Giving Compass' Take:

• Studies suggest that remedial education actually decreases students chances of succeeding in college, particularly for low-income students and students of color. 

• What other services can schools provide to better serve the needs of students? 

• Learn about impactful ways that schools are supporting low-income students. 

Latasha Gandy thought she was the ideal high school student.

Attending Arlington Senior High School in St. Paul, Minn., she kept her head in her books and did her homework. “I was that student everybody wanted to multiply,” she said.

Gandy was in the honors program and graduated with a GPA of 4.2 out of 5.

But when she went to enroll at her local community college, a counselor said she had to take a placement test. When the results came back, Gandy was told she needed remedial classes.

It was a huge blow. Financially, because remedial classes, also known as developmental classes, cost money but don’t count as credit toward a degree. And emotionally, because she started to wonder if she really belonged in college at all.

“I went into this state of, ‘Black people don’t go to college,'” Gandy said.

Gandy had run into the nation’s increasingly cumbersome problem with developmental education, a system that is intended to give students a better shot at succeeding in college but which, according to mounting evidence, is costing students time and money and actually preventing some of them from getting degrees.

Read the full article about remedial education at The Hechinger Report.