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twitterUNLV researching why so many freshmen aren’t ready for college
Steve Marcus
A tutor at UNLV helps a biology major from Thailand with a calculus problem this month. The university wants to learn more about students who need such aid.
Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.
In Today's Sun
- Mentors key to helping students succeed (10-18-2009)
Neal Smatresk
UNLV tutor Nedelina Petkova, left, helps biology major Padtaya Pukpayat with a math problem. Assessing incoming freshmen in math is expected to begin next fall.
Sun Archives
- Nearly half of Nevada students need remedial courses (1-6-2006)
- State scholarship won't cover remedial classes (6-16-2005)
- UNLV wants to get away from the basics (12-5-2001)
- Basic training: UNLV bucks trend by embracing remedial courses (6-29-1997)
Sun Coverage
Beyond the Sun
Walt Rulffes
UNLV is about to launch what may be its most important research project ever: Why are so many freshmen not ready for college even though their high school grades suggest they are?
In 2008, more than a third of the Nevada high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.
Neal Smatresk, the UNLV president, says the problem needs to be addressed clinically, the way doctors examine patients.
“As soon as those students get here we need to diagnose, prescribe and treat,” Smatresk said. “If we come up with the right prescription to fill those critical skills gaps, then I think we can give our students an edge.”
Other public universities — notably in California — are addressing the problem of poorly prepared college freshmen, but Smatresk has a unique laboratory at his disposal: the Clark County School District, the pipeline for 80 percent of UNLV’s undergraduate population.
That will allow UNLV to mount what may be the most aggressive initiative in the nation to address the problem, Smatresk said.
The scope and reach of UNLV’s research — including evaluating every incoming freshman to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing — will create a new paradigm in studying student remediation, Smatresk said.
Key to the effort: a series of brief tests, now being introduced, to identify gaps in the reading comprehension skills of incoming freshmen that might not show up in their high school transcripts or college entrance exam scores. A new assessment of incoming students’ math skills is expected to be introduced next fall.
Smatresk has proposed levying a $1-per-credit-hour surcharge per undergraduate student. A typical freshman class is about 5,000 students, and UNLV has a total of about 22,000 undergraduates. Smatresk said he expects the surcharge to raise about $500,000 a year, which would support the entire initiative, including assessments, remedial classes, the Academic Success Center and tutoring. Smatresk has the backing of student leadership, and will ask for Board of Regents support in December.
Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits.
Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.
The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge.
Students arrive at school with a host of challenges, many of which cannot be solved by even the best of classroom instruction, said Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association.
“We would be more than willing to work with the university and the district in terms of truly identifying what impacts a student’s performance and readiness for college,” Murillo said. That assessment, he said, should include “a component that deals with their home life and a lack of family support.”
Julie Greenberg, senior policy director for the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, agrees that identifying teachers with the strongest — and weakest — track records of producing college-ready students doesn’t tell the whole story.
“You can have a fantastic teacher doing a perfectly competent job but the kids are still below grade level,” Greenberg said. “There’s a lot of confounding variables.
“For a lot of these kids, the problems started in elementary school — you were off track long before your senior year,” said Greenberg, who taught secondary math for 13 years in Maryland. “You were passed along and passed along, and all the cracks and gaps were papered over.”
Smatresk, who served as UNLV’s executive vice president and provost before being appointed president in August, said the ultimate purpose of his initiative is to reduce the need for incoming UNLV freshmen to take remedial classes.
“It’s not about blaming teachers, it’s about revealing the problems we have and then honestly developing strategies to resolve them,” Smatresk said. “We would like to call it an attempt to help the teachers.”
Rulffes was willing to go even a step further.
There are unquestionably socio-economic factors in student achievement, Rulffes said, and elements such as parental involvement and truancy play a role. If the remediation study points to problems in classroom instruction, that shouldn’t be viewed as an indictment, Rulffes said.
“If anything, I would say it’s really the district’s fault and the community’s fault for not properly supporting teachers,” Rulffes said.
Measuring whether high school graduates are truly ready for college has flummoxed educators for years.
Plenty of freshmen with strong track records of academic success, and who do well on SAT or ACT college-admission tests, struggle at the college level.
