Cal State’s Remedial Classes Help Chances, Students Say

To the governors and corporate leaders gathered this week at the National Education Summit at IBM’s headquarters in upstate New York, the dismal English and mathematics skills of America’s new workers are a vexing--and expensive--national problem.

To the officials who run the Los Angeles Unified School District and graduate the most ill-educated freshmen entering the California State University system, those young people are an embarrassing but inevitable consequence of overwhelming demographic and economic change.

But at Cal State L.A. and Cal State Dominguez Hills, where eight of 10 freshmen arrive unprepared to do college-level work, the problems of those students represent business as usual, a never-ending game of catch-up. In fact, for the students, there is no shame in attending remedial classes--only pride that they defied the odds and got this far.

“I knew I’d have to work twice as hard in graduating, but I wasn’t discouraged,” said Bernadette Alonzo, 20, who is one of the first in her family to attend college and who takes a remedial English class at Cal State L.A.

Alonzo is not unusual. According to a report released Monday, 49% of all Cal State freshmen needed remedial English and 54% needed remedial math in 1994.

For local educators, the study bore even more ominous tidings: The four campuses in the Los Angeles area had the largest percentage of unprepared college freshmen.

Los Angeles Unified board member David Tokofsky blamed the rising problem of unprepared students on what he called the district’s failure to set and enforce clear academic standards.

“I think we just need to not deceive ourselves about how low the knowledge base is in our schools,” said Tokofsky, who taught high school for 12 years, calling on the district to enact a rigorous testing system. “A kid can graduate from high school and not know how to read at the fourth-grade level and not know algebra.”

Increasingly, the call to set higher academic standards comes not just from educators but from corporate America, which measures costs of under-performing school systems in cold, hard dollars. Corporations spend a growing portion of their training budgets on reteaching their employees the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Nationally, the number of companies providing basic skills courses for employees has exploded, according to the National Alliance for Business, a Washington-based group that gathered the figures for the governors’ meeting. Citing a survey by Training Magazine, it reported that 43% of American businesses offered remedial training in 1995, more than double the percentage that reported doing so in 1984.

MCI, for instance, spends $75 million annually to keep its employees ahead of the curve--about 10% of which went to remedial training last year. At Motorola, an average of $1,350 is spent each year per employee on six basic skills courses needed to prepare workers for routine retraining.

Many of the costs are hidden, said CEOs at the summit in Palisades, N.Y., where 80 governors and corporate chiefs held a two-day meeting ending today on a plan to improve public education. At Cincinnati Bell, supervisors may have to interview 300 people to find one qualified candidate for an entry-level position.

“We are not unique in that,” said Dwight Hibbard, chairman of the Ohio telecommunications company.

Raising standards in public schools would not only improve the quality of the work force, Hibbard said, but cut the tax burden resulting from supporting “those who can’t compete.”

That burden is enormous. A Department of Labor study of eight Southeastern states in 1988 said illiteracy cost $57.2 billion in lost productivity, unrealized taxes, substandard work and unemployment claims.

Summit co-chairman Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chairman and CEO of IBM, which is hosting the summit at its executive conference center, estimated that adult illiteracy costs American businesses $25 billion to $30 billion a year.

However, he and other corporate heads said the problems that business faces today in attracting a qualified work force go beyond competency in the three Rs. For many businesses, computer literacy is now a basic skill, too.

Many Cal State students say they are not the problem because they at least attend college.

When Marvin Centeno, a freshman from West L.A., decided to enroll in college, his parents--who went to high school--couldn’t have been more thrilled. But they worried. Because he had no car, it took him 90 minutes to travel to the Cal State L.A. campus by bus. Because he had no computer, he often stayed until 11 p.m. using campus computers.

Centeno believes that he works so hard in college, in part, to compensate for what he didn’t get in high school. “I was never taught to write an essay,” said the mechanical engineering major, who had to take two remedial English classes and one remedial math class.

His parents knew he worked hard. They didn’t discuss schoolwork much. But they knew. Last week, Centeno’s mother surprised him with a computer, all set up on his desk. That same day, Centeno saw his father drive up in a different car, a used red Nissan 300ZX.

The elder man eyed his son, asking, “Do you like it?”

Centeno nodded enthusiastically. His father handed him the keys, telling the young man how proud he was that he was attending college.

Centeno could scarcely speak. He hugged his father and felt the tears trickling down his face. “I always thought he didn’t care, that he didn’t know what I was going through--the pressure,” Centeno said.

Many of the students in Cal State’s remedial classes feel this pressure. In Blanca Estrada’s family, no one expected her to attend college. Until her junior year of high school, her grades hovered between Bs and Ds. Then she transferred to a continuation school--a move that her parents figured would doom her education. Instead, Estrada boosted her grade average to straight A’s and won scholarship money to attend Cal State L.A.

Today, she wants to become a doctor unless she just can’t handle the rigorous academics. In that event, she plans to become a biology teacher. Taking a remedial math class is just one hurdle along her path. After all, in her family Estrada is a hero: Her younger sister begs her for a copy of her report card so she can take it around the neighborhood, bragging. And Estrada, though she lives in the dorm, has stayed close to her family. She calls her mother before and after classes.

“It’s a really big deal for my family, and being a role model is a real responsibility for me,” Estrada said. “If I fail, I’ll let them down.”

Among all state universities, Cal State Dominguez Hills fared worst in mathematics. There, 84.9% of the incoming freshmen needed remedial math courses.

One of them, Christine Perot, said the remediation system was needed to help the disadvantaged attain a level playing field with those who attended high schools where guns, drugs and violence are not a part of everyday life.

“A lot of the people who are going here are inner-city kids,” she said. “I grew up going through the Lynwood system, and it was very bad.”

Ken Kendall, 30, said he was starting back to college many years after his first try and that the remediation program was helping him get back up to speed in math. He said that with the world changing so quickly, he realized that he needed a degree to compete in the work force. But he also said there were many like him at Cal State Dominguez Hills whose families had no tradition of higher education.

“I don’t have anyone in my family who has a college degree,” he said.

Then, too, there was Yorgun Marcel, who is from the Ivory Coast of Africa. He said he took issue with the report because it failed to note the central point.

“They are accepting freshmen and then giving them a chance,” he said.

Times staff writer Woo reported from Palisades, N.Y.; Zamichow reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writers J. Michael Kennedy, John Chandler and David Colker also contributed to this story.