Community Colleges May Shelve Reading Skill Standard

Community college Chancellor Philip Westin is considering shelving a faculty-proposed reading comprehension standard for graduates that some instructors argue does not measure a student’s ability to read at the college level.

The recommended graduation standard for those seeking an associate in arts degree would not include any assessment of reading comprehension but assumes the required competency level is met if a student successfully completes 60 units of general education courses, the minimum required for the degree.

Some Ventura County Community College District faculty members contend that an assessment of reading comprehension is crucial, considering how many district students are not native English speakers or are attending college many years after completing high school.

But faculty members who support the proposal say the district has not created a valid assessment test that is free of cultural bias.

Since the 1980s, the state has required community colleges to award associate degrees only to students who have met minimum competency requirements in mathematics, written expression and reading comprehension.

Because of differing curricula, the specific graduation requirements have varied among the district’s three campuses for years. In 1998, a faculty committee representing Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges set out to draft a set of requirements that would be consistent across the district.

The majority of the English department at Ventura College has come out against the reading comprehension requirement proposed by the committee, and faculty members there have been pressuring Westin to block it from being adopted by the district’s trustees.

“This is, in part, about protecting the integrity of the degree,” said Kathryn Schoenrock of Ventura College’s English department, who, along with another instructor, is leading the fight against the proposal. “I want to know that there are standards the degree represents.”

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More important, Schoenrock advocates that students’ reading skills be measured when they first enroll in the district. Those showing poor comprehension skills could be directed to courses that emphasize analyzing and understanding texts.

Statistics are unavailable on the number of district students with limited reading abilities. But Schoenrock pointed to a recent study that found 46% of incoming freshmen to the California State University system needed remedial work in reading and writing. That system accepts the top third of California’s high school graduates.

Schoenrock’s colleague, Deborah Ventura, pointed out that educators generally agree students learn in a variety of ways. Not all of them rely on reading a textbook to pass a class.

“Students who are struggling with reading don’t read textbooks,” said Ventura. “They rely on lectures and their notes and the teacher’s visual aids.”

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But Carmen Guerrero-Calderon, co-chair of the faculty committee that recommended the new districtwide graduation requirements, said community colleges cannot lawfully require students to pass a reading comprehension test to graduate unless the test is proven free of cultural bias.

For years the district’s three campuses required graduating students to pass a reading comprehension test, but the practice was discontinued about five years ago when the tests were found to be biased, faculty members said.

Now, Guerrero-Calderon believes students who complete the 60 units, or about 20 classes, needed for an associate’s degree should be given the benefit of the doubt that they can read at the college level.

“My logic is telling me that if they took all those courses, how can it be that they never had read a textbook or a journal?” said Guerrero-Calderon, president of Oxnard College’s academic senate.

She dismissed the concerns of Schoenrock and Ventura as “very much in the minority.”

“They’re just very vocal,” she said.

But the Ventura College English instructors have apparently been persuasive. Two district trustees have expressed reservations about the proposal, and Westin has scheduled a special meeting today during which he will ask faculty members who support the plan to explain their position.

“We have some circular logic here, some circular thinking,” Westin said last week. “We’re supposed to certify for graduation. But with this, by graduating [the students], we’re certifying them.”

He said that unless the policy’s supporters can show that their suggestion indeed measures reading competency, he will pull the proposal and instruct them to draft new requirements.

New graduation requirements for mathematics and written expression were approved by the faculty committee with little debate, and Westin said he will recommend the trustees adopt their proposals for those subjects. For math, students must complete intermediate algebra, and graduates must also finish an English composition and an analytical writing class.

Schoenrock said if the reading comprehension requirement is changed to include some form of assessment test, it shouldn’t be too difficult to develop an exam free of cultural bias--one that does not favor a Eurocentric education. She said Ventura College now uses such an assessment for its English placement exams.

“We had a statistician validate ours,” said Schoenrock, who has taught reading comprehension at Ventura College for 15 years. “I would think that if not having a validated test is your concern, then why don’t you go get it done?”

But David Lopez, a matriculation counselor at Oxnard College, said developing a test with absolutely no cultural bias would be difficult at his college, because of its large and diverse Latino population.

“We’re talking about Chicanos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and native Mexicans,” said Lopez. “It’s hard to find a commonality among us.”

He said testing in combination with one-on-one counseling is more effective in determining a student’s reading skills.

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Although questioning the fairness of assessment tests, district trustee John Tallman said faculty and administrators at Oxnard College also are resistant to reviving reading comprehension tests because of their history at the school. Before it was discontinued, the exam Oxnard College required for graduation was regarded as the easiest in the district.

In the mid-1990s, star players on the Ventura College basketball team were denied their degrees because they repeatedly failed the reading comprehension test required by the school. The players, who had been promised full scholarships at four-year universities, graduated only after they were allowed to take Oxnard’s reading test, which they passed.

“Oxnard is still nursing its wounds,” said Tallman.