For 30 years, Nevada has tied its high school diploma to passing a statewide proficiency exam, in addition to completing required classes. But the exams are based on the state’s K-12 standards, and are not aligned with the expectations of the higher education system, experts say.
Indeed, about 40 percent of Nevada’s current math proficiency exam is based on fundamental skills that students are supposed to have acquired by eighth grade. The U.S. Education Department has told Nevada it must revise the exam so that only high school-level material is included. The new, more difficult version debuts next year.
“One of the sad things about giving a test like that is that we’re sending deceiving signals to students,” said Nevin Brown, a senior fellow and director of the postsecondary initiative for Achieve, an education think tank created by a coalition of the nation’s governors and business leaders in 1996. “We’re letting them assume that a passing grade means they’re ready for college, which for many of them just isn’t true.”
The problem of Nevada’s underprepared college freshmen has long vexed both K-12 and higher education officials. In 2006, Rulffes and Jim Rogers, then-chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, pledged to take action.
• To weed out borderline students who might not be ready for a more rigorous academic environment, UNLV raised admissions standards, demanding that incoming freshmen have grade-point averages roughly equivalent of a B-minus as opposed to a C-plus. The effect: Students more at risk of failing in college weren’t admitted in the first place.
• The School District now requires all students to take a college prep curriculum — students can opt not to with their parents’ permission — and added a fourth year of mathematics to its graduation requirement. New efforts to help students prepare for college entrance exams, which are used by the higher ed system to determine freshmen class assignments, resulted in higher test scores, district officials say.
• The College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State College began offering more remedial help, as well as expanded dual credit classes for high school students.
In 2006, the Legislature decided it would no longer fund remedial classes at the state’s two universities, UNLV and University of Nevada, Reno, cutting the number of remedial class offerings and resulting in only 8 percent of UNLV freshmen getting catch-up help, compared with 38 percent the previous year. The university still offers a limited number of remedial classes paid for with other funding, with enrollment on a first-come, first-served basis. Students who don’t land a spot at UNLV have to complete remediation elsewhere — such as CSN or NSC — before they can take their first university courses.
Research suggests there is an incentive for universities to offer remedial classes: Students who take them are more likely to graduate than those who need help but don’t. On the flip side, offering remediation on the public’s dime can be the equivalent of double-billing taxpayers for classes that should have been mastered in high school.
Of the Clark County School District students who graduated in 2008 and went on to state colleges and universities, 24 percent required remediation, a rate that has been steadily declining from 40 percent in 2004.
It’s possible that requiring a fourth year of mathematics has contributed to the lower remediation rate, along with students doing better on entrance exams and UNLV raising admission requirements. But “it’s impossible to know for sure,” said Kim Boyle, director of guidance and counseling for the district. “There are so many contributing factors, you have to be careful when drawing conclusions.”
Based on assessments being used in freshman English classes, about 40 to 50 percent of UNLV’s incoming students need help with reading comprehension skills, said Ralph Reynolds, a professor of educational psychology at UNLV who is overseeing the pilot program for an expanded diagnostic tool.
“Our plan is to follow them not just for this year but all four years,” Reynolds said. “That’s the only way to truly measure how effective our intervention is.”
After identifying which students need help, the university intends to provide tutoring, Reynolds said.
There’s only enough money right now to provide tutoring help to the 70 most needy students of the 2,000 tested since August — a fraction of those who might actually benefit, Reynolds said.
But it’s a good start, Reynolds said, adding that he was grateful to Smatresk for allocating the money for a new program despite the severe budget cuts the university was forced to make this year.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that about 20 percent of freshmen enrolling in four-year institutions require at least one remedial course.
Although there’s no shortage of conversations about the need for elementary, secondary and higher ed partnerships to address remediation rates, few educational experts are hunting for a solution, said Greenberg of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
“It’s a strangely rational thing for them (UNLV and the School District) to be doing,” Greenberg said with a laugh. “The reality is that there’s a real disconnect between K-12 academic standards and what colleges actually want students to know.”
UNLV’s strategy of diagnosing how students are ill-prepared for college and reverse-engineering their academic experiences is playing out, in various versions, elsewhere.
