Cal State Remedial Classes Face Tough Test : Education: Trustees consider a proposal to eliminate the courses. But opponents note that nearly half of today’s freshmen aren’t ready for college math and English.

Louanne Kennedy graduated near the top of her high school class, enrolled in an East Coast university and soon made a disconcerting discovery. She wasn’t prepared for university-level courses and eventually dropped out of college.

But that was years ago. Today, Kennedy is the top academic officer at Cal State Northridge, holds a doctorate and is outspoken about the lessons of her life experience: Unprepared students are nothing new, they shouldn’t be blamed for their shortcomings, and they can succeed with a little help.

Kennedy is one of many educators who are criticizing a proposal by California State University trustees to curtail remedial classes and perhaps even turn away from the system rising numbers of unprepared students, calling the possible action shortsighted and impractical.

“I’m not willing to sacrifice a generation of students,” Kennedy said.

A recent report showing that nearly half of Cal State freshmen are unprepared for college math and English courses--and that the rate has been steadily rising since 1990--came as a shock to politicians and the public.

But many educators say that unprepared students and the need for remedial education have long been significant components of American higher education, dating back to the founding of no less than Harvard in 1636, when America’s first college offered Colonial students tutoring in Latin.

Furthermore, the situation is not confined to California universities. The federal government estimates that about three-fourths of all U.S. colleges and universities offer remedial courses and about 30% of freshmen must take them.

In the University of California system, one-third of freshmen didn’t satisfy English requirements in 1993; and the rate was more than 50% at the UC Irvine and Riverside campuses.

Hand in hand with high schools that are failing to adequately prepare their college-bound students, educators say, today’s need for remedial education is in part linked to the goal over the past three decades to open higher education to minorities and the underprivileged.

Such students often attend the most troubled high schools and tend to score low on standardized tests, such as the freshman placement exam that many CSU students must take.

Now, some fear that a conservative political movement in California--including the proposed 1996 ballot initiative that would in part forbid state universities from giving preferential admissions based on race, ethnicity or gender--threatens to close the door that higher education has traditionally opened.

“We have this image that college is just for the best and the brightest. But historically, whoever was not in the mainstream could always make their way into it with a college education,” said Hunter Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education. “And throughout history, they’ve always been attacked.”

The remedial debate has been argued across the country in recent years--particularly during tough economic times and conservative political swings--with various results. Some states, such as Florida, have banned remedial education at universities; others, including Mississippi and Tennessee, have embraced it. And states such as California and Wisconsin quietly run their programs.

After a tense session last month, in which some Cal State trustees accused administrators of trying to downplay the issue, the system’s governing board passed a resolution seeking policies to cut back remedial education. The board could consider the issue again in November.

During the meeting, Cal State trustees complained that they lacked the funds to accommodate today’s rising numbers of unprepared students and insisted that their system is not responsible for providing remedial education.

“The money is just not there anymore,” said Cal State Trustee Ralph Pesqueira, who is spearheading the campaign against remedial classes.

The system spends about $10 million a year on remedial education, a fraction of its $1.5-billion budget.

Pesqueira also charged that remedial students are causing a lowering of CSU academic standards.

Under state guidelines, the 320,000-student Cal State system is supposed to draw from the top third of California’s high school graduates, just as the more selective UC system is supposed to take its picks from the top eighth of graduates.

“I don’t think it ever even crossed anyone’s mind years ago that the top one-third of students wouldn’t be prepared for college-level work,” said Patrick Callan, director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, an independent research group.

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But under longstanding policies, Cal State campuses each year admit disadvantaged, mostly minority students who don’t meet their regular academic guidelines. That group swelled from 11.5% of California freshmen in 1989 to nearly 18% last year. Although figures are not available showing how many of these students end up in remedial courses, CSU officials believe the number is high, contributing to the demand to curtail such courses.

Among regularly admitted freshmen, minority students tend to score low on English and math placement tests and must enroll in remedial classes. The share of minorities overall among Cal State freshmen also has steadily risen from 46% in 1989 to 60% in 1993.

On the English test, for example, among regularly admitted students, 58% of all freshmen were proficient in 1993, compared to 40% of Mexican Americans and African Americans, and 33% of Asian Americans. Similar test gaps have long been found nationally, although they have closed some in recent years.

Experts stress that minority students are just as capable of benefiting from a university education as their white peers. But some lack needed skills, sometimes in very narrow areas, because they attended troubled urban high schools, live in poor neighborhoods or grew up speaking another language.

“Most of why students don’t succeed in school has to do with their circumstances, not their race and ethnicity,” said Marsha Hirano-Nakanishi, CSU’s director of analytic studies. Family income and parental education are key factors in academic achievement, but those often break down along ethnic and racial lines.

By cutting remedial classes, said Robert Noreen, the CSU faculty English consultant, “we would be shutting out a lot of the ethnic groups, and it would be leading to a racist and elitist society.”

Research on how students who take remedial classes perform throughout their college education is limited. A Cal State Northridge study found that students who took one remedial class graduated at about the same rate as others. Another study in 15 Southern states found that remedial students dropped out at slightly higher rates than others, but still benefited.

Even so, CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz predicted that state legislation probably will be introduced in Sacramento to bar the 20-campus university system, the nation’s largest, from offering remedial courses or using state money to fund them. A similar measure is now pending in Texas.

Some Cal State trustees and other opponents of remedial education in the Cal State system argue that students in need of such help should instead attend community colleges.

But others in the higher education community counter that the trustees are wrong to propose that community colleges alone bear the responsibility for providing remedial education.

“For the board members, for lack of a better term, it’s an image problem,” said Charles Ratliff, deputy director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, of CSU’s high number of remedial students. Ratliff said he “tended to disagree with” the trustees’ community college plan.

Although the commission, which coordinates California’s higher education policies, stated more than a decade ago that one of the primary responsibilities of community colleges is to provide remedial education, it also endorsed the practice of Cal State and UC campuses providing such courses, Ratliff said.

The Cal State system admitted about 22,000 freshmen in fall, 1993. Of all those assessed, 48.8% lacked required English proficiency and 47.2% were found lacking in math. If a policy were passed denying admittance to unprepared students, more than 10,000 could be turned away.

“Community colleges are not ready or prepared to handle it,” said Noreen. “From everyone I’ve talked to, they don’t want all of our unprepared students. If we admit them, we should educate them.”

Boylan explained that universities throughout the country have historically taken in unprepared and under-represented students: women, blacks and World War II veterans, for instance.

But the field vastly expanded when colleges, which had very selective admissions policies, shifted to more open practices in the 1960s and the federal government provided financial aid to make higher education widely available to minorities and other non-traditional students.

Kennedy, the provost at Cal State Northridge, said her own difficulties growing up in a disadvantaged family have convinced her that Cal State remedial classes must continue.

“I needed the same kinds of things these kids need,” she said. “What good would it have done for them to tell me to go somewhere else?”