Core Deceits for Destroying Remediation

Back in 2012, several groups … including the Dana Center and Complete College America … published a statement entitled Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education, a statement which has been used as an a priori proof of specific solutions to perceived problems in the profession of preparing students for success in college-level courses, for completion, and for a better life.

The core principles stated have been treated as research-based conclusions with a sound theoretical underpinning. The purpose of this post is to look at the truth value of each statement — thus the title about ‘deceits’.

Here we go …

Principle 1: Completion of a set of gateway courses for a program of study is a critical measure of success toward college completion.

This is clearly a definition being proposed for research. Certainly, completing gateway courses is a good thing. “Success”? Nope, at best this completion would be a measure of association; our students have complicated lives and very diverse needs. For some of them, I would make the case that delaying their gateway courses is the best thing we can do; this step tends to lock them in to a program. Curiously, the rhetoric attached to this principle states that remedial education does not build ‘momentum’. This is clearly a marketing phrase based on appealing to emotional states in the reader. Anybody who has been immersed in remedial education has seen more momentum than the authors of this statement have seen in gateway courses.

Principle 2: The content of required gateway courses should align with a student’s academic program of study — particularly in math.

“Alignment” is the silver bullet du jour. Any academic problem is reduced to building proper ‘alignment’. The word is ill-defined in general (unless we are speaking of automobiles), and is especially ill-defined in education. The normal implementation is that the mathematics is limited to the applications a student will encounter in their program of study. I’ve written about these issues (see At the Altar of Alignment and Alignment of Remediation with Student Programs). In the context of this post, I’ll just add that the word alignment is like the word momentum — almost everybody likes the idea, though almost nobody can actually show what it is in a way that helps students.

The rationale for this deceit targets remedial mathematics as being the largest barrier to success. If the phrase is directed at sequences of 3 or more remedial math courses, I totally agree — there is a significant research base for that conclusion. There is no research base suggesting that 1 or 2 remedial math courses is the largest barrier to completion.

And …

Principle 3: Enrollment in a gateway college-level course should be the default placement for many more students.

This deceit is based on two cultural problems. One, an attack on using tests to place students in courses — both ‘english’ and mathematics. In ‘english’, there is a good reason to question the use of tests for placement: cultural bias is almost impossible to avoid. For mathematics, there is less evidence of a problem. However, the deceit suggests that both types of testing are ‘bad. Another principle deceit addresses placement testing.

The second cultural problem is one of privilege: parents from well-off areas with good schools are upset that their “precious children” are made to take a remedial course. These parents question our opinions about what is best for students, and some of them are engaged with the policy influencers (groups such as those who drafted the ‘core principles’ document being discussed). Of course, I have no evidence of these statements … just as the authors of the deceit have no evidence that it would be better with the default placement rule.

There is an ugly truth behind this deceit: Especially in mathematics, we have tended to create poorly designed sequences of remedial courses which appear (to students and outsiders) to serve the primary purpose of weeding out the ‘unworthy’. We have had a very poor record of accepting diversity, and little tolerance of ‘not quite ready’. Decades of functioning in this mode left us vulnerable to the disruptive influences evidenced by the core deceits.

Principle 4: Additional academic support should be integrated with gateway college-level course content — as a co-requisite, not a prerequisite.

I am impressed by the redundancy ‘integrated’ and ‘co-requisite’. This is a give-away that the authors are more concerned with rhetoric supporting their position than they are with actual students. This call to use only co-requisite ‘remediation’ is also a call to kill off all stand-alone remediation. I’ve also written on this before (see Segregation in College Mathematics: Corequisites! Pathways? and Where is the Position Paper on Co-Reqs? Math in the First Year? for starters).

Within mathematics, we would call principle 3 a ‘conjecture’ and principle 4 is a ‘corollary’. This unnecessary repetition is a give-away that the argument to kill remedial courses is more important than improving education. The groups who did the ‘core principles [sic: deceits]’ have been beating the drum head with ‘evidence’ that it works. Underneath this core deceit is a very bad idea about mathematics:

The only justification for remediation is to prepare students for one college level math course (aligned with their program, of course 🙁 )

Remedial mathematics has three foundations — preparing students for their college math course, preparing students for other courses (science, technology, economics, etc), and preparing students for success in general. Perhaps we have nothing to show for our efforts in the last item listed, but there are clear connections between remedial mathematics and other courses on the student’s program. Co-requisite remediation is a closed-system solution to an open-system problem (see The Selfishness of the Corequisite Model).