Since 2004, Louisiana has been tracking the achievement of students whose teachers are graduates of in-state colleges of education. The effort is intended to measure the quality of the preparation program a teacher went through by evaluating the standardized test performance of a new teacher’s students, said Beverly Flowers-Gibson, associate dean of the College of Education at the University of Louisiana-Monroe.
Her campus has received top ratings, indicating the young teachers it produces are scoring as well or better than veteran teachers.
But the evaluations “don’t tell us what we’re doing right,” she said. Other universities call Flowers-Gibson to find out Monroe’s secret formula, only to learn the academic program and approach are similar to what they have in place.
“It would be wonderful if we could say, ‘If you follow these steps in sequence, you will have successful teachers,’ ” Flowers-Gibson said. “But we are not there yet.”
At the least, Clark County schools are trying to better identify poorly prepared college-bound students before they graduate.
An assessment test being developed by the School District will measure reading, writing and math skills of high school juniors. If the results show they are not on track to meet higher ed’s expectations by graduation, the students can use their senior year classes to get up to par.
“If we can identify struggling students when they’re juniors, we can help them use their senior year to shore up their weaknesses,” Rulffes said.
The School District is modeling its assessment of college-bound juniors after a program in California, where more than 60 percent of the 40,000 students admitted to the California State University system each year have needed remedial classes in English, math or both.
California’s high school juniors can take a series of short tests that measure their readiness for college-level work, and use the results to guide their choice of senior-year classes.
While Cal State’s overall remediation rate remains high, there’s evidence at individual campuses that the program is helping.
Kim Grytdahl, principal of Silverado High School, says he likes the sounds of the Cal State assessment test. Last year 21 percent of Silverado’s graduates required remedial classes after enrolling in a state university or college.
There are plenty of students with decent GPAs and passing scores on the proficiency exams who still aren’t ready for the college workload, Grytdahl said.
“It would be great if we could have the data in front of us and say to a kid, ‘Look, you have a decent GPA and you’ve passed the proficiency tests, but based on what our higher ed system says you need to know, here’s what you have to work on,’ ” Grytdahl said. “And they should do it now while it’s free. If they wait until they get to college it’s going to cost them.”
The biggest stumbling block for college-bound students is math. In the Clark County School District, from 86 percent to 90 percent of middle and high-school students fail to demonstrate mastery of the subject on end-of-semester tests.
Smatresk credited the School District for at least being brave enough to conduct such tests.
“If you assess math anywhere in this country, and you do it honestly, you are going to be horrified — because kids aren’t learning,” Smatresk said.
Math professor William Speer, who is leading the team developing UNLV’s new diagnostic math assessment of incoming freshmen, applauds the district for adding a fourth year of math as a graduation requirement.
“It’s not OK to do a statistics class as a junior and then sit out a year because you think you’ve earned a holiday,” Speer said. “You really pay a price for that.”
To Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, Smatresk’s desire to help educators improve their knowledge base is “admirable” but fails to take into account a larger reality.
“In my mind that’s putting the blame on the teacher,” said Murillo, whose union represents the majority of the district’s 18,000 licensed personnel. “If the teacher were more prepared, if the teacher had access to workshops, if the teacher did things differently, the student would learn — the truth is what a student does at school is largely determined by their home life.”
The UNLV research may go a long way in validating — or refuting — that contention.
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Stop the wasting our tax dollars on this research. I will give you the answer for free. Two words: Social Promotion.
We, the taxpayers have already paid to educate them once. Stop the free remediation programs. Send the unqualified students back to high school.
odog hit it on the head; stop accepting students w/ poor grades. if the student cannot or will not improve throw them out of the program. case closed.
I agree with odog. Let's go a step further, get rid of NCLBA.
If they are not prepared with the educational skills and knowledge required to be accepted into college, how did they get accepted? Maybe they are graduates of the new Rancho High School that the taxpayers spent over 100 million to build. Lets get back to basics and hold people accountable for their actions, all across the board.
Strong parental involvement is a huge factor in a student's success. What can be done to increase the involvement and commitment of the parent or parents?
The high schools need to stop teaching towards the ACT/SAT/other standardized tests. Standardized tests provide a metric, but unless you teach a student actually how to study and how to learn they are going to make it nowhere in college. College freshmen are being brought in used to being spoon fed information to the test whereas most college courses are likely to expect the student to actually pick up their book and read.
