At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen attends a remedial math class for incoming freshmen.
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: August 9, 2010
Hunching over her notebook at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen struggled to figure out what do with the algebra problem in front of her: x2 + 2x – 8 = 0.
It was a question every ninth grader is expected to be able to answer. (For those who have erased the ninth grade from memory, the answer is at the end of the article.) But even though Ms. Croslen managed to complete three years of math and graduate from high school, she did not know how to solve for x.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” she said during a break from her remedial math course, where she has spent the last several weeks reviewing arithmetic and algebra. “I know this is stuff I should know, but either I didn’t learn it or I forgot it all already.”
In most school systems, what happens to students like Ms. Croslen after they obtain their diplomas is of little concern. But the New York City Department of Education acknowledges that despite rising graduation rates, many graduates lack basic skills, and it is trying to do something about it.
This year, for the first time, it has sent detailed reports to all of its high schools, telling them just how many of their students who arrived at the city’s public colleges needed remedial courses, as well as how many stayed enrolled after their first semester. The reports go beyond the basic measure of a school’s success — the percentage of students who earn a diploma — to let educators know whether they have been preparing those students for college or simply churning them out.
The city’s analysis, which it intends to reproduce every year, comes as policy makers nationwide have been calling for higher standards for schools. Most states have committed to adopting a “common core” of what each student should learn in each grade, and in New York, state education officials recalibrated their scoring of standardized tests this year, saying that the bar for passing had fallen too low.
Illinois began tracking how its high school graduates fared in college several years ago, after dismaying reports about freshmen floundering at state schools. Officials in Denver and Philadelphia are now following suit.
New York, like other cities, has made a considerable effort to improve its high school graduation rate — now 59 percent, up from 47 percent in 2005 — and push more of its students to enroll in college. But many of those students are stumbling in basic math and writing: 46 percent of New York City public school graduates who enrolled in one of the City University of New York two-year or four-year colleges in 2007 needed at least one remedial course, and 40 percent of them dropped out within two years.
At a third of the city’s 250 high schools, at least 70 percent of the graduates who went on to CUNY needed remedial help.
“You’re always very excited with the kids who are crying on graduation day, assuming they are going on to bigger and better things,” said Josh Thomases, who oversees academic programs for the city’s education department. “But heretofore that assumption has been largely untested.”
The city chose to study the class that entered CUNY in 2007 so it would have at least two years of college data. At the High School for Public Service in Brooklyn, for example, more than 90 percent of the 80 students who entered as freshmen in 2003 graduated in 2007, with the vast majority enrolling in college. But of the 26 students who enrolled in CUNY colleges, more than half needed to take a remedial math course.
“We have students who come with a real need and have to catch up,” said Ben Shuldiner, the principal. “Our job was to do our very best with them. We’re very proud of that, but clearly they still need more.”
Mr. Shuldiner said that in the last four years, the school had enrolled more students in advanced placement courses and had begun offering advanced algebra classes in ninth grade.
For Bronx Leadership Academy High School, where Ms. Croslen received her diploma, nearly 60 percent of the class of 2007 had to enroll in a remedial class. Kenneth Gaskins Jr., the principal, said that was hardly surprising, given that so many students arrived at his high school far below grade level.
“We’re expected to get them caught up in four years, which we try very hard to do and often succeed,” he said, adding that teachers often spend hours helping students with strategies to pass the Regents exams required for graduation.
While schools and principals are not being judged on their remediation rates, Mr. Gaskins noted that the city still rates them on their graduation numbers, which can be a factor in principals’ pay and, in the worst cases, whether a school is shut down.
“For the school’s own survival you are going to help kids get over that hurdle,” he said. “But they may not have a solid enough base to really show they’ve mastered the subject.”
Instructors at the community colleges say they have seen the effects of poor preparation for years. Elizabeth Clark, who teaches remedial writing at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, says her students do not have a sense of what a college-level essay should look like. Many follow a simple five-paragraph, elementary school formula: introduction, three points and summary.
“They don’t know how long it should be; they don’t know how to develop an argument,” Ms. Clark said. “They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer, and you have to push them past simple binaries.”
There are also more basic problems, Ms. Clark said, such as students not knowing that each sentence must begin with a capital letter or using “u” instead of “you.”
John Garvey, who recently retired as the liaison between CUNY and the public schools, said the experience of remedial classes — known as developmental courses in academic parlance — could be discouraging, making students more likely to drop out.
“This is a student who thinks he or she has been doing pretty well, but their first experience is being told you are not good enough,” he said. “All of their confidence and determination is being undermined.”
The city is actually making progress. Even as the number of graduates enrolling in CUNY has increased, the percentage of students taking remedial classes has gone down.
About 58 percent of the city’s college-bound graduates in 2007 went to CUNY schools; 15 percent went to State University of New York colleges, with the remainder attending private colleges or public colleges out of state.
Mr. Thomases said the city was trying to develop a way to get data from other colleges.
Susan L. Forman said that many of the issues have remained the same for the four decades she has taught remedial math at Bronx Community College, including students easily confused by fractions and negative numbers and becoming paralyzed when they are told they cannot use calculators.
What has changed, she said, is that students are often overly confident.
“Their naïveté is just extraordinary,” she said. “They have a tremendous underestimation of what they do not understand.”
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