CUNY began experimenting in 2007 with a different approach to remediation. Jahleah Santiago and Ashley Baret are in the START program, an intensive 12-week immersion designed for students with remedial needs in one, two, or all three areas.
Nathan Stevens, Baret and Santiago's START teacher, has a luxury few of his CUNY colleagues enjoy: time, a total of 15 hours a week with these students. On a recent afternoon, he stands at the whiteboard, going over eight homework problems, encouraging all 14 students (average class size is 20) to verbalize their thought processes. A scruffy figure with a beard and tattoos, Stevens is relentlessly Socratic—"How do you know that you're finished with the factors now?"—and patiently draws out each student, who range in age from teens to fifties, as the class simplifies polynomials and multiplied exponents: "Put it into words, Manny. Tell me how you got that answer."
Seventeen hundred students are in the START program this spring. They are technically deferring admission to CUNY, paying the $75 fee out of pocket so they don't start the Pell Grant clock. Their curriculum was written especially for the program, and all instructors spent a full semester training with another teacher in the classroom. "In this program we seek to show what's really happening in the math," Stevens says. "Rather than teaching my students to memorize the formulas, tricks, rules, I try to reinforce the underlying ideas of what they're looking at, with the hope that they could solve any problem they see."
"In my high school, math was kind of under a veil," says Santiago. "You didn't know what was going on—you just do that and that and get the answer. Nathan will break it down and do different examples until we get it."
That process sounds an awful lot like what we used to think of as "teaching." And 60 to 70 percent of START students, most of whom set out with multiple remedial needs, gain proficiency in a given subject after just one semester, compared with 20 percent who take regular remedial courses. The program began in 2009, building on the model of ASAP, a full-year intensive program. CUNY also opened an entire school called New Community College near Bryant Park last fall; all three programs feature intensive, accelerated study, small classes, and individual attention. START and ASAP will both double in size this fall to a total of 8,000 students. "It's amazing, the progress I see in such a short time," says Stevens, putting his hand over his heart with unabashed sincerity. "The students leave me, they pass the test, I see them later in the hallways, and they tell me how well they're doing. They hold on to their notes from my class. It just gives you that wonderful teacher feeling."
Doing things this way isn't just warm and fuzzy—it also seems surprisingly cost-effective. While it's initially more expensive to have small classes with extra advisors and tutors, of the original cohort who entered ASAP in 2007, 55 percent earned their associates' degree in three years, compared with 24.7 percent of similar students in the broader CUNY campus and just 16 percent of urban community college students nationally. According to an independent study by the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Columbia, the graduation rates were so much higher that ASAP cost about 10 percent less per graduate.
At its heart, this story is about a complex set of math problems. CUNY is beginning to make headway with this reinvented approach to remediation, but the underlying paradox persists: It is still spending considerable money and time, its own and its students', to teach people what they should have already learned.
The contradiction is stark. If the city's Department of Education were to adopt the practices of START and ASAP—small class sizes, mastery-based course design, one additional counselor or adviser for every 25 students—it seems likely that more students would progress on grade level, and the system as a whole would actually save money. The trend, however, is in the opposite direction: 13 percent cumulative budget cuts since 2007, and larger classes at 60 percent of middle and high schools as of last fall. It's no wonder the remediation numbers keep rising.
In the Bloomberg Era, we have also gotten data-driven accountability based upon test scores and graduation rates which means if the students do not pass the test and do not graduate on time, it is the fault of the teachers, the administrators and the schools and all will be held accountable.
Under the new APPR state evaluation system, that means teachers may be fired.
Under Bloomberg's Reign of Error over the NYCDOE, that means hundreds of schools may be closed, reopened as new schools and then closed again.
You always here this jive statement from corporate ed deformers and charter school cheerleaders when they're talking about schools: "We know what works."
Most of them mean busting the teachers union and firing "bad teachers."
But we really do know what works in education and what has worked for a long, long time:
Small class sizes, individualized instruction via a real teacher and not a Joel Klein computer program and mastery design courses rather than endless standardized test prep actually helps students learn.
Too bad in the era of data-driven accountability, in the era of the Bushes and the Obamas and the Rhees and Kleins and Spellings and Paiges and Duncans, there is no time or money to experiment with methods that actually work to improve education.
These people are too busy branding teachers "bad" and schools "failing" and looking for ways to shut the whole system down and privatize it.
Because the agenda in education reform is not improve schools or help students.
It is to privatize the last great public institution that hasn't been privatized yet and profit from it.
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