In 2011, President Obama visited NOVA. He spoke about the importance of education for all of our citizens and the great challenge facing America to become number one in higher education again. He asked community colleges to face these challenges by working harder and helping get students through school. Yet with ever-decreasing budgets and increasing emphasis on placement tests and other “quantifiable” measures of success imposed by state legislatures, are these realistic goals?
This white paper discusses the impact of Obama’s push to make the U.S. number one in college graduates, and the impact that legislative efforts from this push are having on students (developmental students in particular) (229). It also suggests new methods for attempting to redesign developmental writing programs and make them more effective.
The authors first note the failure of placement exams such as the Compass and ACCUPLACER in putting students into the correct developmental classes. They note that these tests have “‘severe error rates,’ misplacing approximately 3 out of every 10 students” (233). They also note that many states have their own versions of these placement exams, often implemented by state legislatures in an effort to “reform” developmental education. For example, here in Virginia, the Virginia Placement Test (VPT) has been implemented statewide alongside Compass and ACCUPLACER. As a result of this exam, “the success rate in first-year writing has dropped significantly” and has caused part time and adjunct faculty to be reassigned or laid off, which “deprives developmental students of opportunities for personal contact with expert, caring practitioners … instrumental to their retention and success” (234-35). The writers of the white paper suggest that replacing these placement exams and replacing them with multiple modes of assessment, including a writing sample, is crucial (238).
In addition to the legislative push for tests such as the VPT, many states are seeing state legislatures inserting themselves into the community college with little or no input from faculty (235). These efforts have frequently limited students by putting them into classes for which they are unprepared, has required them to co-enroll in community colleges for developmental education and four-year colleges for other courses, and has even removed developmental education from some four-year schools, forcing community colleges to turn away an influx of underprepared students (232-33). Because these legislature members have little or no experience with higher education, the negative ramifications for both faculty and students are stark.
Despite the bleak outlook, the authors do offer some suggestions for developmental education reform. These include: mainstreaming, or putting developmental students in class with nondevelopmental students with an additional lab session; studio courses, which allows all students in need to meet weekly with a writing instructor to support the work of the course; compression, which is taking 8-week classes to finish two semesters in a single semester; integration or contextualization, which offers developmental content within other general education courses; stretch courses, which stretches a one-semester class into a full year with the same teacher; and modules, which divides specific skills into modules in which the students focus only on their areas of weakness (236-37). The authors note that no matter what a school chooses to do, two-year college English educators must be trained to take part in conversations and insert themselves into legislative discussions to talk about these issues and how to best support students who are underprepared while preserving the mission of open access (238).
The problems that are facing developmental education, as part of both Obama’s push for the U.S. to be number one in higher education, is certainly a noble and important goal, but as it begins to increase legislative interference in a field of which lawmakers know nothing, it becomes more problematic. The issues that the authors of this paper bring up remind me of Ralph Cintron’s essay in the “Octolog III.” He notes: “Where I teach, state funding has plummeted over the decades until today it is about sixteen percent. The university is developing plans for consolidating departments and units” (126). This is happening across the country, particularly at publicly funded colleges; in the community college this hurts particularly badly. While we are getting an ever-increasing influx of students in colleges due to the push for increased societal higher education, we are also getting an ever-decreasing amount of funding from the government. Yet, the government still finds it appropriate to create tests and measures that assess our students and us, such as the VPT, which show how we and our students are failing. It is ultimately a catch-22. This movement towards Neoliberalism, as Cintron calls it, means that the government can continue to justify reducing spending while they are also forcing unrealistic expectations upon students and teachers.
One example of modifications the legislature has made is the requirement of exams such as the VPT. This has affected my own college, NOVA, very negatively. While the government sees such exam implementation as a cost- and time-saving measure, students are being placed into the wrong classes more than ever before. Studies show that other methods are more effective, yet with ever-reduced and ever-stretched full-time faculties, funding such initiatives would be impossible. These tests ultimately cause more frequent failure rates and, as a result, even more government spending as students get a small amount of government funding each time they take a class. In an ideal world, the government would work with educators to see the true needs of students, increase funding to schools for proper measures of assessment, and work with us rather than against us.
This leads us, inevitably, to the question: can these issues ever be solved? Can we move away from the testing model towards something better, and can we increase funding to improve these measures? While President Obama has positioned himself as a champion of free community college, I am skeptical. While such a tuition reduction might help students, I do not see it, ultimately, as an increasing revenue stream for the college. If anything, it will increase the number of students, and therefore, underpaid adjunct faculty, which is a whole separate major issue. Until such measures are passed, I must continue to ask: at what point will we stop sacrificing our student’s time and money and government money on what have been statistically proven to be failing methods? My attitude, while pessimistic, seems realistic.
In 2015, President Obama proposed the idea of free community college for up to two years. While this has not come to fruition yet, it is certainly a talking point up for debate. Unfortunately, while such a proposal sounds meaningful, ultimately, will it help more young people to succeed, or will it result in even greater legislative control at the college?
Works Cited
Cintron, Ralph. Lois Agnew, Laurie Gries, Zosha Stuckey, Vicki Tolar Burton, Jay Dolmage, Jessica Enoch, Ronald L. Jackson II, LuMing Mao, Malea Powell, Arthur E. Walzer, Ralph Cintron & Victor Vitanza. “Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010.” Rhetoric Review 30:2 (2011): 109-134. Print.
Two Year College English Association. “TYCA White Paper on Developmental Education Reforms.” TYCA Council. 2013-2014. Accessed 18 Sept. 2015.