You can not create a program that is going to make people better parents across the board, and like odog said, social promotion to a higher grade without meeting the requirements along the way is largely to blame. You don't earn your grade level any longer, or at least, you aren't required to.
To make matters worse, gifted and talented education programs - to help our best and brightest meet their potential - get little to no funding because it's seen as singling out or giving special treatment to people with more potential in many areas, while football teams get treated to dining out after games. For years there has been talk of "leveling the playing field." This is what you get with a level playing field: below average students are promoted, mediocrity is rewarded, and the outstanding are penalized because the time and money is spent on students that are not serious about their education. The entire system is a disaster area.
Do they even have English and mathematics classes in high school anymore?
This is an national crisis! Students everywhere are going through their K-12 public educational system without a strong foundation in mathematics skills that would prepare them for success in college or the workforce. It's about faulty state standards and curriculum aligned to these standards. It's also about schools of education not preparing future teachers adequately and state DOE's not setting a high enough bar for teacher certification. High college remediation rates mean unnecessary financial burdens to families and a lower chance of graduating college. County colleges nationwide, especially in urban areas, are seeing 80% to 90% remediation rates...and many are taking not just Algebra 1 again, but basic computation classes. Visit www.usworldclassmath.org and join our coalition. Find your state chapter or just send us an e-mail.
lv_spiff, BINGO! I think it's about study skills, of students lacking the discipline to read material that is not discussed in class but is still part of what will be tested.
I am betting incoming freshmen are ill-prepared for tests that exam their full sweep of knowledge of the material versus what was just discussed in the classroom.
If that IS the shortcoming, how best address it? Encourage high school teachers to test information that's in the reading material versus just what's discussed in class.
The entire system needs an overhaul. Social promotion is definitely a problem. Instead of grades, just have skill level. Everyone is in Reading 1 until they met the requirements. A child could be in Reading 1, Math 6 and Language Arts 2. Of course you might have to take age into account. You probably don't want 12 year olds in with the 6 year old children. Though I'm sure there are plenty of 12 year olds in our system that can't read so they could be grouped together. On the other hand, the old one room school house seemed to do okay with children of different ages and skill levels.
it is not nevada's job to spend extra money on a student from thailand that is not prepared. they should not have been admitted! what about SAT scores and interviews before admission?
personally, I think that this is a top down problem. my opinion is that the majority of professors are lame, so unlv gets pathetic students applying (the good ones go to UNR or a better school), and the cycle continues.
Everyone is BROKE in the state - WHERE DOES UNLV GET THESE EXTRA FUNDS?
Perhaps someone can clarify - isn't the policy that every graduate from a Nevada high school can go to one of the higher education institutions in Nevada? Does this mean they automatically get accepted at whatever institution they apply to?
Like I've been saying, the surest indication of how our over-funded, bloated public education bureaucracies in this country have failed is their graduates -- they can't functionally read, write or do their sums, but they sure know who to call when they've been "abused." K-12 is far more about their job security and social engineering than real education.
This is nothing new. Since at least the 70s the Navy, which must recruit high school graduates, has required they read at least at a ninth-grade level to read and understand the warning signs around its nuclear reactors. Yet to meet its recruitment quotas it has had to put many of them in remedial reading classes.
vegasstudent, they aren't automatically accepted to whatever institution they apply, in my opinion, it is just UNLV accepting the losers because they can get more funding from the state for doing so and if many professors could care less about their students, it doesn't matter if they admit them. those are my opinions.
I have a few additional solutions to this problem.
1. Fire any teacher or administrator that promotes any student that has not passed final exams in every grade level.
2. Remove all cell phones, calculators, gaming equipment, etc., from the classrooms.
3. Remove all disruptive students from the classroom.
4. Require all students to be able to speak English before starting school. Concerned teachers can earn extra money tutoring students that fall behind at the parent's expense.
5. Put one third of the CCSD administrators in the schools as classroom and hall monitors.
6. Require dress codes for all students. No pajamas, head rags, no pants below the waist, no micro skirts and no underwear showing. These are distractions.
Parents cannot be forced to make their children learn but they can be held responsible.
