Rethinking remedial education in community colleges

Katie Hern was surprised in fall of 2005 when only 55% of her remedial English students passed the course. Not that it was a surprising figure. “In fact,” she says, “it was pretty typical.” But the students had been part of a “learning community”—in other words, their courses were linked and students stuck together in one cohort across their classes, the goal being to maximize student success and retention—and so Hern had expected atypicality.

“Then I looked back over the data from my students and how they had done over the semester and I found there was a good reason to be surprised— because about half of those who got a [withdrawal] or no credit had shown they could do the work,” says Hern, an English instructor at Chabot College, a community college in California’s East Bay area. “The issue is not so much about ability but sustainability,” she says, defining the “sustainability gap” as such: “The gap between students’ ability to perform and the performance they actually sustain over the semester.”

Across California, community college leaders are writing action plans for improving so-called “basic skills” (otherwise known as remedial or developmental) and English as a Second Language education as part of a system-wide initiative, with the goal of creating models for other instructors operating in solitude behind their classrooms’ closed doors. Read more in Inside Higher Ed online.