By Carl Irving
In a move away from traditionally lenient, mass admissions policies, the Board of Trustees of the California State University appears ready to bar future freshmen who cannot handle college level math or English.
After two years of study and discussion, a solid majority of board members is expected to vote in January to close the door by the year 2001 to most students who do not pass the Cal State math and English entrance tests.
The trustee proposal, which would be the most restrictive yet imposed by any major American public university, follows a persistent increase in the failure rate on these tests. Three fifths of entering freshmen at Cal State campuses who take the tests now fail one or both , even though the system requires four years of high school English and three years of math for admission.
Critics warn that the trustees may be following a perilous route in an attempt to uphold academic standards. They believe the proposed policy would create bitter resentment among minority students, especially the rapidly increasing number for whom English is a limited or second language.
The proposal would effect only first-time freshmen, who make up about one third of the new Cal State undergraduates each year. The others are transfer students, mostly from California's community colleges. Most transfer students have adequate college-level skills in math and English and do not need remedial classes, according to a Cal State report.
The proposed policy represents a break with Cal State's long-standing practice of blanket admissions for students among the top one-third of the state's high school graduates. The university has never invoked system-wide deadlines for passing such tests before graduation, and many students put them off until their senior years.
Proponents see the restriction as a way of forcing the public schools to improve the quality of their instruction.
Cal State Trustee Ralph R. Pesqueira said complaints from both businessmen and college educators led him to become one of the sponsors of the proposed change. Some Cal State campuses, he said, now have as many as 60 class sections dealing with students who could not pass the proficiency tests.
"CSU has said, 'enough is enough,'" Pesqueira said. "By 2001 you are not going to come to CSU unless you are prepared...Teachers are afraid of principals, superintendents of boards of education, parents of their kids, and kids aren't afraid of anything. I'm not trying to hurt anybody here. If you can see basic building blocks in the third grade, we're not going to lose them. A deep, deep cancer starts back there in kindergarten."
That view differs sharply from critics such as Alexander Astin, professor of education at UCLA, who believes that "the future of the State of California will depend more and more on how effectively we deal with marginal students." He believes the Cal State leadership to be wrongheaded by taking an elitist stance, instead of facing up to the state's rapidly changing ethnic and racial mix. Others argue for prodding students by raising admissions standards, rather than pushing them away with negative warnings.
Community College Chancellor David Mertes calls the proposal "a good idea" because it will put students on notice in high school. "I approach it from the view that's what the high school is about," Mertes said. "Its primary mission is to assure that graduating students are properly prepared in basic skills--reading, writing, verbal communication, math, computer literacy."
While many appear to like the goal, there is doubt that it can be met. Faculty leaders urge enactment of the proposed Cal State pledges that would accompany the deadline--for stronger college-high school alliances that would monitor and guide students through English and math beginning in early grades.
Although Cal State trains about two thirds of all the state's public school teachers, little in the Trustee proposal seeks to improve the quality of teacher training.
Educators who face the everyday realities of California's changing high school population are not gleeful about the proposed policy. "If the current 2001 plan goes through, I am sure that the CSU will become a much smaller institution (as will the University of California, if they follow suit), because I don't believe that our state high schools will be able to send us students who are dramatically better prepared in both math and English," said Robert Noreen, Cal State's chief faculty consultant on English and professor of English at Cal State Northridge.
Increasing numbers of Mexican-American and Asian-American students, for whom English is a second or limited language, have added to a general sense that more and more students emerge from California high schools inadequately prepared. According to the California Board of Education, three of every ten students in kindergarten through third grade--more than half a million boys and girls--are "limited English proficient." Many of them will want to become Cal State students a decade from now.
The population changes require patience, say many educators. But California seems short of this quality at the present time.
With a presidential election looming, and a California Republican governor as one of the candidates, it is a sensitive season for such issues in an increasingly multi-racial state. Many Mexican Americans expressed anger and frustration over the passage in 1994 of state Proposition 187, banning welfare and public health benefits for illegal aliens.