What a bunch of great comments. vegasstudent, I couldn't have said it better. But who listens to students, or to teachers, the ones who are in the classroom? We're just supposed to be dictated to, not listened to. Spend a fortune and years and let the "experts" figure it out. It's job security for those who could afford the time and money for a PhD to get them out of the classroom.
Idiots expounding on how to teach. What a joke. Step up and become a teacher. Oh, wait. The job doesn't pay enough.
It's great the UNLV is attempting to address the profound and very obvious (if you teach college courses) problems in student preparedness for college-level work. We already utilize testing for college entrance, and there are some aspects of the challenge of college learning that cannot be captured in a test. It's also be important to be clear about who constructs the test, how does it differ from other entrance exams and why they expect to get better info from a new test.
The vast untapped resource in this scenario is the university's academic faculty. Why not encourage and support faculty research into the problem--and NOT rely solely on faculty in education departments or the dubious profession of "learning science"? The academic faculty are on the front lines with students in their classrooms--so they know the problems better than anyone, AND they have years of training and expertise in their field that would allow them to approach and research the problem rigorously and from competing points of view. The debate that would ensue would be much more productive towards defining problems and innovating solutions than a test designed by who, with what expertise?, and on what rationale?
"Plenty of freshmen with strong track records of academic success, and who do well on SAT or ACT college-admission tests, struggle at the college level."
I would like Emily Richmond to tell us the source of this comment. As far as I know, SAT and ACT tests are actually a pretty good indicator of academic ability and college success. That's why they're used, and that's why standardized testing is enormously important - because it's standardized. Teachers can grade all over the place. Teacher grades tell you little. I have kids in my class all the time who are below grade level, but who came in with A and B grades in my subject. Now, if some kids choose to drink beer in college instead of studying, don't blame it on the standardized tests.
these are all my opinions. Last time I checked, if you aren't ready for a 4 year college, you go to community college for remedial courses. The problem is UNLV accepting unprepared students instead of letting them go to the cheaper community colleges for their remedial reviews. Oh why, oh why, would UNLV take these students and complain about it after? Because they get more money. Are Gibbons and other state legislatures so stupid that they will throw more money to UNLV instead of calling them on their crap?
The problem is with the teachers. They just are not very bright. They study for 4 years to become a teacher, then all they do is complain about how little it pays. Excuse me, but didn't you realize that before you chose to pursue career in Education? Everyone gets paid in this society based on their ability and contribution. It's fairly simple to become a teacher, thus many individuals can be one so the pay is low. It's very difficult to be a physician, thus less individuals can pursue medicine and the pay is higher.
It's amazing how reasons to problems slap us in the face yet we want to "Research" why. The comments on this article was FREE. Heed!
Teacher
There are a lot of great teachers in our school system. However there are a lot of teachers eaning a paycheck to show up. There are a multitude of problems.
1. No Parental involvement.
2. Students with no desire to learn.
3. Administrators that override teacher decisions and test results.
4. Too many distractions in the classrooms. Cell phones, dress codes, lack of attention spans, no homework completed, just to name a few.
5. Inability to speak English.
6. Good students should be in classes with good students.
One great solution is entrance exams.
A few additional requirements.
1. If the child cannot speak English, they should not be allowed in the school. Parents need to get them private lessons.
2. If a student is below a grade level, tutoring should be required at the parents expense.
3. If they are mentally challenged, they should be in special education classes.
We have lowered the bar so much so that kids that didnt used to pass now pass. Kids that used to be average are now A students. Thats why the US has fallen behind in the math and science fields to places like India and China. By lowering our expectations we lower the national IQ average of the country.
To Steve7952
"The comments on this article was FREE. Heed!"
You are part of the problem you profess to know the answers to - you lack proper subject/verb agreement in your own sentence construction. The word should be "were" not "was."
This is only one of the ongoing problems that I encounter on a routine basis in my classroom at UNLV - especially in lower-division courses that fulfull general education requirements.
It is not only that students don't know how to construct a grammatically correct sentence (much like reader Steve), or write a decent paragraph -let alone a passing paper; nor is it only a problem of reading comprehension and critical thinking.
I am encountering more and more students who think that simply enrolling in college-level classes somehow entitles them to a passing grade - regardless of how subpar their work is - and, eventually, a college degree.