Principle 5: Students who are significantly underprepared for college level academic work need accelerated routes into programs of study.

Conceptually, this principle is right on — there is no deceit in the basic idea. The loophole is the one word ‘routes’. The commentary in the principles document is appropriate vague about what it means, and I can give this one my seal of approval.

To continue …

Principle 6: Multiple measures should be used to provide guidance in the placement of students in gateway courses and programs of study.

This is the principle to follow-up on the default placement deceit. Some of the discussion is actually good (about providing more support before testing, including review sources, to students). The deceit in this principle comes in two forms — the direct attack on placement tests, and the unquestioning support of the HS GPA for college course placement.

The attack on placement tests has been vicious and prolonged. People use words like ‘evil’; one of my administrators uses the word ‘nuances’ as code for ‘this is so evil I don’t have a polite word for it’. This attack on placement tests is a direct reason why we no longer have the “Compass” option. The deceit itself is based on reasonably good research being generalized without rationale. Specifically, the research constantly supports a better record in mathematics placement tests than in ‘english’, but the multiple measures propaganda includes mathematics.

The use of HS GPA in college course placement is a recent bad idea. I’ve written about this in the past (see Does the HS GPA Mean Anything? and Placement Tests, HS GPA, and Multiple Measures … “Just the Facts” for starters). Here is a recent scatterplot for data from my college:

The horizontal lines represent our placement rules. The correlation in this data is 0.527; statistically significant but practically almost useless. Our data suggests that using the HS GPA adds very little value to a placement rule; at the micro level, I use the HS GPA as a part of ‘multiple measures’ in forming groups … and have found that students would be better served if I had ignored the HS GPA.

The last:

Principle 7: Students should enter a meta-major when they enroll in college and start a program of study in their first year in order to maximize their prospects of earning a college credential.

Connected with this attack on remedial courses is a call for guided pathways, which is where the ‘meta-major’ comes from. The narrative for this principle again uses the word ‘aligned’. In many cases (like my college), the ‘first year’ is implemented as a ‘take their credit math course in the first year’. Again, I have addressed these concepts (see Where is the Position Paper on Co-Reqs? Math in the First Year? and Policy based on Correlation: Institutionalizing Inequity.

Meta majors are a reasonable concept to use with our student population. However, the normal implementation almost amounts to students selecting a meta-major because they like the graphical image we use. In other cases, like the image shown here, meta-majors are just another confusing construct we try to get potential students to survive.

As is normal, we can find both some good truths and some helpful guidance … even within these 7 deceits about remediation. Taken on its own merits, the document is flawed at basic levels, and would not survive (even in its final form) the normal review process for publication in most journals.

Progress is made based on deeper understanding of problems, building a conceptual and theoretical basis, and developing a community of practitioners. The ‘7 deceits’ does little to contribute to that progress, and those deceits are normally used to destroy structures and courses. Our students deserve better, and our institutions should be ashamed of using deceitful principles as the basis for any decision.

placement, politics of developmental mathematics | Jack Rotman | October 7, 2019 10:32 am

2 Comments

By Larry, October 18, 2019 @ 9:57 am

I applaud your willingness to put so much effort into voicing a “let’s slow down, think carefully, and do it right” point of view. It certainly gives me a lot to think about and share — thank you!

But have you ever noticed how low to the ground is a buffalo’s head? All they can see is which way everyone else is going. You can stick your head up and say, wait, there’s a cliff ahead — but they’ll just look at you and say, “What? I don’t see any cliff. If everyone else is going this way, it must be OK. C’mon, keep up.”

Let’s hope we’re not that herd.
By Jack Rotman, October 18, 2019 @ 12:07 pm

Nice comment … I like the analogy to grazing herd animals. I think ‘teachers’ (as an over-slimplified generalization) tend to see and attend to the part of the field we are standing on — and don’t see the cliff ahead, nor the blizzard looming on the horizon behind us.

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