When I was hired on by the Hartford Business Journal, I didn’t have to attend any of the remedial classes.
I was exempted from learning how to wash the publisher’s car; I didn’t have to learn how to change the typewriter ribbons, or to refresh the ink for the quill pens. I didn’t have to take the spelling test to check if I knew how to spell “Anthuneeeum.”
No, I was put on the accelerated path that led me directly to my slot as senior vice president of opinion and director of alcohol services for HBJ, because, after all, I am a Columnist God.
But, most organizations, including this one, can’t afford too many all-stars. It’s too expensive and the office suite doesn’t have room for that many egos. So, you bring in some of the struggling Unwashed Masses and you train them; you give them remedial education, until they’re ready to write snappy stories about utility regulation.
There’s no shame in it for the employed beneficiaries. The hiring authority can set the bar wherever it wants and, when you satisfy the competency requirements, you have a chance to join the team and learn at the feet of Cohen the Columnist. All is well.
And so it is with Connecticut’s community colleges. The bar to admission is purposely set reasonably low, so that be you a graduate of something snobby, something middling, or some hideous urban mess, you can come through the door and learn and grow and prosper.
But, if you haven’t yet mastered the equivalent of washing the publisher’s car or changing the typewriter ribbon; if you aren’t yet much of a Shakespeare scholar, or very good at algebra; the community colleges will shuffle you to “remedial” classes, to bring you up to snuff and prepare you for what lies ahead.
More than two-thirds of the students who enter Connecticut’s community colleges are required to take at least one remedial class, which, while it might be beneficial to them, is embarrassing to the adults who pretend to educate them lower down on the educational totem pole — especially in high school, where they are, in theory, being educated well enough to at least cope with community college.
A General Assembly bill that seems to have passed without much fuss would banish the remedial classes — to be replaced by “embedded” remediation in traditional classes. That loud screaming you hear is from community college instructors, who may be obligated to offer remedial education in a subtle, grade-inflating kind of way that doesn’t look or sound like remedial education.
The end of formal remediation is fueled in part by phony-baloney statistical analysis suggesting that most of the kids who take remedial classes don’t graduate anyway — with the implication that they might as well fail at a more dignified level, without the bother of “remediation.”
Community colleges in Connecticut, and across the country, are faced with a plague of students who never graduate — for many reasons, ranging from mediocre K-12 education, to money troubles, to family backgrounds that don’t encourage the reading of Moby Dick to determine exactly what that whale is intended to symbolize.
Community college students represent a hodgepodge of expectations, from an inexpensive pathway to a four-year degree to just enough academic credibility to catch the eye of a heating-and-air-conditioning repair service.
Whatever the goal, community colleges must promise at least a modest, but concrete, core competency. Is “remedial education” part of that process? Of course it is. To eliminate it will do those students no favor.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
