THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 20, 1996 TAG: 9605200044
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 240 lines
Doris Jellig closed the last session of her spring remedial English class at Tidewater Community College with some good news.
``Everybody sitting before me is going on to Freshman Comp,'' she told the 15 students. ``. . . You have progressed extremely well. If you don't believe it, take all your papers out. Because I don't give out A's easily.''
The students - recent high school graduates, immigrants, grandparents, retired military officers - learned to clip their run-on sentences, to hone their topic sentences, to keep their subjects and verbs in sync. Now they're ready to take on freshman English.
Jellig maintained a buoyant mood in that last class, tossing attaboys to the students (``Look at that last essay, Mr. Zebedee; a big old A'') while preparing them for their final assignment.
But increasingly, politicians and educators are taking a sober, critical look at college remedial courses as a symbol of the breakdown in the nation's educational system.
With pressure rising to slice costs and raise academic standards, remedial courses have become prime candidates for cutbacks.
In the recent General Assembly session, Gov. George F. Allen proposed ordering all four-year colleges to stop offering remedial classes. The legislature, protecting the autonomy of Virginia colleges, deleted Allen's provision, but echoed his sentiments: It urged all four-year schools to contract with community colleges, such as TCC, to offer the courses.
Also during the session, Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Manassas, unsuccessfully proposed that the public school systems that graduate students who need college remedial courses should be required to pay for those courses. Both houses rejected the bill.
And now, one of the budget-cutting proposals floating through Washington would reduce - or even eliminate - federal aid to all students in remedial courses.
``The issue is not really remedial education,'' said Bruno Manno, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, who favors many of the proposals. ``The issue here is the question of academic standards, whether we're honest and fair to students and whether when we give them a (high school) degree, it really means something.''
But David Merkowitz, spokesman for the American Council on Education, a leading lobbying organization for universities, says four-year colleges have an obligation to help students who are behind.
``Providing access is one of the things we do in higher education,'' he said. ``. . .Should we provide the opportunity for folks whom the public schools have failed or who have been out of public schools for 10 years, or do we punish these folks?
``We would argue that it makes no sense to cut significant numbers of students off from opportunity.''
Skeptics say, however, that colleges aren't motivated solely by altruistic notions of access. Norfolk School Superintendent Roy D. Nichols, angered by the drumbeat of criticism directed at public schools, says universities should share the blame: ``Colleges are more interested in generating dollars by having people in seats than having students who are ready for college.''
Students are generally placed in remedial classes after receiving low scores on a college placement test. Sometimes they may need help in the basics of writing, sometimes in algebra. That usually doesn't mean they can't take other freshman courses, such as political science or chemistry. The remedial classes usually do not count for credits.
The American Council on Education, in a report earlier this year, said 13 percent of college students - or 1.6 million - have to take a remedial course.
The State Council of Higher Education, in its most recent report on remediation, said 25 percent of Virginia freshmen enrolled in the courses in 1993-94. That doesn't mean Virginia's students are faring worse than their peers: The American council's study covered all college students, from freshmen to seniors, and said 56 percent of the students in remedial courses were, in fact, freshmen.
The state report listed Norfolk State and Old Dominion universities with among the highest rates for four-year schools. NSU had 257 freshmen, or 31 percent, in remedial courses; ODU had 444, or 45 percent. But a note accompanying the study said it didn't include 200 students at Norfolk State who needed remediation but were ``mainstreamed'' in regular freshman courses during a one-year experiment.
Educators say it's difficult to accurately gauge the extent of remedial work on campuses.
Colleges, often looking to avoid the stigma of inferiority they fear is attached to remediation, sometimes bill the classes as ``enrichment'' or ``developmental'' courses. And what's remedial at one campus may be standard freshman fare at others. MIT, for instance, offers remedial classes for entering students who aren't up to speed in calculus, Merkowitz said.
Gordon K. Davies, director of the State Council of Higher Education, for years has been pushing four-year schools to trim back remedial classes. He thinks he has made inroads, but he's not sure.
``It has disappeared too quickly to make me entirely comfortable,'' he said. ``The thing I can't get a handle on, and nobody really can, is the way in which the curriculum changed. Maybe what was remedial became Math 101. If that happened, that would be regrettable.''
Both Old Dominion and Norfolk State have changed their remedial policies in the past few years. Since 1994, Old Dominion students who don't pass the placement test have a number of choices: take a remedial course at TCC, a noncredit ``enrichment course'' in ODU's continuing education program or one-on-one tutoring.
Also in 1994, NSU started the Retention Enhanced Education Program (REEP), targeted to help underprepared freshmen stay to graduation. About 600 of Norfolk State's 1,000 freshmen are in the program, which includes intensive counseling and small classes that meet four times a week. Freshmen who do well enough can get credit and jump straight into second-semester math or English; those who don't must stay in REEP classes.
``We've gone to enormous pains to craft a special program that is working for us,'' said Gen. Robert E. Wagner, special assistant to the president. ``It's beyond the `R' word.''
Neither university appears ready to get out of the remedial business totally, although Norfolk State officials have said they would eventually let TCC take over that task.
``Until our public schools get our kids ready, we can't stop taking the potential kids who weren't motivated or didn't get the type of instruction they should be getting,'' NSU President Harrison B. Wilson told board members earlier this year.
