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Remediation
Sep. 3rd, 2006 07:01 pmI go to a community college to learn creative writing, drawn there by an extraordinary teacher named Lisa Alvarez. There are sometimes gaps of understanding between me and the institution. For example, during the first week of school, I was denied access to Professor Alvarez's class because I had not taken freshman composition. "They don't have a mandatory freshman composition requirement at Yale?" "No, sir." "Then Yale had better re-think its priorities." I had to get my graduate transcript from UCI, showing that I had taught numerous semesters of English composition, before they would acknowledge that I might not have to take it. But they've got standards to maintain. God help them. This article on remediation suggests that by one measure, the ACT, over eighty percent of high school students need some kind of remediation before they can pursue higher learning. Remediation is the dirty word of the moment, especially insofar as the Education Department's report on the future of higher education is concerned. Insofar as the Department's panel is concerned, remediation should not exist. (p. 10) My community college is in the remediation business. ESL and its sequelae, such as Basic English, are at record enrollments. English courses which are actually about something, such as the novel, have to advertise to make their enrollments. Remediation is what 2-year junior colleges should be doing; they are taking unprepared students and turning them into marginally prepared students. In doing so, they are absorbing the brunt of the failure of the public school system.
No Child Left Behind is applying pressure to public schools to perform along very narrow measurements. To my mind, this is misguided -- part of the conservative efforts to vitiate and destroy the public school system. I think that the pressure should be placed on the students. This is, of course, politically untenable. Even now, parents will call teachers to assert that it is impossible that their child might have failed, and that it must be the teacher's fault. The California high school exit exam was assailed because it deprived children of their "rightful" high school diplomas, until it was rejiggered so that only 10% instead of 50% failed. But it must be made unambiguous to the student that failure has horrible and shameful consequences which will be invariably be applied -- something along the lines of the Japanese system. It is remarkable how much Latin and Greek could be transferred into young minds in the sixteenth-century English chapel school, given a credible threat.
The question is, and continues to be, what can you do in the face of failure? The tried and true idea is to run people through the system, proclaiming their success. On the other hand, once you mark people as "failed," what do you do with them? Create a voting underclass? Send them into the Army? Take away their right to vote? Put them in the Iron Maiden? Spend 30K/year imprisoning them? Deport them to India, where they can be sustained at 1/10 the cost? The options are horrible and inhumane. One can see why the buck has been passed for so many years. But there is a constant amount of pressure put on the educational system; if you squeeze it at one end, expect the problem to come bursting out the other. Right now, remediation is the only plausible means of absorbing the flow.
No Child Left Behind is applying pressure to public schools to perform along very narrow measurements. To my mind, this is misguided -- part of the conservative efforts to vitiate and destroy the public school system. I think that the pressure should be placed on the students. This is, of course, politically untenable. Even now, parents will call teachers to assert that it is impossible that their child might have failed, and that it must be the teacher's fault. The California high school exit exam was assailed because it deprived children of their "rightful" high school diplomas, until it was rejiggered so that only 10% instead of 50% failed. But it must be made unambiguous to the student that failure has horrible and shameful consequences which will be invariably be applied -- something along the lines of the Japanese system. It is remarkable how much Latin and Greek could be transferred into young minds in the sixteenth-century English chapel school, given a credible threat.
The question is, and continues to be, what can you do in the face of failure? The tried and true idea is to run people through the system, proclaiming their success. On the other hand, once you mark people as "failed," what do you do with them? Create a voting underclass? Send them into the Army? Take away their right to vote? Put them in the Iron Maiden? Spend 30K/year imprisoning them? Deport them to India, where they can be sustained at 1/10 the cost? The options are horrible and inhumane. One can see why the buck has been passed for so many years. But there is a constant amount of pressure put on the educational system; if you squeeze it at one end, expect the problem to come bursting out the other. Right now, remediation is the only plausible means of absorbing the flow.
