Graduation rates are up in Baltimore City Public Schools, but college readiness rates are still much lower in the city than in other school districts in the state, the Baltimore Sun reports.
“I don’t think our kids understand the difference between graduation requirements and [college] requirements,” the paper quoted Faith Connolly, director of the Baltimore Education Research Consortium, as saying. “So we’re graduating them … and that’s it.”
There are two distinct issues here, only one of which was covered in the Sun’s excellent article:
- Colleges offer bogus classes to keep tuition revenue up
- Elementary & middle schools don’t prepare students for high school
And although the issues are definitely related to each other in the sense that each Baltimore student will have to confront both of them, the people who would bring about the solutions are different and don’t talk to each other very often.
The college tuition scam
Two- and four-year colleges and universities have been offering non-credit, remedial courses for quite a while. By taking these courses, students reinforce the delusion that they’re making progress toward a degree so they keep paying tuition. According to a 2009 study from the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy, with financial support from The Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads, large-scale studies have failed to find any evidence that remedial courses help students obtain degrees.
For the material covered in these classes, students would be better off, and end up less saddled with debt, never enrolling in college in the first place. For example, at the University of Maryland, College Park, the course Math 003 is offered this fall in 10 sections. Ten sections. The “0” as the first digit indicates it’s not a college-level course. Here’s the official description:
A review of Intermediate High School Algebra intended for students preparing for one of the credit bearing Fundamental Studies Math Courses. … Taught in special computer labs using a self-paced computer program. The curriculum will be geared toward the student’s level of algebra skills and eventual goals. There is a special fee for the course that may be applied in addition to the regular tuition charge. Students should refer to the schedule of classes for details on fees. … The course does not carry any credit toward any degree at the University. The course is repeatable. Topics will be chosen from exponents, polynomials, linear equations, quadratic equations as well as polynomial, rational, exponential and logarithm functions and elementary probability or statistics, depending on the student.
Students who have to take Math 003 are wasting their money. If they didn’t learn these subjects in 12 years of school, what are the chances they’ll master them from a computer in one semester? Also, they probably aren’t the kind of self-motivated learners who do well in a self-paced course taught by a computer program.
So, the University of Maryland gets to collect tuition from these students for each semester they take Math 003, and students go deeper into debt by learning math that should have been taught in high school.
Right now, such a student has no business being in college. If he’s enrolled at a community college, the remedial math classes won’t transfer to any university, which nullifies one of the main reasons students enroll in community colleges before going to a 4-year school: to save money. And if he needs Math 003 in a major that requires college math, he needs counseling, which is admittedly lacking in Baltimore’s high schools.
Students can learn this kind of math in a library for free. The Khan Academy has produced videos and tests for math at all levels, including advanced college mathematics. There’s no reason to spend money on a remedial math course offered by a university or community college when those exact subjects can be learned at the library for free. Courses like this are a joke, and counselors need to advise kids more properly to stay away from them and save their money.
According to a professor who blogged about this subject, the final exam for the “Math for Education Majors” course at Baton Rouge Community College in Louisiana features this question: “If a 12 foot ladder is broken into 3 equal parts, how long is each part?” He wasn’t joking.
Both the University of Maryland and Baton Rouge Community College are fully accredited institutions. They should be ashamed of themselves about this practice. Actually, they probably are a little embarrassed, but on the other hand, it’s not easy to imagine what else they might do. Better college counseling is a must in this regard, advising kids who need remediation before college to get it for free and maybe put off college and the associated debt for a year or so.
Preparation for high school
As the Sun’s article points out, quoting Baltimore’s new schools CEO, Gregory Thornton, “Many of our kids don’t come to high school ready, and then the high school carries the weight of it all. … As we look down the road, this is not a high school initiative, it’s a K-12 initiative. … They are obviously not getting the opportunities throughout that are required for them to be successful.”
This point can be best illustrated in science, I think. It’s not unusual for students in Maryland to receive less than an hour a week of science instruction in elementary school. Less than an hour a week.
The Next Generation Science Standards, now approved by the Maryland State Board of Education, try to address this issue. In some areas, they fail a little, but the overall plan of the standards in science is robust and distributes the “weight of it all” evenly from kindergarten on up through high school.
The subject isn’t assessed until fifth grade, which means some teachers in kindergarten through fourth grade don’t teach kids anything about science. The NGSS will change that.
Mr Thornton told the Sun he intends to institute changes across the city based on some of his success in Milwaukee, changes he hopes will prepare students not only academically but also socially for college life.