In July, the University of California Board of Regents voted to abandon race and gender provisions in campus affirmative action affecting admissions, hiring and contracts--an action that has stirred angry protests among African Americans and others.
Yet mostly white, middle class attitudes, supporting traditional entrance requirements, dominate not only the boards that run California's public higher education institutions, but the electorate as well. White men and women generally cast more than 80 percent of the ballots in California's statewide general elections.
The Cal State proposal already has sparked controversy.
"You tell us 'we're going to close the doors, because you grew up in a barrio, a ghetto,'" Sophia Quinonez shouted at a group of Cal State trustees, meeting in their cushioned, elegantly paneled conference room at the system's Long Beach headquarters. Quinonez, who said she earned $4.25 an hour as a cleaning woman, spoke for a delegation of Mexican Americans from central Los Angeles. "It's your fault," she told the trustees. "It's racism. Our schools are concentration camps. We can't study. It's not my fault that I received an inferior education."
She is not likely to influence Pesqueira, a Latino businessman from San Diego who chairs the board's educational policy committee. "The ghetto should not be CSU's problem," he said in an interview. "Why is K-12 playing dead? There's no discipline. If kids in Mexico fail to show up with their homework, they're out in the street for the rest of their lives."
Those defending the public schools cite impossible teaching odds: huge classes, growing numbers of poor immigrants and shrinking financial support. Per-pupil expenditures for California's public elementary and high schools now rank 42nd in the nation; the state recently sank to 49th in percent of personal income spent on K-12.
"I really worry about high school bashing," said Denise Murray, chair of the San Jose State University linguistics and language development department. "What do we expect--that English teachers should read and grade 250 essays a week?"
"The high schools break my heart," said Mary Cullinan, professor of English at Cal State Hayward, who has studied problems related to remedial English courses. "There's no counseling. They're down there with Mississippi."
Cal State administrators spent two years debating and researching the remedial issue. At the July board meeting, a special committee headed by Pesqueira submitted the proposals for phasing out the remedial courses.
Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz has taken no position on the remedial question. He declined an interview on the subject, saying through a spokesman that the trustees are "moving in the right direction."
The trustees plan to discuss the issue during a joint meeting with the Community College Board of Governors and the California Board of Education on October 31 at Cal State Sacramento. They will also hold hearings on their plan in southern and northern California.
The proposals, said Peter S. Hoff, senior vice chancellor for academic affairs for the Cal State system, evolved toward a consensus that "unless we draw a line in the sand, it (change) won't happen." A lot of debate and mind changing preceded that moment, according to Hoff.
California legislators, who have greater control over the Cal State budget than they do over the constitutionally autonomous University of California, will be heard from as the January voting date approaches.
Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat and ex-officio trustee, may have reflected some party colleagues' views in Sacramento when he said at the July meeting that he concurred with the committee's goals, because it is "essential that every student be confident in English and math." English is our national language, said Davis, and every child must be proficient in it. But he added, the question is "how to get there without scaring people half to death."
The Cal State proposal seeks to reduce such fears by making broad proposals to help the public schools. Such promises have been made before and then broken--by both Cal State and UC. But State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin thinks things may be different this time because UC and Cal State both have suffered from "precipitous" drops in enrollment, because the Regents' vote to abandon affirmative action policies has "galvanized" student leaders, and because of the large increase in the number of students who need remedial work.
But the state superintendent disapproves of any admission shutdown for those needing remedial work. "To say you can't come in at all might be to say you might kick Albert Einstein out," she said in an interview. "Colin Powell had to have a lot of tutoring. Charles Schwab was a dyslexic. Kristi Yamaguchi was born with club feet. I hope we proceed with some flexibility."
The Cal State proposal urges periodic testing, beginning in early grades, to trace students' progress. It remains vague about any exemptions from the proficiency requirement, except for a handful of "re-entry" students--those who have been away from schooling for several years.
