Are there not enough community college students?
California’s incoming community colleges chancellor, Sonya Christians, doesn’t officially step into her new role until June 1, but she has an urgent agenda: enrolling every ninth grader in a college course.
Right now, just 6% of California students take a college course through dual enrollment in their first year of high school. The time is now, Christian said, to make sure that all 436,192 of the state’s eighth graders will be automatically enrolled in a college course next fall.
“Can we do this? We must. We must,” Christian said. “We can’t wait for tomorrow.”
Christian made this urgent call to action earlier this month at the first Dual Enrollment Equity Conference, an event that brought 450 dual enrollment advocates and educators from California’s K-12 and college systems to Bakersfield. What she calls her “ninth grade strategy” is emblematic of the type of work she expects to push during her tenure as the next chancellor.
If a 9th grader can take and pass a college course, the course is probably too easy to be considered a college-level course. Of course, those who preach equity equity equity don't think black and brown skinned kids can compete academically with white and Asian kids, which is why they want standards lowered.
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So, she wants to take underserved minority students whom have issues making it to high school graduation and subject them to a program where in the same four years, they get a high school diploma AND two years of college credit.
What is her plan for ensuring these new mandatory college students pass their high school classes while studying for college mid-terms and finals?
I think the model could work for some small number of kids, but the vast majority are just going to get more schoolwork thrown at them that they aren't going to do anyway.
Seriously, when you think about it, college-level work (which as you already mentioned she will probably water down) is a bucket of cold water to the face for many a young college freshman. So, we are going to expose 9th graders to college level requirements - they will be so traumatized that they won't ever think about going to college after high school!
I used to work at a community college. After the dramatic drop in enrollment following the pandemic, about a third of the enrollment was high school students. It explains why the campus was empty, no cars in the parking lot, and the food service operation cut hours and still ran at a loss.
Right now, just 6% of California students take a college course through dual enrollment in their first year of high school. The time is now, Christian said, to make sure that all 436,192 of the state’s eighth graders will be automatically enrolled in a college course next fall.
6%? That sounds pretty high, actually. And do those "college" courses include useful things that used to be taught in high schools, such as welding, auto shop, etc?
“Can we do this? We must. We must,” Christian said. “We can’t wait for tomorrow.”
Why "must" we do this? Ah...follow the money! Butts in seats = money for the schools = money for left wing activists!
Christian made this urgent call to action earlier this month at the first Dual Enrollment Equity Conference, an event that brought 450 dual enrollment advocates and educators from California’s K-12 and college systems to Bakersfield. What she calls her “ninth grade strategy” is emblematic of the type of work she expects to push during her tenure as the next chancellor.
I see she did not invite any dissenters, or if there were any, they doubtless kept their heads down and counted the years until retirement.
Idiot -- what a lot of tax payer money spent on (what will be unsuccessful) social engineering!
Deleted-comment "anonymous": when you have a comment about something I've said, I'll consider posting it. Until then, no.
Reality is, the level of mathematics courses, particularly at the community college and California State University (CSU), especially for 100-level coursework, has dropped considerably over the past decade. This is due to leftist influences, manifested through both legislation and policy at the various institutions.
For example, the community colleges used to offer (and fill) a lot of remedial math courses. Those courses were outlawed by two bills from the legislature in Sacramento, which effectively defined "ready for college level work" as "graduating from high school in California." Now the students who would have had to pass the local community college review of high school Algebra II (intermediate algebra) before taking 100-level (transferable) coursework in mathematics are put directly into those transfer-level courses (like intro statistics or so-called college algebra) without any remediation or assessment. Many of them are very much unprepared. In addition instructors, particularly part-time instructors, but also tenured full-time instructors, who do not pass sufficient numbers of these students from these transfer-level courses will come under scrutiny for not being equitable. Equity is a euphemism for equality of outcomes, and particularly at institutions which enroll large numbers of Hispanics and/or other protected groups, the district (read: the administration) is scored based on how well they achieve parity in pass rates and transfer rates for protected groups, measured relative to non-protected groups.
The CSU had their own internal version of AB705/AB1705 which resulted in remediation in mathematics being eliminated, and the pressure for instructors there-- especially part-time instructors-- to pass students is intensifying. I heard that a local CSU campus has advised adjuncts in math on the downlow that the magic number is 70%, meaning that if they do not pass at least 70% of the students, on the average, they can expect to be removed from the schedule in the future.
When these trends are compounded with everything that happened during the shutdowns and the remote teaching, where many students in math courses became much more proficient at cheating, the overall effect is that "college level" math students of today means something very different than what it meant just five or ten years before.
The quest for diversity in all disciplines has led to AP courses and dual enrollment courses to be greatly watered down. These administrators don't demand this for educational reasons, but because it looks good on a data spreadsheet.
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