Cal State Students’ Skills

Your editorial “Playing Catch-Up in College” (Feb. 3) is a clear statement of the problem of the poor preparation of students entering the California State University system. You state that the threshold for admission to CSU is a 2.0 grade-point average. A student must graduate with a 3.0 or compensate for lower grades with a higher SAT or ACT score to meet admission standards. To be admitted, a student with a 2.0 GPA would need to score at least 1,300 on the SAT or 30 on the ACT.

These admissions standards, which served the system well when I joined the CSU faculty in the 1960s, have been completely undermined by grade inflation in the high schools. Those students requiring remedial education at the university level are, by and large, students with high school GPAs of 3.0 or better.

Henry I. Abrash

Professor Emeritus

Cal State Northridge

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Writing skills and math skills for new college freshmen are very important, but for a number of reasons it is simplistic to blame this problem on incompetent high school and middle school teachers and connect it to social promotion. First, not all students are going to college, much less CSU, and the teachers do not know which ones will. Should all students be held to university admissions standards?

Second, and here I can only address the English side of the problem, CSU has fairly high standards for entering freshmen. The sample question provided for the current English placement test asks students to read a passage from anthropologist Margaret Mead, explain her argument and “discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with her analysis.” This task is typical of university courses but is not often encountered in high school.

Third, students who test into remedial English are by no means illiterate. My students in English 096 at Cal Poly Pomona last quarter could write pretty good summaries of articles and could express their opinions, although they struggled to write strong thesis statements and to incorporate and document other texts to support their own views.

The English placement test has been in use for more than 30 years, and there have always been large numbers of students who tested into remedial classes. In 1997, CSU began a serious attempt to reduce the need for remediation and has devoted significant time and resources to improving the connections between CSU and K-12 faculty. Hundreds of CSU faculty and students have gone out to the schools to tutor students and work with teachers, and hundreds of skilled and dedicated K-12 teachers have participated in CSU programs. Class size, linguistic and cultural diversity, economic demographics and many other factors create serious problems in the schools; it is too simple to blame it all on the teachers.

John R. Edlund

Director, University Writing

Center, Cal Poly Pomona

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As a middle school English teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District, I take great exception to your editorial. How can you be so out of touch with today’s realities of education? We are not incompetent. We are, however, increasingly expected to work miracles with less funding and more students in the classroom. Two years ago, the LAUSD made a big show of ending social promotion. Teachers applauded. Then, the district “discovered” there was not enough room on most campuses to accommodate the students who needed to make up classes. Result? The district ended its policy.

As a teacher, I can recommend that students repeat a grade, but without parent approval my recommendations are worthless. It is unfair to blame middle and high school teachers for the large percentage of students who are flunking out of college. The problem of social promotion should be addressed to the LAUSD.

Marci E. Arnold

Robert Frost Middle School

Granada Hills

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The “most dispiriting news” I have read recently as an educator was your editorial describing middle and high school teachers as “harried or incompetent.” Middle school teachers lack the power to retain students, even if they earn failing grades. Middle school teachers cannot force students to attend school regularly or to participate in the learning process. We also do not have the power to make parents participate in their children’s education or socialization. Are we incompetent because a student misses 30 school days per year, never participates in class and does not do assigned work? The education budget cuts will increase our class sizes again.

Many of my colleagues already have 37 to 39 students per class. Are we incompetent because we cannot meet the needs of so many effectively? Many students reach middle school with minimal English and math skills. Are we incompetent because they arrive reading at a second-grade level and have not memorized the multiplication facts?

Yes, we are harried, but why label us as “the culprits”? It would be encouraging to hear positive reinforcement for the long hours and caring we bring to our students every day. Any competent middle school teacher can tell you that positive comments are part of “best practices” in teaching.

Ruth Louisell Levine

Saugus