Professors at UNLV will issue midterm grades tomorrow for all 100 and 200-level courses. I am prepared to give more than 1/3 of the 85 students in my 100-level course Fs.
This is the unfortunate reality of my classroom this semester: students who don't come to lecture, who hand in "papers" that are less than 1 page in length - without even having purchased the necessary books to complete the assignment. In some cases, students lack the ability to even understand the question they are being asked to answer.
It is that bad.
I much prefer to gives As to Fs, but I have no problem failing students who don't - or cannot - do college level work.
After all, it is my job to make sure that students who receive 3 credits toward the completion of their college degrees have met the basic requirements of college-level work; if they cannot do this, they cannot pass my course.
This problem is not unique to UNLV - but it is definitely worse here than at other universities where I have taught (UMass-Amherst, Indiana University). And it certainly begs the question: what, exactly, is going on?
Finally, for those of you who are concerned about tax-payer dollars supporting this research - you need to reread this article. For it is stated quite clearly that this research initiative will be supported by a $1 per-credit surcharge per undergrad student.
I can save UNLV the $2,000,000.00 they have committed to this gross waste of time. Have one of their "researchers" who is computer literate google "freshmen not ready for college".
They will get hits on 786,000 articles and research papers on the subject.
They can then use the $2,000,000.00 to do a study on why professors at UNLV get paid $120,000 per year for teaching 2 classes per week.
To do well in school requires one to actually be able to sit down and focus and concentrate on the task at hand........this is the exact opposite of what our kids experience throughout most of their day. They are constantly being bombarded with messages telling them that they should be enjoying themselves all the time and if they are not, then there is something wrong with them. This out of control consumer capitalism over the last 25 years has brought us all kinds of nice things, but the cost has been our ability to actually think. Turn on the tv sometime..what passes as intelligent debate are really sound bites usually no more than 1-3 minutes in length. Standardization of our schools is the last thing our society needs. Expecting a one-size-fits all curriculum to create creative and innovative thinkers is pure fantasy. I really hope that I am retired when this all comes crashing down. Hopefully you all will be too!!
The U.S. Army after WWI released the results of its testing on inductees which showed that roughly half of them had the mental abilities of a 12 year old. The met the traditional definition for moron. This led to eugenics programs in the U.S. designed to increase the "common stock" and remove "bad blood" from the gene pool. These programs became the basis for Hitler's plan for a master race. It's possible that they ultimately didn't really work.
Look around and it is pretty clear that people, in general, aren't very bright. There are examples both ways, but just look at what passes for entertainment these days. We are a few years away from "Ow! My Balls!" being an award-winning show.
To do well at the university level requires an ability to think. Thinking is not taught in this country in K-12 as much as obedience to church and state; rote memorization is stressed over analysis, interpretation and deduction; and students are trained for tests so schools don't lose funding.
It's not just this generation, however. Look at the number of people who posted comments questioning how UNLV is going to fund this study and who asked why the school is accepting people who are unqualified when both of those questions are answered early on in the story.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein
A person has to want to learn before he or she can achieve success in school. Even the best plans will fail if students decline to engage themselves.
I owe my success to my parents who instilled in me a willingness to learn. I remember countless discussions with them about everything from earth science to English grammar, old Hollywood films to sports and nutrition. No one ever forced me to open a book. I did so because I saw my parents reading them.
A teacher can do a lot to facilitate academic growth. But if people are not raised with a desire to seek knowledge, teachers are all but doomed to fail.
instead of giving school teachers bonuses, they should give the bonuses to students that earn good grades. the students, not the teachers, need the real motivation.
We can debate the "failures" and "successes" of education all day long, but, quite simply, if parents do not raise children who understand personal responsibility and who do not value education, all the best teachers in the best academic environments will have little effect.
I was born, raised and educated in Las Vegas, through my degree at UNLV - all at public schools. I never have, and do not now, look at my education as subpar, primarily because I chose to make it valuable by attending class and applying myself.
Children today are not the "victims" of a consumer culture any more than my generation was; they are, however, the victims of a society (and of parents) that values neither personal responsibility nor commitment. Further, those students lucky enough to have good parents are then placed into a system that, as evidenced by teacher pay scales, does not value education and has instead given teachers the job of raising children instead of educating them.
