‘We know what works’: Santa Rosa Junior College ditches remedial classes amid statewide debate over student tracking

The California Acceleration Project, a faculty-led group focused on improving outcomes for students, has helped lead the charge since 2010 to study the effectiveness of remedial education at community colleges and, based on those findings, phase it out.

Studies have shown students who begin community college in remedial English and math classes — which do not help fulfill graduation requirements at four-year colleges — are unlikely to pass college-level courses in those subjects within a year. That metric, advocates say, is a good indicator of students’ likelihood of completing their degrees.

According to data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, the share of students who passed transfer-level classes in both math and English dramatically increases as remedial class requirements are eliminated. Those findings come from data collected across the 116 campuses since the 2010-11 school year.

The data showed improvement in student academic performance over years as remedial courses were stripped away. In 2014-15, the 39,630 students enrolled in California community colleges, or 25% of newly enrolled students that year, passed a college-level math class within a year of enrollment.

By 2019-20, that number rose to 72,976 students, making up 50% of newly enrolled students across a smaller overall student body.

In English, the percentage of students who passed a transfer-level class within a year of enrollment increased from 47% in 2014-15 to 67% in 2019-20.

Katie Hern, a co-founder of the California Acceleration Project and an English instructor at Skyline College in San Bruno, said she understands why talk about phasing out remedial classes elicits concern from some educators.

“It’s very often coming from a responsible place of care for students,” she said. “But the evidence is very, very clear: Students are much better off when we let them directly enroll into transferable college-level classes.”

The group’s work helped spur Assembly Bill 705, which took effect in January 2018. It was an initial step to push California’s community colleges away from offering remedial, or pre-transfer level, classes.

The bill strengthened existing law requiring community colleges to use multiple measures, rather than placement exams, to determine math and English placement. Those included high school coursework, grades and grade-point average.

Community colleges were required to enroll students in transfer-level courses unless they had evidence to believe a student would be “highly unlikely to succeed” in those classes.

For allied lawmakers and advocates, full implementation of the law meant eventually phasing out remedial classes entirely.

But individual campuses have tackled the changes with varying degrees of urgency. Some have continued to offer remedial classes several tiers below transfer-level, which spurred the new legislation.

Most colleges, including Santa Rosa Junior College, have made progress in the past few years while adding other support for students who would have enrolled in remedial classes.

Sheryl Cavales-Doolan, chair of the English department at Santa Rosa Junior College, described the process in her department. While winnowing remedial class offerings, they have increased extra support in college-level courses to help students refresh basic skills they are rusty on.

An example is English 50, a “corequisite” course, designed by the department “to enhance and support students' critical reading, writing, thinking, and research skills for effective participation in and successful completion of English 1A,” according to the course description.

“It’s not been without controversy, the AB 705 changes, but what it’s really done has given us an opportunity to reflect on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Cavales-Doolan said. “I would say it’s really galvanized our department’s commitment to (asking), ‘How we are going to best support our students?’”

An extreme solution?

Still, some students and teachers are not ready to abandon remedial education, especially in math.

Many students are not ready for college-level math right away, Melvin said. Requiring they complete a college-level course within a year of enrollment could have unintended consequences, he said.

Grace Gideon, 33, didn’t pass a transfer-level class within a year of enrolling at the junior college in 2013. When she started, she had a son in kindergarten and hadn’t been in school for seven years, so she enrolled in a pre-algebra course.

She didn’t pass her first college-level math class until five years later. By the metric used in the research fueling the AB 1705 push, Gideon’s path would not have been considered successful.

But this spring, nine years later, she graduated from the junior college with five associate degrees and was a speaker at commencement. She’s heading to the University of California, Berkeley, where she hopes to study quantum mechanics.

Before taking pre-algebra at the junior college, Gideon thought she disliked math. That all changed in her remedial course, she said.

“I completely fell in love with math and changed my major,” she said. “When I came into the math class, it felt very safe and structured, giving me this stability and a place where I could actually solve problems.”

