Students from 196 high schools throughout Wisconsin were required to take remedial math or English within the UW System in their freshman year.
Thousands of students that are taking these classes are coming into college unprepared, according to a UW System report from fall 2017.
The report revealed the students often had a harder time meeting math requirements, as students who came from 195 schools needed to enroll in remedial math courses while those who needed English remediation only came from 56 schools.
Milwaukee Public Schools appeared the most times on the report, often nearing or surpassing 50 percent for students in need of math remediation.
Comparatively, nine of the 10 best high schools in Wisconsin appeared on the remedial education list, according to the 2018 rankings from the U.S. News and World Report.
“Oftentimes, as this report has shown, many of the students come from relatively well-ranked schools — at least according to the official rankings. In reality, those students are simply not prepared for college,” wrote Ola Lisowski, a research director at the MacIver Institute.
Remedial-level classes do not count toward the final number of credits needed to graduate, solely functioning as a bridge that students must cross in order to start working on regular college coursework.
They also require students who take remedial-level classes pay full tuition for the course, although they do not receive college credit. This increases the amount of time it takes college student to finish their degrees as well as contributes to the trend of student suffering from extensive loan debt.
However, remedial courses have been taught on campuses throughout Wisconsin for decades. The report only covers fall 2017, which prompted Noel Radomski, the managing director of Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, to question if a change in the amount of schools was “statistically significant.”
“A one-year variance in remedial course data does not indicate that a high school is better or worse,” he said.
However, Lisowski did not take into account was the DPI report card system, which functions as a measurement of student achievement, growth, closing gaps, as well as on-track and postsecondary success.
To measure how prepared students are to be successful in their college careers, the DPI takes into account both graduation rates and attendance rates along with 3rd Grade English/Language Arts Achievement and 8th Grade Mathematics Achievement.
“The variables are adequate predictors of college preparedness, but a major problem arises with urban, suburban and rural high schools that have poor financial resources,” Radomski said.
However, there have been many improvements to remedial courses, which have helped increase postsecondary education retention and graduation rates. Corequisite remediation — which allows students to work towards their degree without worrying about prerequisite, non-credit courses — have returned with reputable results.
Many campuses are also fostering and analyzing different postsecondary-level quantitative courses outside of remedial math, which will allows for improved access for students that fall under the postsecondary requirement.