Low pay scales for teachers means, plainly, that the wrong people become teachers and for the wrong reasons. If a third of public school teachers are not qualified to teach thanks to this, at least a third of public school attendees don't belong either in public school or at the grade level they were assigned. The fact that a 14 year old who speaks no English is put into the same 9th grade class as someone who does translates to one thing: education for the others suffers. This is simply unacceptable.
Time to get realistic on education; life isn't like Little League and not everyone gets a trophy.
the pay has nothing to do with the crappy teachers. the education degree is so ridiculously easy and stupid that it attracts losers! they need to scrap the "education major" and require people to get a degree is something real and then minor in education.
It's pretty bad in the school system when the parents, teachers, and admins argue back and forth more over allowing "French Fries" on the lunch menu (and have French Fry committees) than the kids ability to Read, Write, and solve Math equations.
Instead of giving teachers bonuses for teaching math & English, how about letting them come the next day and teach math & English again, LIKE WHAT THEIR JOB DESCRIPTION SAYS?
I teach students 1 + 1 = 2 for $56,000 a year.
Just imagine how much better I would be able to teach students 1 + 1 = 2 if I was paid $70,000 a year.
Amazing that they need to research this when the answer is so simple - we've made the grading standards below what is necessary for a college education. We don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves, after all, isn't college for everyone? I bet the answer is going to be to reduce the value and standards of a college degree.
Hilarious.
"Why are so many freshmen not ready for college even though their high school grades suggest they are?"
So many variable here:
-"Freshmen" (their first year of college will be unpredictable at best)
-"not ready for college" (someone's opinion)
-"high school grades" (grades are influenced by the the student's abilities, the student's attentiveness, the teacher's skills in teaching the subject, the teacher's motivation in grading the student, etc., etc., etc.....)
All of the research in the world will never answer the question.
Too bad it's going to cost the students a $1 per credit-hour surcharge. Looks like UNLV is going to nickel-and-dime the students to death....
"In 2008, more than a third of the Nevada high school graduates who enrolled at the state's universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million."
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When I taught undergrad "Critical Thinking" at UNLV back during 2000 - 2003 (adjunct faculty), the figure for remedial English was more than 50%. Sometimes I'd look out over my class and think 'man, 2/3 of you need to re-take high school.'
What we called "Critical Thinking" was mostly Jr. High level "reading comprehension." My electronic infotainment culture students mostly HATED to read. But they loved to "argue" endlessly about their pet peeves (which was why they signed up), and all expected at least a "B" just for turning up in class. I got taken to my Sups more than once over a "C-" grade (that truly should perhaps have been an "F").
As an adjunct PTI, you hand out any "F's", you will likely not be hired back the next semester. And at the time, roughly 60% of the classroom faculty were PTI's like me, making piddley "Happy Meal" money for our trouble (all while Administration is overpopulated with clueless Associate Deppity Assistant Chancellor Provost-Deanie-Weenies pullin' down 6-figure salaries).
But, hey, the UNLV Prez is gonna kick some serious bootie over the football program.
Have to agree with many of the previous commenters regarding the whole lack of parental involvement and the social promotion thing.
Anyone who thinks the monetary value placed on teaching as a career has nothing to do with the quality of those who teach is simply burying their heads in the sand. Good students with ambition follow the money - period - and many end up in careers that are emotionally dissatisfying but financially lucrative. No matter the feel-good that comes with the "idea" of teaching, its financial and practical reality is inhibiting to all but a few. I know a handful of great teachers, but they all complain about how the bureacracy of teaching limits their ability to have a positive impact. Imagine if teaching were valued by society, and the pool of qualified applicants we'd see then. In my experience in operating a business, lots of people apply for open positions, but you never get the best until you raise the base pay to attract them.
Here are my opinions. I totally disagree James. It's not just the money, an education degree is the "path of least resistance in college" since it requires little effort or brains. An education degree is a joke. They need to require teachers to get real degrees in majors such as math, english, and science instead of letting them get away with the bullsh|t "education" degree.
If they are coming out of Clark County schools it all makes sense!!!
what do american car companies and teachers have in common?
that's right...unions.
every attempt to quantify a teachers performance is met with resistance and protest from the teachers union.
unlv doesn't seem to have a problem cashing these "not ready for college" tuition checks, do they?
