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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Florida graduates are often unprepared for college

From News Press.com

by David Brietenstein

Just three months separate high school graduation from the start of college, but the interval might as well be light years.

Colleges are seeing more freshmen arrive on campus without a solid academic foundation, and institutions are having to create remedial programs to teach skills students should have learned in high school.

“We get people from the K-12 system who lack the basic abilities,” said Steve Calabro, president of Southwest Florida College. “Their mathematical abilities are atrocious. Their ability to read for comprehension and their communication skills are bad.”

Simply earning a high school diploma does not mean a student is ready for college. High schools measure proficiency one way, and colleges another, according to Robert McCabe, executive director of the 40-member National Alliance of Community and Technical Colleges. That disconnect, he said, results from school districts and colleges doing their own thing.

“There has been no work to stream or align college with high school,” said McCabe, who served as president of Miami-Dade College for 15 years. “We ought to think of this as a single system, but we don’t.”

National studies have charted the continued poor performance of students attending public colleges. “Diploma to Nowhere,” a 2008 study by advocacy group Strong American Schools, found 43 percent of students at two-year public institutions and 29 percent at four-year public colleges have taken a remedial course. The report calculates the cost of that remediation at $2.3 million to $2.9 million annually.

At Edison State College, seven in 10 first-time freshmen are assigned to at least one developmental course after failing to achieve a minimum score in English, mathematics or reading on the Postsecondary Education Readiness Test.

Eileen Deluca, associate dean for college prep and developmental studies, said the vast majority of test-takers struggle in math, which is perplexing because high school students have more testing difficulty with reading.

Bryan Ordonez, a 19-year-old Edison student from Cape Coral, is taking the second of three levels of math remedial courses, despite earning B’s and C’s in his high school math courses. Some of his Edison classmates aced pre-calculus in high school, yet find themselves paying full price for non-credit remedial courses.

“It was the test,” Ordonez said. “Three hours of reading, writing and math. By that point, you just want to get out of there.”

Edison has a plan, though. The college started with a base of associate’s degrees and added bachelor’s programs on top and charter high schools on the bottom. Next fall, Edison will open a K-8 school in Lee County, part of district President Kenneth Walker’s plans for a seamless education system.

The college also is opening communications lines with the five school districts in Southwest Florida. Edison sponsored a workshop in the spring that brought K-12 and higher education academic chiefs into the same room to discuss reading and math curriculum, and it coordinates an email listserve among the group.

At Florida Gulf Coast University, 57 of 2,230 first-time freshmen last year, or 2.6 percent, were required to take remedial courses. However, that low rate doesn’t mean students are ready for demands of their degree programs. Engineering dean Susan Blanchard said only 18 of 102 freshmen engineering students in 2009-10 tested well enough to be placed into calculus I, which is the first math course in the engineering program sequence. Those unprepared for calculus spent up to three semesters taking prerequisite courses, adding as much as one year onto their college education.

“If they’re not ready for calculus I, they’re behind,” Blanchard said. “It’s not their fault they’re not ready. They still have the ability, but have to work a lot harder.”

Preparation isn’t just a concern in Southwest Florida. The Florida Department of Education found in 2009 that almost 47 percent of students enrolling in community or state college in the year immediately following high school were not ready in three core subjects: math, reading and writing.

Bob Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a Massachusetts-based advocacy group, said teachers spend too much time teaching students how to pass standardized tests and not teaching skills students need to succeed in college.

The lack of basic mathematical skills and real-life applications also affects the workplace. Basil Bernard, president of Southeast Florida-based Apricot Office Supplies and Furniture, recently attended an education summit in Miami, and provided an example of what’s not being taught in school.

“Some of the workers I get don’t know how to balance a checkbook,” Bernard said. “How can you graduate from high school and not know how to balance a checkbook? Something is wrong. We have to at least teach students the basic skill sets.”

High schools are charged with training students for college and the workforce, or both, and McCabe believes high schools, colleges and employers must work together, even if that means reteaching information that already should be stamped onto a student’s brain.

“We need all of these people for our future, and we don’t want to give up on them,” McCabe said.

http://www.news-press.com/article/20111005/NEWS0104/111004048/1006/

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