Pamela Burdman

Pamela Burdman
May half dozen, 2015

Teachers and students across the land are adjusting to the Common Core standards, which promise to help more immature people go prepare for college. In the words of Country Board of Education President Michael Kirst, the standards represent "a unique opportunity to strengthen alignment across the divide between K-12 and post-secondary instruction in California."

Kirst and other advocates of the new standards were motivated to support them, in role, by sobering data showing that a large proportion of high schoolhouse graduates require remedial courses when they go to college. In math, for example, near 85 percent of community college students and about a 3rd of California State University students confront at to the lowest degree one remedial course.

A chief goal of the new standards is to reduce those rates by ensuring that more students finish high schoolhouse with the knowledge and skills that colleges look. The standards, however, assume colleges' expectations are static. In fact, equally a new policy written report past LearningWorks and Policy Assay for California Education that I authored reveals, those expectations are shifting as colleges and universities seek to make their remedial math programs more effective.

Therefore at that place may be a mismatch betwixt the math students are existence taught in loftier school based on the Common Cadre and new curricular innovations being implemented at the college instruction level.

What is happening is that dozens of community colleges in California are offering a subset of their students alternative remedial math sequences that emphasize statistics preparation, while the Common Core math standards place a priority on algebra.

In the typical scenario, students take two years of algebra during loftier schoolhouse that ideally prepares them for college-level math courses required to earn a four-twelvemonth degree. In reality, many students end upwards taking one or both as remedial courses during college, based on their scores on placement tests.

Algebra 2 is a graduation requirement for students pursuing an associate caste. Community college students seeking to transfer to iv-year universities must also testify proficiency in Algebra 2 on a placement examination, or take a remedial class, before they can enroll in a college-level course required to transfer to a four-year university.

Designed for community higher students pursuing non-technical majors, the new math pathways place a greater priority on preparation in statistics and quantitative reasoning than in the traditional algebra-intensive course sequence.

The culling approaches are growing rapidly in community colleges. That's in office considering of promising early on results, showing that students who endeavour the new sequences are three to iv times as likely to pass a college-level math course, such as Statistics, every bit students enroll in traditional remedial courses.

It'due south likewise because, while two years of algebra courses provide direct training for science and engineering majors, applied math courses such as Statistics are more relevant for students in many other academic fields, including the social sciences.

Requiring every educatee to demonstrate proficiency in Algebra 2 via remedial courses increasingly strikes community higher leaders as unnecessary, unwise, and unfair – particularly since evidence shows that the vast majority of students required to take remedial math courses never consummate college.

It's not merely community college standards that are starting to shift. Both the CSU and Academy of California systems are entertaining new approaches, acknowledging the case for basing students' math requirements on their academic and career goals. UC'due south admissions committee recently approved a two-grade alternative remedial sequence (including a pre-statistics course and a college-level statistics course) for community higher students seeking to transfer, despite the program'due south relatively slim algebra content.

And some CSU campuses have reduced the amount of algebra students placed into remedial math courses must report earlier enrolling in higher-level courses such as Introductory Statistics.

What do these changes hateful about higher readiness for California'south high school students? For admission to UC and CSU, students still demand the equivalent of 2 years of algebra in loftier school. And despite its practical emphasis on developing mathematical maturity and sense-making, Mutual Core math includes a healthy dose of Algebra 1 and 2.

For now, the thought of expanding the Common Core standards to include an alternative course pathway at the loftier schoolhouse level is a sensitive i. U.S. students don't choose majors until they are in college, and educators are understandably wary of limiting students' options by letting them graduate from high school with fewer than two years of algebra. But the traditional practise has besides express loftier school students' options, because many struggle with algebra, especially Algebra 2.

The new standards hope to change that, by ensuring that more than students succeed in high schoolhouse math, not just passing courses but actually agreement the mathematical ideas. Only One thousand-12 education reformers could learn from new programs at the college level that suggest that for all students to succeed in that location may need to be more than than one pathway through mathematics.

Pamela Burdman is a Berkeley-based college education policy annotator and a former program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Her latest publication is DEGREES OF Liberty: Varying Routes to Math Readiness and the Challenge of Intersegmental Alignment.

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