<p>I’m an ed policy person, so I was pretty unhappy, though it wasn’t really news to me. It did get some good press in the Denver Post, and I’ve been showing the data off at presentations for middle school parents. But before you can fix a problem, you need to know that there IS a problem. This does a good job of identifying certain problem areas. The top five public high schools in Colorado had college remediation rates in the 6-10% range. Typical high schools were in the mid 30-40% range, and many of the urban high poverty high schools were in the 60% and up range. One change that came out of a prior analysis was to require an additional year of math in high school as a graduation requirement, and to eliminate “business” or “consumer” math as a qualifying option. </p>
<p>IMO, while the urban high poverty numbers are likely to be very hard to move, a little sunshine on how poorly many of the suburban middle-class high schools did is going to do a world of good as educated parents begin asking the questions about why Amanda’s school has a 40% math remediation rate when Stephen’s school in the next town over has a 25% rate. (The other thing I remind folks is that these are kids who both graduated from college AND who matriculated in college soon thereafter. It doesn’t include dropouts or students who didn’t go on to public college.)</p>
<p>One of the things that I like to point out to middle school parents is how expensive remediation is in college, how it increases the chance that the student won’t actually finish college, and how it is strongly associated with being able to graduate within four years because of the need to take the remedial coursework before being allowed to take the regular required sequence of classes. The pocketbook issues are pretty significant. The other thing is that when you’re talking about a middle class school where 40% of the kids need math remediation, you’re talking about a LOT of kids – not something that can be attributed to “those” kids with the poor parenting, special needs, or other frequent explanations for why the data isn’t really meaningful.</p>
<p>With respect to privacy, my understanding is that the data is blinded, and neither the colleges nor the high schools see the results for any specific student. On other state data, if there are five or fewer students in a given reporting category, the data is asterisked out and instead aggregated at a higher level.</p>