When higher education officials last week released a report showing nearly 45 percent of the Englewood High School students who went to a Colorado public college in 2004 weren’t prepared to do college-level math, reading or writing, principal Bob Barrows was not surprised.
The data in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education report, which listed remediation rates for most of the state’s high schools, mirrored trends seen in state tests given to public school students, Barrows said. Remediation rates show the percentage of college freshmen who need remedial work in basic subjects before they can tackle college-level courses based on how they perform on standardized tests.
Poor districts had the highest rates of students who needed to take remediation courses in college, while wealthier district had lower rates.
And schools that rated the highest on the Colorado Student Assessment Program test had lower percentages of remedial college students than those that had “low” or “average” state ratings.
“We’re not surprised to see the data look the way it does,” Barrows said. “It looks exactly like CSAP data.”
What’s less obvious is why students who have earned a high school diploma need remediation. School administrators say the problem is a range of factors, including the skills students bring to high school, the courses they take once there, and the lack of alignment between high school and college courses.
“It’s dangerous to judge a school by that (data) without getting into a conversation about that,” Barrows said.
In Englewood, some students enter high school at a sixth- grade reading level, while a handful of others are immigrants who haven’t mastered English, Barrows said.
At Jefferson High School in Jefferson County, 65 percent of the 49 students who enrolled in a state college in 2004 needed to take basic skills courses in reading, math or writing, the report showed.
Principal Jose Martinez said the median reading level for the average ninth-grader is about that expected of a sixth-grader.
Even with interventions in place, Martinez said, it’s hard to make up for lost time. “We can bring them up to the ninth-grade level by the time they finish (high school),” he said.
In the Cherry Creek School District, where 437 out of the 1,684 students – 26 percent – who graduated and enrolled in a public, in-state college in 2004 needed remedial classes, officials note that not all students choose to take rigorous classes during high school.
The district recommends that students take four years of English, math, science and social studies, said Linda Fox, executive director of high school education at Cherry Creek.
But students can obtain a diploma with less – four years of English, three years of math, two-and-a-half years of social studies and two years of science.
David Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in Boulder, said students shouldn’t leave high school until they are ready for college – even if they don’t intend to go.
“In the world of work today, the entry-level skills that are required for noncollegiate work are not that different from college-level work,” he said. Students need to be literate, he said.
The broader problem he sees is the absence of any connection between what high schools require students to complete to earn a diploma, and what colleges expect students to know when they enter college.
Colorado’s education commissioner, William Moloney, said there is “a fundamental tension in education between what kids need and what they want.”
Stan Scheer, superintendent of the Littleton School District, which had a remediation rate of 23 percent, one of the lowest in the state, said the state does not have comprehensive graduation requirements for all high school graduates, so students go into higher education with different levels of experience.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