But Beverly H. Sgro, the state's secretary of education, says there are good reasons to leave the job to community colleges. Community colleges, she said, are designed to help students who didn't get enough preparation in high school; four-year colleges are supposed to train qualified students ``to assume their role in work and society. It seems sort of redundant to have two-year institutions designed to teach remedial courses and duplicate that in four-year courses.''
Plus, the courses are more expensive - for the state and for the student - in a four-year university. ``Very often, those courses are taught by graduate students, but they do take up time and resources,'' she said.
Sometimes lost in the debate is what would be best for the students themselves.
Jellig, an associate professor of English at TCC, and her colleagues see benefits for them at the community colleges, where they say more professors are truly committed to teaching students who are behind. At universities, she said, ``some people don't want to start at the beginning; they want to talk about Faulkner.''
But Merkowitz asked: ``What do you do with the Asian-American student who's got straight A's in math and science but still has some English and writing problems? Are you going to require that students like that enroll in a community college full-time or take one course in a community college that may be 30 miles away from campus?''
And Norfolk State officials say remedial students, no less than better-prepared students, deserve the advantages of a historically black college. One of those benefits, Wagner said, is seeing successful upperclassmen. ``Senior African-American students are tremendous mentors who have made it. The mentoring makes an enormous difference.''
At Christopher Newport University underprepared students are doing better since the university dropped its remedial courses last year, English chairman Jay S. Paul said.
They are mixed with other freshmen in intensive English courses. ``I think that the classes give them better preparation for academic reading and writing; they're set up to force students to read closely,'' Paul said. And now students must write more summaries of what they've read, which Paul said can prove to be an unexpectedly tough, but rewarding, assignment.
The proposal to curtail federal loans or grants for remedial students originated with Arthur M. Hauptman, a Washington education consultant who has the ear of the Clinton administration.
Hauptman says his proposal is far more complicated than that. It would also eliminate all tuition for remedial courses but would increase federal and state spending to broaden remedial education. But educators fear that, in the cost-cutting fervor overtaking Washington, members of Congress might just go for the bottom-line approach when crafting next year's budget.
Thomas Green, a student in Jellig's class who receives a federal Pell Grant, said that would have devastated him. Without the grant, he wouldn't be able to attend school. And without the remedial course, he fears he would have flunked out. ``This class,'' he said, ``prepares you for college courses.''
Green, 42, ran a janitorial service before an injury forced him out of work. Now he's hoping to get a business degree to become an entrepreneur. He needed the remedial course to brush up on his writing and avoid run-on sentences.
On the last day of class, Jellig read a paragraph he had just written - proof, she said, of his marked improvement:
``For most, stress is an everyday part of life. This problem that sometimes dominates our whole being may overwhelm or change our lives as we know it. So what do you do about it? First, recognize that stress has engulfed your life. Second, use the proper aides to combat the tensions, and lastly try to keep your life balanced.''
Both universities and school systems say they're working harder to keep freshmen from needing remedial work. ODU recently began working with Virginia Beach teachers so they can prepare high school juniors for the university placement tests. Wagner said Norfolk State is starting a summer session in its retention program, designed to get freshmen up to speed even before their first day of class.
In Norfolk, Nichols has won approval to drop the general high school diploma, which he said doesn't adequately prepare students for college or work. Norfolk students will have to choose between a college-prep track, vocational diploma or TechPrep hybrid, a combination of academic and vocational classes.
No matter how hard they try, educators concede there will always be students who enter college unprepared. Perhaps the best approach to remediation is the middle ground, said Davies, director of Virginia's higher education agency.
``The goal is to do as little of it as possible,'' he said, ``but if you walk away from it altogether, you're doing a huge injustice to a lot of people. MEMO: ABOUT THE COURSES
The American Council on Education found that:
13 percent of all college students take remedial courses. 8 percent
of all college students need a math course, 6 percent a reading course
and 5 percent a writing course.
The majority of remedial students - 57 percent - are women.
Nineteen percent of African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic
students and 15 percent of American Indian students take remedial
courses, compared with 11 percent of white students.
56 percent of all students in remedial courses were freshmen, but 18
percent were either juniors or seniors.
Students whose first language isn't English make up almost one-third
of the students in remedial English classes.
59 percent of the students in remedial courses attend community
colleges; 34 percent are in four-year schools, and 3 percent are in
trade schools.
Remedial students are more likely than others to come from families
with annual incomes below $20,000.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
STEVE EARLEY
The Virginian-Pilot
Patty Young, left, and Jennifer McNally study for English 03 exam at
TCC's Beach campus.
Doris Jellig teaches a college prep English class at the Virginia
Beach campus of Tidewater Community College.
STEVE EARLEY photos
The Virginian-Pilot
Doris Jellig, an associate professor of English at the Virginia
Beach campus of Tidewater Community College, goes over work with
student Heather Austin. Jellig says community college profs are
often more committed to teaching students who are behind than are
university profs.
Lynn Pappilion participates in English 03, a college prep class at
TCC in Virginia Beach. With pressure rising to cut costs and raise
standards, remedial courses have become candidates for cutbacks.
KEYWORDS: REMEDIAL EDUCATION by CNB