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Remediation Rates by District and School – Class of 2012
Posted On Mar 12 2014
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All this talk of College and Career Ready Standards (CCRS) and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) made me stop to remember why somebody decided creating new standards was necessary in the first place.
Every source consulted agrees that one reason was to produce high school graduates better prepared for college and careers. Evidence has existed for many years that a large percentage of high school students were taking remedial classes as freshmen in college.
The Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) produces measures every year of how many of Alabama’s high school graduates attending Alabama’s public colleges or universities take a remedial math or English class as freshmen. It does not track rates of students attending out-of-state colleges.
Here’s ACHE’s student database page. The report from which the following maps and tables were created is titled “Fall 2012“. The report at the link is viewable as a PDF. After converting into a spreadsheet, the percentage of students (of those enrolled in Alabama’s 2- and 4-year public colleges and universities) taking remedial classes was calculated.
There are a whole lot of different views you can take of this data, but this one is a very simple one, mapped out by school district. Click on a district to view the remediation rates for that district. Here’s the downloadable data in Excel format.
Here’s a more detailed look: by high school. This is a spreadsheet with 366 rows (the number of high schools included in the report). It reveals how many students from each high school graduated, enrolled in Alabama’s public colleges or universities, and how many and what percentage of those students enrolled in a remedial math or English class as freshmen. Once you click on this link to download the spreadsheet, you can sort by whichever column you choose by clicking the arrow at the top of the column.
Here’s a small window into the data. Download the spreadsheet to get the full view and to find the high schools in your community.
It’s late as I write this. I’m not going to interpret this data. That is best done by the local communities and the local boards who should be using this data to determine why their remediation rates are what they are and what needs to be done to lower the rates.
(Why 2012? Because I had the spreadsheet available and the 2013 numbers were only made available on February 25. More analyses forthcoming. Likely after this legislative session.)
Check out these maps on the ALSDE web site if you’d like to see in whose legislative district these school districts are located.
