do at the cc level, what we have for the 13-to-17 population could be described as holding tanks.

Remediation is a live wire, as a political topic. Yet, educationally, it’s an obvious need.

Some have argued that colleges should get out of the remediation business. Leave high school material to the high schools, and don’t bill the taxpayers twice for teaching subject-verb agreement or the pythagorean theorem. Save tax money, and maintain the brand integrity of higher education.

He goes on to note that, for a number of reasons, some remediation is a necessary evil. Point granted. There is, however, an efficient level of remediation, and accumulating evidence that the current level is inefficiently high. It doesn't come for free, and it's draining on people who expected to be working in the higher learning yet encounter ever-rising administrative expectations that those same people do special education. (Think about it this way: do you really want a high-strung test pilot teaching weekend flyers how to read a check list? Shouldn't the test pilot be pushing the envelope on the latest hard-to-unload passenger bus?)

A BASKETBALL SCANDAL IN HIGH SCHOOL.

I took some joy in the recent resurgence of Milwaukee Hamilton's basketball program, tempered by displeasure with what high school basketball has become.

Years ago, Milwaukee Hamilton's boys' basketball team won a state championship (keep scrolling) with students from the neighborhood. In the early 1990s, two different teams made it to Madison but did not advance to the title game.

Now comes something close to a recruiting scandal. The man who coached a northwest side school, Milwaukee Vincent, to five victories in seven appearances in the finals, lives near Hamilton. He recently became the head basketball coach there, in part because of illiquidity in the housing market and high fuel prices.

Milwaukee families have some choice in the schools their children attend, and sometimes that choice depends on athletic opportunities.

I'm more displeased and less temperate to learn that Hamilton must forfeit its share of the 2008-09 City championship for a different roster error, involving a fifth-semester sophomore.

The Wildcats' share of the City title was taken away Monday. Milwaukee Public Schools commissioner of athletics Bill Molbeck announced that Hamilton had been forced to forfeit seven City Conference victories and two nonconference victories.

The forfeits changed Hamilton's 12-1 conference record to 5-8 and turned its 19-4 overall record into a 10-13 season. As a result, Washington (12-1) is the sole City champion for 2008-'09.

Oddly enough, Hamilton's coaching change and the influx of transfers that made Hamilton the area's most controversial program last season didn't play any role in the forfeit ruling. Instead, the source of the trouble turned out to be a player who had already been there.

A junior basketball player had started attending Hamilton during the 2007-'08 school year, so administrators were used to seeing him around. But even though he was a sophomore at the time, he had already attended four semesters at other schools, pushing him past the WIAA threshold for instant-transfer eligibility.

By rule, the player was supposed to sit out of varsity athletics for one calendar year. But Hamilton administrators didn't immediately notice this anomaly and allowed him to play this season. He was a little-used backup who averaged fewer than 3 points per game.

The news story includes editorial comment.

So the Wildcats' season ended as messily as it began, with Tom Diener - the legendary Milwaukee Vincent coach - taking over after leaving Vincent, then taking the job at Grafton and then backing out of it, saying at the time that he wouldn't coach in 2008-'09.

And then came all the transfers - most of them sophomores, and most from Bay View - which prompted an internal MPS investigation that cleared the players of wrongdoing.

There are purists inside and outside the City Conference who see Hamilton as a renegade program that has pushed the envelope of the rule book to its limit.

Behavior like that, unfortunately, has become a growing trend - mostly in our area, but in some points elsewhere - by shortsighted adults who view basketball as the most important factor in an adolescent's life.

These kids, who think they're lucky, are instead being turned into pieces of meat up for barter and bid at age 13.

Given the propensity of big-city high schools, including Hamilton, to turn into dropout factories, the kids' preferences for shooting threes might be rational, and the adults not so short-sighted (although the odds of a high-school basketball player signing a professional contract are well south of the longest shot at the Kentucky Derby). But there still is a planetarium at Hamilton. Perhaps a restoration of the school's academic side, to go with the sports emphasis, will help reverse the trend.

EDUCATION SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING.

I'm reusing an old post title and revisiting an old argument.  "I encourage readers to focus on two words: fifth grade. Perhaps, in suggesting that the state universities send the high schools a bill for each credit hour of remedial arithmetic and writing their students racked up, I was not being bold enough."

Conditions have not gotten any better in sixteen years.  Recently, collegians having trouble with 7+2 = x+6, which can be posed as a first grade arithmetic problem by replacing "solve for x" with "fill in the box" came to our attention.  Dear reader, even the house organ for business as usual in higher education was troubled.  "A ‘Steep Decline’ in Students’ Academic Preparation at UC-San Diego Struck a Nerve."

HOW INEFFECTIVE ARE CONNECTICUT'S HIGH SCHOOLS? The Office of Retaining Students Who Weren't Prepared in the First Place never lacks for work. (Via Joanne Jacobs)

Seventy-two percent of Connecticut’s high school graduates who go on to community college aren’t prepared for college work, according to a state education group. The remediation rate is 65 percent for graduates enrolling at four state universities.

“Connecticut has a significant college readiness gap that is threatening our ability to replenish our workforce,” said Michael Meotti, the state’s commissioner of higher education. “We are fortunate that with 3 out of 4 high school graduates going onto college, we have one of the highest college-going rates in the country. But now we are finding that many of these students are not college ready.”

Only 54 percent of Connecticut high school graduates who go directly to college will earn a certificate or degree.