But the key provision states that by 2001 "it will be a condition of admission to the California State University that entering undergraduate students must demonstrate readiness to undertake college-level instruction in English and mathematics."
The issue has been around for a long time. "There's an uproar every ten years," said San Jose State's Denise Murray. Harvard University began remedial coursework in the 1870s, after the faculty discovered that new engineering and business students weren't writing as well as those studying Latin and Greek. At present, nearly two thirds of the nation's four-year colleges offer remedial instruction, according to the U.S. Department of Education. A third of the nation's college freshmen take remedial courses.
Last June, the City University of New York's trustees voted, effective in the fall of 1996, to stop accepting students unable to complete remedial work in the freshman year. Two thirds of CUNY's 213,000 students were enrolled in remedial English or math during the past academic year. State campus systems in Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and New Jersey also have tightened requirements in recent years, but all have stopped short of an outright ban similar to the Cal State proposal.
Both Cal State and UC have raised their admissions requirements several times in recent years. In 1988, after several years of discussion and warnings, the Cal State Trustees formally upgraded admissions requirements by announcing that the high schools would have to begin phasing in four years of college prep courses, including four years of English and three years of math. The new Cal State admissions rules took full effect in 1994. English proficiency tests were left unchanged, but the math exam was stiffened.
Despite the extra high school requirements, freshman failure rates in English have risen steadily on the 20 Cal State campuses, from 42 percent in 1989 to 49 percent in 1993. In math, failures rose from 28 to 47 percent over the same period. Hoff said the increasing problems with English concern him more than the math results. "I'm personally not convinced that much math is necessary for all students," he said. "We may have overreached on that one. The only rational question should be, 'Are they ready to do solid work?'"
Others link growing rates of failure to lower high school grade curves, as increasing numbers of students from poor and minority backgrounds enroll in high school college prep courses. Cal State generally admits applicants from among the top one-third of the state's high school graduates--those with at least 3.0 grade point averages. But the ethnic mix has changed, as white enrollments dropped from 70 percent to 53 percent of the total over the past decade.
The failure rates are somewhat deceptive, because they do not include first-time freshmen who were not required to take the proficiency tests because they compiled high grade point averages in high school or scored well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Testing Program (ACT) examination. Nor do they include those--12 percent of incoming freshmen in 1993--who simply were not tested at all. "They slipped between the cracks," a Cal State official said.
However, of those who did take the tests, large numbers failed.
In 1993, Asian Americans who took the English proficiency tests had a failure rate of 82 percent, Mexican Americans, 78 percent, African Americans, 79 percent and whites, 41 percent. In math the failure rates were 81 percent for Mexican Americans, 59 percent for Asian Americans, 90 percent for African Americans, and 68 percent for whites. The failing rate overall in math was 54 percent for women and 39 percent for men, while the gender percentages were almost even in English, according to Marsha Hirano-Nakanishi, Cal State's director of analytic studies.
Beginning in the fall of 1997, the trustees propose to require all freshman applicants to take either the SAT or the ACT exams to balance possibly inflated high school grades. During the "phase in" period prior to 2001, all regularly admitted freshmen will have to pass English and math tests by the end of their first year.
Although the trustees recommended that Cal State also work with the community colleges to ensure all mastered basic skills before transferring, such students pose almost no problem with regard to English or math entrance standards, according to a Cal State survey. In 1993, 97 percent of them were "ready" in English and 89 percent in math.
Chancellor Mertes said that the trustees' proposal may not have much of an impact on the community colleges if students who fail have time to repeat the proficiency exams. "I could easily see a situation similar to law students who take special crash courses just to pass the bar exams," he observed. But if that does not occur, such students will come to the community colleges, which would then need more money to educate these students. Mertes said he awaits more details from Cal State before he can determine the consequences for the community colleges.
The cost of remedial instruction is less than one percent of the system's $1.6 billion operating budget, system officials said.
