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Originally Posted by SWTXBelle
Yep, you are on to something here. To see that there is a severe problem with many college students and their preparation for college English classes, you need only look at the number of remedial and freshman English classes that are offered at colleges and universities. The resources being devoted to getting students "up to speed" is amazing, and has turned into a problem for many schools. You would think that as high school graduates who have had to pass certain tests and take certain classes they would be prepared, but you'd be wrong.
It's also worth noting that while all high schools seem to require 4 years of English, upper level math and science courses are usually optional. That does not, however, mean that simply passing 4 years of high school English means you are a good reader or writer. I always got a bit of a chuckle out of native Spanish speakers who took college Spanish thinking it would be an easy "A", not realizing that their native language was not the same as the textbook Spanish they would be studying. I'm sure you know native speakers of English who can't put together a grammatically correct sentence to save their life, or who have difficulty writing well.
As pointed out by other posters, in order to teach writing effectively you have to give the students a chance to write - and rewrite. To develop good literary analysis skills you have to have a chance to engage in discussion, and be given the opportunity to write critically. That's tough to do if you have too many students (which many of my public school counterparts do.) or if you are more worried about teaching the skills to pass some NCLB test - and I realize we are going a bit off topic, but it is interesting.
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I think teaching to the NCLB test is vastly overstated as a problem. If you were teaching a good solid curriculum with good methods, the chances that you'd have to teach to the test instead are less likely than a lot of people would have you believe, particularly if kids were on grade level when you got them. (Special education and ESL/ESOL are probably exceptions to this generalization.)
And, if your state chose tests that weren't good measure of the actual curriculum, you have only your state to blame because the states wrote their own NCLB plans. As much as state and local officials like to blame NCLB for everything, a lot of the things that teachers are required to do in the name of NCLB actually aren't required by NCLB. It's just easier for the local guys to blame the feds.
I think the best way to solve the college remediation issue is for most colleges to quit offering remedial services and only actually accept and enroll students who are ready to do the work. Acceptance could be contingent on acceptable placement test results.
Having remedial classes harms the instructional level at the college and maybe surprisingly at the high school level too. It's really hard to have high standards for passing a high school class if colleges in your area routinely accept students who don't meet those standards.
I'm in favor of junior colleges/community colleges for remediation or for additional remedial services offered by high schools to graduates who flunk college placement tests. But letting kids who aren't qualified in and then complaining about it, (I don't mean you SWTXBelle, I mean colleges in Georgia) seems disingenuous when you have the data to know in advance that the kid isn't likely to be college ready.
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