I'll never lack for work either. For five years, Cold Spring Shops has noted the unfavorable cost-benefit ratio of producing dropouts by making a bad job of middle and high school followed by two or three semesters of repeating middle school in college, something that probably discourages some of those collegians. The Cold Spring Shops suggestion is that colleges send the high schools that failed to prepare those students the bill for the remedial courses, and although the idea has not caught on, the liquidity constraint confronting governments has not gone away.

MAKE THE HIGH SCHOOLS DO THEIR JOB.  Some straight talk about remediation at Washington Monthly College Guide.

Universities still don’t have to provide remedial assistance. Blaming administrative costs on the need for remediation is misleading, suggesting as it does that the growth in such costs is valid. In fact, there’s no reason administrators have to manage such “help,” and there’s no indication they’re doing it well.

And let’s not talk about how remediation wasn’t necessary years ago. If students aren’t prepared for college, just don’t admit them. It’s very troublesome to suggest that somehow because high school students aren’t ready for higher education colleges will just let them in anyway and then bill all students for the costs of remediation. It’s the college’s fault they don’t run remediation programs efficiently; there’s no reason to pass the costs of that wastefulness on to students.

It's not quite sending the high schools a bill for sending Distressed Material in need of repair before it can be exposed to College Work, but perhaps it takes time to eliminate the impossible.

NOW THE LAW.

I think it was nine years ago I first suggested that universities identify the high schools that sent unprepared students, and bill them for the remedial courses.  Earlier this year, Tennessee lawmakers considered such a policy.  Wisconsin legislator John Jagler (R- Watertown) introduced a bill that would require the state university system to identify by school district the proportion of students requiring a second go at high school.  (Nobody has yet proposed that the universities send the school districts the bill.  I'll take one slice of the pizza at a time.)

Governor Walker has signed the bill.

"I've heard from many parents who were stunned to learn that despite getting good enough grades to get into a UW system school, their kids aren't prepared to start their college career," Jagler said. "My hope is that by shining a light on what schools these students attended, discussions can begin at the local and state level on finding solutions to better prepare students for higher education."

Watertown is not a poverty pocket. I expect these reports to shake a few people up.

SLOWLY, THEY COME AROUND.

Inside Higher Ed provides Arthur M. Hauptman, who describes himself as "a public policy consultant specializing in higher education finance issues," which is a fancy way of saying "swamp denizen," with a platform to consider "Refinancing Remediation."

Every year, because of inadequacies in the K-12 education process, millions of students enrolling in college must take at least one remedial course in math or English because they are not fully prepared for college or career. Although estimates vary, it seems at least one half of community college students and one-fifth of students in four-year colleges take at least one remedial course; many more students enrolling in for-profit schools require remediation, whether they take a course or not. It is also clear that rates of remediation are higher for students from low-income families than they are for the average college student. Of even greater concern, the probability that students taking remedial courses will graduate is much smaller than the already modest completion rates in American higher education.

The most objectionable part of the current student aid system is how this remediation is financed. Students who take remedial courses are typically charged the same tuition as for college-level courses, even though remedial courses usually cost institutions less because class sizes are large and adjunct professors or instructors teach these courses.

Catch that "because of inadequacies?" Caused by whom? Blank-out.

Regular readers understand that it's not right to require collegians to pay for high school twice, which, no matter whether you call it "remediation" or "development" or "accommodation" or "special education" is what you're doing.  That's true whether you put your best teachers or the adjunct whose c.v. came over the transom yesterday or a circus clown moonlighting in the off-season in the classroom.

Apparently the matriculants who turn up in the remedial classes often have deficiencies in other basic skills, which leads Mr Hauptman to the following leap of logic.

For these reasons, this system of paying for remediation must be fixed so that we avoid a continuation of current situation in which millions of students take on large debts they have little chance of repaying. The high school dropouts and graduates requiring remediation also deserve a system in which the chances of their improving their basic skills are significantly improved. And to the extent these changes would improve the basic skills of those who now can’t compete in today’s workforce, this may be the single most important thing we can do to improve our national ability to compete globally.

Let's leave that "national ability to compete globally" aside, as it's a screaming non-sequitur.  "[K]nowledge-intensive high-technology products can be produced using high-skilled workers (think iron puddlers and Web designers) or using low-skilled workers with easy-to-use machinery (think automobile assembly plants and picture presets on McDonald's cash registers.)" Perhaps higher education can produce more of the first type of worker (although that will depress earnings); it's up to entrepreneurs to adapt production technologies to the second type of worker (which has the effect of raising earnings).  Let's work backwards, perhaps that "system in which the chances of their improving their basic skills" is something other than Woke Education, in which, somehow, the students who develop those skills are implicitly sell-outs, "code shifters," to use the current locution.  That gets us back to the heart of the matter.  Instead of the Divine Passive, "must be fixed," let's come up with some action items.  First, identify the high schools that are sending graduates out unprepared.  Second, send them the bill.

Mr Hauptman is not ready to go there yet.

To do this, the financing of remediation should be overhauled so that providers are compensated based on their ability to improve the basic skills of students taking remedial courses and students no longer pay tuition or need to borrow for these courses. That would require moving to a performance-based system of remediation in which students would not be charged tuition for any remedial courses they take. Instead, federal, state and local governments would pay colleges, schools and the other providers of remediation a fee by for doing so, with the providers who do the best job of increasing the competencies of students getting the most reimbursement and the most business.

At least one commenter is.