Each Cal State campus goes its own way in seeking solutions to the remedial problem. Many of the campuses have revised English remedial training in recent years. Fresno State's one-year-old writing center has been "very successful," because it teaches the mechanics of writing through writing rather than by memorizing, said Alex Gonzalez, provost and vice president for academic affairs. His campus plans to install a "math lab" with computers for drilling practice, and software for use there and at home.
Twenty-seven percent of Fresno State's students are Mexican American, and courses in English as a second language have become a central challenge. But Mr. Gonzalez wonders whether proficiency tests really ask the right questions, since most of those who fail them "do rather well when they take the remedial courses."
Blenda Wilson, president of Cal State Northridge, shared that skepticism about the proficiency tests. "Students we admit who are Latinos or other non-native English speakers are students who meet our requirements," she said, "so the problem may involve what we do not ask them to do." Wilson hopes that Cal State will enter into "academic alliances" of college faculties and public school teachers. She suggests using funding now reserved for teachers' continuing education for such purposes.
The freshman test results range widely from campus to campus. At Cal State Los Angeles, 80.6 percent of those who took the English proficiency test failed in 1993. Los Angeles county has the state's largest concentration of students in need of special English training: last year, more than half a million K-12 students had limited English--41 percent of the statewide total.
At Cal State Long Beach, 59 percent failed the English language test last year, while at Northridge the total was 63 percent, at Pomona, 53 percent, at San Diego, 42 percent, at Sacramento, 45 percent, and at San Francisco, 48 percent. San Luis Obispo had the lowest failure rate, at 19 percent.
Such statistics obviously helped propel the trustees toward drawing that "line in the sand" that Vice Chancellor Hoff mentioned. But UCLA's Astin, who has studied such issues for decades, called the Cal State proposal "irrational to the extreme...The future of the state of California will depend more and more on how effectively we deal with marginal students. Those crowding into our community college and Cal State campuses are the future of California. We're not talking small numbers here. If we don't have a program to develop their cognitive and social skills to the level where they can become productive citizens, the state is in for some pretty bleak times."
Astin considers the proposal to be part of a "general push to elitism in public universities that's been going on for decades." He believes that elitism is based on a misreading of the public campuses' mission to educate the citizenry, which includes marginal students.
"Witness all of the jocks in the UC system," he said. "Hundreds of these athletes might not even be admissible to the CSU campuses. Somehow we manage to educate them. We have a pretty good record at UC with our athletes...The underprepared student is a pariah everywhere. Academe hasn't been able to face up to this problem...It's our Achilles heel. We have our ego tied up in how exclusive we are in a university rather than how to educate our students. It's wrong- headed to shut the door.
"They've got it backward," Astin added. "The campuses and the high schools have to develop a comprehensive plan on how to educate young people and give them a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Don't say, 'You can't go to CSU.'"
Stanford Education Professor Michael Kirst, who once headed the State Board of Education, also favors a more positive approach, but one that's more demanding than Astin suggests, because "students get the cues and strive to meet the new standards." In the 1980s, when Cal State first imposed college prep requirements in the high schools, "We heard the same protests about how slum schools were no good and their students couldn't make it, and how higher standards would mean fewer students. Experience shows that's not so.
"It's easier to pass the buck to the high schools, rather than asking, 'Is something wrong with our admissions standards?,'" Kirst continued. "That's what we were willing to do in the 1980s: dramatically change admission policies by raising requirements. Rather than putting it all on the high schools, we need more pull from the CSU, by expecting students to meet higher standards."
Robert Noreen, Cal State's expert on English placement tests, said, "the political winds are moving in the wrong direction--away from encouraging students to learn to think and express themselves individualistically." Still, he added, "the proposal now before the trustees may provide a wake-up call to the high schools, and may encourage students to be more serious about their education."
James Highsmith, a professor of business law at Fresno State and chair of the statewide Cal State faculty, doubts that the proposal as written will work. "I don't think we're going to get rid of remediation anywhere by 2001," he said. "But if you don't work toward it, it doesn't happen."