The Chronicle of Higher Education: Florida Moves to Slash Funds for Remedial Education, and College Leaders Protest

Link to article: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Florida-Moves-to-Slash-Funds/240048

Four years ago, the Florida Legislature changed the trajectory of developmental education across the state’s 28 open-access colleges by making remedial classes optional for most students. Enrollment in the classes plunged, and colleges set to work revamping and beefing up academic supports for students who weren’t ready for college-level classes.

Lawmakers concluded that the reduced remedial enrollments meant that colleges needed less money. On Monday, as part of an $82.4-billion state budget bill, they slashed the colleges’ remedial budgets by $30.2 million.

The move provoked an immediate outcry by leaders of the Florida College System, which represents the state’s open-access institutions, many of which offer both two-and-four-year degrees.

Their costs, they said, hadn’t dropped with enrollments in remedial classes. They’d simply shifted, and in some cases even grown, as they hired more advisers and replaced adjuncts with more highly credentialed faculty members to teach the extra credit-bearing sections.

National leaders in developmental education see the cut as an indication that state lawmakers who are pushing to significantly reduce enrollment in remedial courses are more concerned with cutting costs than improving graduation rates.

The flap in Florida reflects a national debate over the best, and most cost-effective ways to bring underprepared students up to speed.

How much do colleges really save when students bypass remediation or enroll in an accelerated or revamped program?

"I find it hard to believe that Florida legislators are naïve enough to believe that because remedial enrollments have fallen, community colleges need less money," Hunter R. Boylan, a professor and director of the National Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University, wrote in an email on Wednesday.

"Those students haven’t disappeared. They’re simply taking different classes."

Well over half of the students entering community colleges nationwide require at least one remedial course, with many requiring a sequence of noncredit catch-up courses. And a study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University found that only 20 percent of those referred to developmental math and 37 percent to developmental reading went on to pass the relevant entry-level college course.

Such outcomes have prompted a flood of reform efforts, with Florida among the most-aggressive states in trying to do away with remediation.

The bill cutting the state colleges’ remedial budget is awaiting the signature of Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, who could veto all or part of it.

Students’ Needs Continue

When state lawmakers voted to cut remedial funding, they assumed "that if remedial education was no longer recommended or encouraged, the students themselves and/or their learning needs would go away," Cynthia Bioteau, president of Florida State College at Jacksonville, wrote in an email.

"In reality, those same students with developmental learning needs continue to come through our doors," requiring different, but no less costly interventions now.

In recent years, the college has provided embedded support within gateway English and math courses and both in-person and online academic tutoring, including 24-hour online support in math.

Such supports are crucial, developmental educators say, for underrepresented, first-generation, and older students who make up the majority of community-college students.

"Students need support wherever they are," whether it’s in remedial or introductory college courses, said Sharisse Turner, dean of Tallahassee Community College’s transitional studies division, which offers developmental courses. Budget cuts would prevent the college from hiring the staff and providing the resources they need, she said.

During her classroom visits, she said, she was struck by how far behind many students are in math.

"The first-level dev-ed class goes over how to add and subtract whole numbers and how to use percentages," said Ms. Turner, who is president of the Florida Developmental Education Association. "It made me think about people who bypass that class trying to handle algebra."

At Polk State College, enrollment in remedial classes dropped from 2,208 in 2013-14 to 823 in 2015-16. The law making remediation optional also required that colleges provide new options for advising. As a result, the college has effectively been shifting money from developmental education to other advising and counseling services, said the college’s president, Eileen Holden.

In an effort to help steer students into the right courses when they are no longer allowed to require a placement exam, colleges have begun looking more closely at high-school grades and other measures. This approach is more time-consuming for advisers who see hundreds of students, and in some cases has required hiring more staff members.

Edwin Massey, president of Indian River State College, agreed that it costs more, not less, to provide tutors, counseling, and technical tracking for students with shaky math skills who enroll in algebra.

To comply with the 2013 legislation, Florida colleges revamped their remedial classes for students who chose to take them.

Remedial-class sequences compressed into shorter blocks and bite-size modules have been created to give students personalized, more efficient catch-up support. Many colleges have begun offering "corequisite classes" in which a student needing remediation is placed directly into a credit-bearing class with learning support wrapped around it. That might include tutoring, labs, or additional coursework.

A study by the research center at Columbia found that corequisite classes in Tennessee are considerably more expensive to offer than stand-alone, prerequisite classes. The study focused on that state because it was the first to eliminate its free-standing remedial classes and replace them with corequisites.

Still, the change is cost-effective, the study concluded, because more students passed their gateway course.

Less Remediation, Costlier Salaries

As more students shift from remedial to college-level courses, some colleges that relied heavily on adjuncts have had to shell out more for faculty salaries. (Faculty members usually must have at least a master’s degree to teach college-level courses, but that isn’t always the case for remedial classes).

Revamping courses and beefing up advising have also taxed college budgets, according to Shouping Hu, a professor of higher education and director of the Center for Postsecondary Success at Florida State University, who is conducting a long-term study of the impact of the Florida legislation.

"The costs can be incurred for developing different modes of developmental-education courses as required by the law, professional-development costs for faculty and staff members, and increasing the number and workload of the advising and student-support professionals, among other things," Mr. Hu said.

The stakes are high, as particularly underprepared students who opt out of remediation often struggle.

A study that Mr. Hu headed found last year that passing rates in gateway courses have dropped across the state’s two-year colleges since the 2013 legislation was approved. On the positive side, the actual number of students passing gateway courses increased because so many more students were enrolling in them directly.

The push to reform remedial classes is largely based on the dismal graduation rates of students who start out in them. But saving money is clearly a motivating factor, said D. Patrick Saxon, an associate professor of developmental-education administration at Sam Houston State University.

"The philanthropists and advocacy groups who pushed for the 2013 legislation rendering developmental education optional did so, in part, with a promise of cost savings," he wrote in an email. "We shouldn’t be surprised that legislators will take them up on it."

State Rep. Larry Ahern, the Republican chairman of the Florida House of Representatives Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee, said in an interview on Wednesday that Senate leaders who initially favored a $58-million cut in remedial budgets saw the reduced enrollments in those courses as a sign that students were arriving better prepared, perhaps because of improvements that had been made at the high-school level.

After hearing from college leaders, Florida House and Senate negotiators reduced the cut to $30.2 million.

Complete College America, which has been a leader in the push to revamp remediation, believes the state is moving in the right direction. Despite the group’s earlier assertions to lawmakers nationwide that too much money is wasted on remediation, the group now argues that cutting college’s remedial budgets doesn’t make sense.

"Time and time again, Florida’s colleges and universities are showing that they get it: committing to remediation reform, building pathways for students, and exploring other innovations to boost student success," Tom Sugar, president of the nonprofit advocacy group, wrote in an email on Wednesday. "But too often these innovations have been met with legislative actions that lack precision and foresight." The pending legislation, while offering some positive steps, "makes destructive cuts, undermining ongoing reform efforts to better serve underprepared students."

Savings from reductions in remediation should be reinvested in success strategies like corequisite remediation, which will increase graduation rates and provide a better return on investment for taxpayers, Mr. Sugar said.

Travis Reindl, a spokesman for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided significant support for Complete College America and other remedial-redesign efforts, said it promotes such changes "as a tool for improving student success, not for cutting costs."

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan,or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.