Case Closed … Mind Closed?

We are again being bombarded with ‘information’ about co-requisite remediation working.  The “we” in that statement would be everybody involved with college remediation — practitioners, administrators, policy makers, and boards.  One of the recent notes from Complete College America begins with “Case Closed on Traditional Remediation”.  Good propaganda … bad education.

The most basic issue before us is NOT “should we have stand-alone developmental math courses”.  No, the core issue is:

What ‘mathematics’ do students need to ‘know’ for various educational goals?

Non-mathematicians have considerable difficulty understanding this question, because of the two words in quotes — ‘mathematics’ and ‘know’.  For many, mathematics consists of arithmetic and algebraic procedures with some memorization of geometric formulae; ‘knowing’ consists of being able to recall barely enough of those procedures to pass a college math course.  In other words, non-experts tend to see mathematics as training in skills, and they tend to view our courses as barriers to an education.

We certainly can agree, at some level, that the mathematics being taught in basic courses (whether remedial or college algebra) is both badly out of date and not well suited to the educational needs of our students.  Therefore, when the primary evidence for co-requisite remediation comes from comparisons between the experimental treatment and ‘traditional’, the results have meaning mostly for people who do not understand the problem space.  So what if 70% of students in the treatment succeed compared to 54% of those in the traditional classes!  Neither group is getting good mathematics (most likely).

My message continues to be:

Design NEW courses with modern content designed to meet the educational needs of our students.

For some students, this will mean that they take a college statistics course with extra support (co-requisite).  For other students, this means that they will take one pre-college course which provides strong understanding of concepts and relationships with good fluency in being able to deal with quantitative problems in both symbolic and numeric methods.  For a few students, this means that they will need to take two pre-college courses.  And, for some students (half?), they can start in the college mathematics course because their recent Common Core mathematics experience has provided them sufficient fluency.

A declaration that the “case [is] closed” reflects the bias of the speaker, not the factual situation.  The speaker is hoping that we will have a closed mind to other interpretations (especially if we are leaders or policy makers).  The worst thing about Complete College America is the message that a problem has been solved and there is nothing further to understand.   We see closed minds in education, but the results are never good.  I can only hope that most of us will keep an open mind, and consider the basic problem so that we can work on real solutions for our students.

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