Complete College America — focus on ‘remediation’

A recent webinar (March 11) addressed some central concerns of the Complete College America (CCA) alliance, a collaboration of 24 states. 

In this webinar (see http://www.completecollege.org/docs/Completion%20Fundamentals%20Webinar.pdf) remediation was a central issue.  Early in the presentation, the statement is made that “Remediation, as it currently exists, does not make a difference” based on analysis of data for students in gatekeeper courses who had passed remedial math versus those who placed in remedial but did not take remedial math. 

Although this point is valid based on the data, I was encouraged by the fact that the results for math were better than the results for reading or writing:  78% passed the gatekeeper after completing remedial math, versus 68% who placed into remedial math but did not take it. 

Later in the presentation, some novel solutions are described.   Since the presentation was done by several people, I found that the result was a good mix of ideas.  The session on “Transformative Technology” lists “A flavor of the possible” (a very nice phrase), which serves as a reasonable summary of many of the current efforts. 

I was a little disappointed that this CCA webinar did not mention either the New Life project nor the Carnegie Pathways.  We seem to be flying under the radar for many policy makers; this will shift as our implementations begin.

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