The Math Bridge

Imagine, if you will, two small towns near a bridge over a large river. One town (Prima Factoid), priding itself on details and being thorough, shared a belief that ‘being ready’ meant having all of the basic skills taught in their local high school.  They spoke of alignment, of mastery, of students’ taking responsibility for their learning.  The neighboring town (Stepped Up), being populated by realists, shared a belief that every body was ready enough … or they were not eligible.  They spoke of evidence, reports, and things not working.

These towns share the bridge that is developmental education, a major part of this structure being called developmental mathematics.  Prima Factoid constructed levels and additional ramps to the bridge; Stepped Up put everybody in vehicles all going the same speed (fast) with some extra handbooks and ‘life line’ calls.  The two towns had a friendly football rivalry, but this hid a deep mistrust between citizens of the two towns.

So here is my motivation:  Complete College America released a report Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere    (see http://www.completecollege.org/docs/CCA-Remediation-summary.pdf).  I am disappointed in this report … within their goal of fostering a completion agenda, they label remediation as a failure beyond recovery; they suggest that we place all students in college-level courses (as in Stepped Up). 

However, many of us actually live in Prima Factus, and we need to recognize how mismatched this approach is to the needs of college students.  By living via a basic skills mentality, with an honest desire to help students, we present unnecessary barriers and extra courses in front of students without much evidence of this being effective for the majority of students.

For the developmental education bridge to actually work, we need to be much more deliberate and thoughtful in its design.  To think that all students are ready for college courses with support ignores the deep educational needs of a large portion of our students; to think that all students need to pass courses covering basic skills from arithmetic and polynomial algebra is to provide a weak foundation for college work.

We need balance; we need a clear vision … a vision that recognizes that there are many students who just need some extra support to be successful in college courses without taking developmental courses, while there are many other students with academic needs that should be met in a few courses (like 1 or 2 math courses). 

Reports that totally condemn what we are doing do not help us move forward, just as reports that totally defend the current basic-skill oriented models.  We have fundamental work to do so we truly help our students … ALL of our students.

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