Advocates for remedial courses point out that California’s high school graduation requirement for math only reaches up to algebra I. That’s several tiers below college-level math, which begins at pre-calculus or statistics, both of which require understanding of concepts covered in algebra II.

As a result, a high school graduate can show up to community college without having taken the classes that would prepare them for college-level math.

Those who favor dropping remedial classes point to increased offerings of college-prep courses in some of Sonoma County’s school districts, including Santa Rosa City Schools. The math course sequence that satisfies admissions criteria for both the University of California and California State University systems, for example, includes completion of algebra I, geometry and algebra II.

But amid the disruptions from wildfires and their residual effects, including smoke days and power shut-offs, as well as the year-plus of remote learning during the pandemic, many local students are not completing the CSU and UC prep requirements.

In Santa Rosa City Schools, for example, the rate of graduates who successfully completed all the requirements has dropped 14% in the past five years.

In 2021, the share hit a low point of 1,905 graduates, or 11.4%, according to data shared by the school district.

That type of data and conversations with local high school math teachers have Melvin concerned about the state’s big pivot away from remedial classes.

“To do something so drastic right when we’re coming out of the pandemic, it seems disingenuous,” he said. “Turning off all (remedial) options is also inequitable.”

Debate hits home on campus

Shawn Smith, who is studying nursing at the junior college, returned to school in fall 2021, 27 years after he dropped out of eighth grade. He went on to complete a GED in 2009, but passing college-level math upon his entry to the junior college was “not ever going to be possible,” he said.

The remedial course in which he earned an A last fall set him up to pass statistics and chemistry, he said.

“Had I not taken this class, I know for a fact I would have failed,” Smith said. “And it would have crushed me. It wouldn’t have been worth it to me (to continue school).”

Now, he said, he’s earning A’s in all his courses. But failing early on, he said, would have cemented fears he long harbored about himself as a student: “See, I knew school wasn’t for me. I knew I was dumb.”

An online petition from Santa Rosa Junior College community members opposing AB 1705 had nearly 2,000 signatures this week. The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges has also come out against the bill.

In response to the criticism, though, proponents of eliminating remedial education point back to the data. Though individual students or small groups may find success, they said, research shows more evidence to refute the benefit of a remedial approach than affirm it.

Hern highlighted data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office that tracks outcomes for students with disabilities. Those students who start in transfer-level math still consistently pass those classes at much higher rates in a year than they do if they start in remedial classes.

In 2019-20, 53% of students receiving disability services passed their transfer-level math classes within a year. If they started in a remedial class one level below college-level, though, only 13% passed a college-level math class within a year.

“Yes, they may face challenges, but they’re not better off starting in remedial classes,” Hern said.

Proponents also point out the pitfalls of continuing to offer remedial education. One is that Black and Latino students are disproportionately represented in remedial classes wherever they are offered and also complete college-level classes at lower rates.

“The data (shows) that remedial classes are a profoundly broken solution to anything that you think is ailing students,” Hern said. “If you are really worried that disrupted learning has left students more ill-prepared for college, which I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to think, then the solution is to increase your corequisite offerings.”

Hern also described offering “just in time” supports as a way to assist students. For example, she teaches two versions of a freshman composition class.

Students who need extra support enroll in the version of her course with longer class time, so she can work with students who need extra support or review of foundational concepts.

Robert Holcomb, new vice president of academic affairs, who took over for Saldaña-Talley in July, said the junior college also will examine ways to boost tutoring support. Skill development courses are another resource. Those courses are not for credit, but they are free to enrolled students, Holcomb said.

“Even though it isn’t part of the credit sequence, they’re free, repeatable,” Holcomb said. “They may just have to buy a book.”

Santa Rosa Junior College leaders expressed confidence that this strategy of additional supports will ensure students who might have previously enrolled in remedial courses will still get what they need to succeed.

“We know what works,” Saldaña-Talley said. “It’s just a matter of figuring out how we can scale it up.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.