Giving Compass' Take:

• Pamela Burdman discusses research that shows that college remedial math courses do not help students and disproportionately harm students of color.

• Steps have already been taken at some institutions to have students take math classes that are more closely related to their major and rolling back remedial math courses.

• Read about the large number of students who take required developmental courses.

Community colleges were rolling back their remedial math requirements. Students who would have been required to take anywhere from one to four remedial courses were being placed into shorter sequences of remedial courses — or directly into college-level math courses.

The trend toward dismantling traditional remedial education is unambiguous.

Even before California became the latest state to adopt policies limiting remedial enrollments, community college remedial math course-taking had dropped dramatically, falling 30 percent over a five-year period, from 1.1 million to around 780,000.

Though remedial math was intended to help students succeed in college, research has demonstrated that the courses don’t enhance students’ chances of completing college and can even worsen them.

The placement tests traditionally used by colleges tend to “under-place” a significant portion of students, sending them to remedial courses they don’t need. Disproportionately, these are students of color.

So it’s promising that fewer students are taking remedial math — especially remedial arithmetic, which saw a 50 percent plunge. College students assigned to arithmetic typically face three or four semesters of math before they can take college-level math courses.

Ordinarily, a drop in college remedial courses would herald an improvement in high school math learning. But despite a recent focus on college and career readiness in high schools, that’s not what the evidence shows.

One strategy for reducing those enrollments has been a change in the way higher-education institutions measure students’ readiness for college-level work. Many two-year colleges are also thinking more broadly about quantitative literacy and diversifying their course offerings. To fulfill graduation requirements, students have increasingly been allowed to choose math courses aligned with their areas of study, instead of having to take college algebra.

Read the full article about getting rid of remedial college math courses by Pamela Burdman at The Hechinger Report.