Maintained by Jay Howard, 20 Sept 2002
College, Yes: Our CAP Students Can Succeed
by Michael McColl
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In recent issues of ViewpointS, articles have appeared recommending new approaches to the high failure rate of students in the College Achievement Partnership (CAP), in particular the A-level students. In the Winter 2002 issue, both Bruce Watson's "After A-level, Exit Options: Counseling and Placement Might Provide Alternatives," and Bridget McFadden's "Education for a Changing World Should Change When the System Doesn't Work," propose that a significant number of CAP students are unable to benefit from a college education and should be counseled/tracked to vocational education geared to the job market, "e.g. customer service training skills" (Watson), or "a few specific skill sets, such as computer knowledge, for one" (McFadden). I strongly disagree. Whether or not our students attain all of their educational goals, it remains crucial that they achieve college level proficiency in reading and writing. Steering A-level students away from college before they have reached this level is an abdication of our responsibility as educators to prepare our students for active participation in our society.* Competence in reading and writing and thinking skills is a powerful leveler. As far as public issues are concerned, the graduate of college-level English courses may be better trained to take an active and useful part than the physicist, engineer, member of the symphony, or indeed the president. We are trying to provide college educations for the students who, on average, went to the worst schools and whose families had to function with the least amount of money. Their goals and dreams represent the idealism of those for whom an education was not something to be taken for granted, but something pursued with difficulty, against the odds. There are tremendous obstacles, structural problems in society, that militate against the success of our students. How many years of reading and writing levels are they attempting to reclaim during their first semester? Should students' economic backgrounds and the dialects they speak be the primary determinants of whether they achieve competence as readers and writers? Watson postulates that "the majority of incoming A-level students will not succeed academically for a variety of personal, family, health, and financial reasons . . ." His solution is "to first counsel them, and, second, to place them in other training facilities or in jobs." Why are "personal, family, health" reasons less likely to interfere with a training program and job than with a college education? What do financial problems have to do with a student's intellectual capabilities? If the problem is financial, shouldn't we devote our efforts, not to steering them away from college, but towards making more financial help available? We can teach them why we are underfunded. We can also encourage them to practice their writing and speaking skills by addressing the policy makers who make their lives more difficult, and are able to do so because those affected by these policies are not politically united and active. Shouldn't our response to students with health problems be something other than suggesting that a college education isn't for them? Since more and more students are going online, many with PCs at home, perhaps some of those with health difficulties could do some of the course work from home. And we need to remember that the problem is not only the student's health, but our country's destructive health care policies. There are other possible reasons for failure not listed by Watson which should also be considered. Is there a chance that the student failed to progress because of an undiagnosed learning disability? Do specialists in this area review the placement exams? Are individual instructors qualified to discern various levels and types of disability? One of my current students in English 098 class has a learning disability that went unrecognized during the placement process; she will lose at least one semester's progress while she seeks testing and begins to learn how to cope with her disability. We know that many students have trouble with attendance because of child care. Why aren't we talking about trying to provide inexpensive or free child care for our students? It would make a good field work assignment for a 102 student to investigate why such child care for students never seems to be seriously considered; or to begin organizing students to demand that this service be provided. We might also consider being more flexible with our attendance policies when the student is able to email assignments from home. Are there students who have failed because of surface errors which are not generally considered by composition specialists to be serious problems? Are the policies of the English department informed by current research and theory in the field of composition? Are students failing courses because they fail grammar tests? How many successful professionals can identify a subordinating conjunction? I hope that these questions continue to be regularly discussed. I do not doubt that Bruce Watson and Bridget McFadden write out of concern for their students, and I appreciate that Bruce Watson puts the "failure" rate of our students in a context that shows how much is being accomplished with a 25% success rate. And we should make efforts to help our students get jobs- but not at the expense of an education that I believe they can achieve, given sufficient opportunity. When I read the two articles to my 097 students they were stunned, then angry and frightened. They have a lot at stake. For many it's been a long road that has brought them, finally, to our classrooms, and their college attendance is a matter of great consequence. We need to devise interventions to work toward ever higher success rates, not offer-except in the rarest and most extraordinary circumstance-what might be taken as a demoralizing judgment, that they are not adequate to their dreams of education. |
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Maintained by Jay Howard, 20 Sept 2002 |