San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed addresses student placement issues in the Community Colleges

Jun 5th, 2015

Community colleges sending too many into remedial math
By Eloy Ortiz Oakley and Pamela Burdman

An op-ed in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle based on the report, DEGREES OF FREEDOM: Probing Math Placement Policies in California Colleges and Universities, highlights how improvements to math placement policies can help improve student success in California community colleges.  The piece, written by DEGREES OF FREEDOM author Pamela Burdman and Long Beach City College (LBCC) superintendent-president Eloy Oakley, calls on community colleges to join an initiative to apply greater weight to students’ high school records in determining whether they need to take remedial courses. LBCC found that doing so allowed the college to quadruple the proportion of entering students taking  college-level math courses without a drop in course completion.

DEGREES OF FREEDOM, a three-part series exploring college math requirements in California and nationally, was co-published by LearningWorks and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). The op-ed addresses part three of the series.

Click here to view the SF Chronicle Article.

Click here to download a PDF of the SF Chronicle Article.

Click here to download the DEGREES OF FREEDOM reports.