The dropout and failure-to-graduate rates in California’s 72-district, 114 community colleges serving over 2.1 million students are unacceptable. A study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership at Cal State Sacramento found that 70 percent of community college students fail to graduate or transfer to a four-year institution. These students typically drop out without any degree but with considerable debt.
One strategy used to redress this grim
reality was to pour resources into remedial math and English courses, populated
disproportionately by African-American and Latino students. It failed
abysmally. Only 18 percent of elementary algebra students completed
transfer-level math to CSU and UC systems in three years, and only 6 percent of
pre-algebra students.
Something radical had to be done. Enter
Assembly Bill 705. Introduced by Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, it was signed
into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Jan. 1, giving community colleges a deadline
for full implementation by the fall of 2019.
The two revolutionary aspects of the
bill are: a) colleges must maximize the probability that a student enter and
complete transfer-level coursework in math and English within one year and b)
colleges must use high school coursework, high school grades or high school GPAs
to place incoming students into transfer-level courses, providing concurrent
support as needed.
To appreciate the radical nature of AB
705, consider what I have witnessed with heartbreaking regularity in my years
of teaching math. Joe, a high-school graduate with a 3.0 GPA, enrolls in his
local college as a springboard for admission to UC Davis to major in
sustainable agriculture. He expects to spend at most 3 years to accumulate
enough units to transfer. Without delving into his aspirations, however, the
college gives him an impersonal placement test where he falters with fractions.
He gets trapped into a three-semester sequence of non-transferable basic skills
classes of pre-algebra, algebra 1 and 2. He manages to pass the first two but
algebra 2, with complex conjugates, quadratic equations and such, proves
insurmountable. Overcome by emotional and psychological problems, Joe drops out
and accepts a low-wage job below his potential.
AB 705 recognizes that it is the
structural problem of under-placement and long sequence of classes that prevent
students like Joe from graduating. Under AB 705, Joe is placed in transferable
statistics in his very first semester, with help in math provided
as just-in-time or co-requisite remediation. Excited by the relevance of
the predictive power of statistics to his major, Joe aces the course. In a
year, he completes transfer-level math and English requirements for a four-year
institution.
Pipe dream? No. Pilot projects at San
Diego’s Cuyamaca College and San Bruno’s Skyline College among others have
shown that placing students in transferable math and English courses based on
high school GPA quadruples the completion rate.
AB
705 has its challenges and detractors. Some claim it is too draconian. Others,
that it was forced down from above without adequate faculty consultation. These
are legitimate concerns, but the overriding factor for embracing AB 705 is that
through proper placement and emphasizing acceleration over remediation, it can
lift students from failure to success.
The Golden State has the fifth largest
economy in the world, after the United States, China, Japan, and Germany. Its
demand for a skilled, innovative workforce is skyrocketing. California’s
community colleges must play a significant role in nurturing and educating this
workforce. Faculty, counselors and administrators must work together to help
students reach the high bar set by AB 705. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have
been guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations, with minority students
bearing the brunt of our casually cruel mindset. We wrongly focus on what our
students don’t know rather than what they know. The pilot projects have shown
that students rise to the challenge of higher expectations. By demanding more,
we can not only help our students succeed academically but also guide them
toward a life of meaning and purpose.