In this district the answser is very obvious:
1) an ignorant board of trustees who know nothing about education.
2) a superintendent and associate dunderheaded associates who know nothing about what is really involved in the art of teaching or in the process of learning.
3. restrictions on teacher control of the classroom via their own decisions about curriculum, design and implmentation of lesson, freedom to be creative, inventive and innovative in developing relevant and challenging lessons to meet the needs and interests of the students.
4. insistance on enforcing ridiculous no work =50%; manditory C grades as minimum regardless of quality or quantify of work by a student---no on fails for any reason.
odog nailed it in the first post.
Study skills are a thing of the past. Cable TV and xbox are considerably more pertinent than a "boring" history book.
ADHD is a scam perpetuated by lazy people to promote drug use and excessive excuse use.
I am glad that UNLV is researching the attrition rates for students. I hope the study can lead to improving graduation rates because we need UNLV to enhance their productivity to benefit the local community.
What a waste of money - these bogus "studies" just make UNLV look like even more of a joke.
mike, please explain what makes the study bogus?
well, community members are constantly hyper-critical of UNLV for not being "productive," "efficient," and "reliable" --- now, they are trying to correct the current issues, so make up your mind? do you want them to continue to be a "joke" or start addressing attrition and graduation issues now?
What will I do today......so many video games to play.....so many worthless tv shows and movies to watch......so much to do on the internet.....YouTube....I need to download more music to my iPod and upload more pictures to Myspace page from last weekends party.....wanna see! I have to reply to all these e-mails & text messages. Wait! I have to take this cell phone call.....I wish I had the time study, too busy......TTYL LOL
info, I take it back; yours is the best post of the century.
It just boggles my mind that such a high number of matriculants require remediation. What this tells me is that the colleges are NOT very picky about who they admit. It's all driven by their chase after $$$. They simply accept a higher number of students knowing that 40% shouldn't be admitted simply to rake in te $$$. They don't care that the kids drop out and are saddled with a debt.
The first blogger is correct: Forget the fancy research! EVERYONE (especially students) knows what's wrong with this picture---------1. social promotion 2. low expectations 3. slippery/malleable "standards". They've been taught to massage the system from Day One. I have 26 years teaching experience. 13 K-12, 13 college. I'm a parent.
NLY ABOUT 25% OF THE TOTAL OF STUDENTS NOWDAYS HAVE SELF-ORGANIZING SKILLS.
Few work hard: Few expect to: Few have had to.
I don't think you can be a good student without being a reader. I've heard the vast majority of kids no longer read books (even reading good magazines helps). If you read you're exposed to spelling, reasoning, etc.--it's sort of a self-education. Good students need to be able to focus for extended periods of time and search out subjects they are curious about. Somehow this sort of mind-set has to be encouraged by parents or teachers or kids themselves.
See my blog, The Vegas Valley View, on this subject: http://bit.ly/2aBlI6
I agree with both LV-spiff and Odog. I work in the school district along with having 2 kids in the Clark County School District. We as a nation and Nevada need to quit teaching the test and just go back to teaching. We also need to quit thinking that America is the end all and that we do everything right and start looking at other countries that are passing us up. In other countries they start "weeding" kids in 5th grade with a final "weed" in 8th where at that time they decide if the child is education bound or trade bound with no shame if you are trade bound. So the start of 9th grade they will either go to High School for education or Trade school to learn a trade like auto mech, construction, chef, etc.... Not a bad plan if you ask me.
Also I am a graduate of the Clark County School District and as far as I can remember (it has been over 20 years) if we did not pass all classes lets say in 9th grade we DID NOT move up to 10th unless we attended summer school. If we chose not to attend summer school we started the next school year back as a Freshman and took the freshman classes over that we failed and we were "Freshman" not a Sophmore with Freshman credits...... I also think that EVERY job in America should REQUIRE a high school diploma or have a kid attending school inorder to work. That might stop the Drop out rate. I think that the nation should even go as far as to make it Manditory that if you drop out and want to receive Welfare, food stamps etc that inorder to receive that money you should have to attend adult high school and be passing or else the money would stop.