North Carolina’s four-year high school graduation rate has improved to 78 percent, but that achievement has raised some questions. Among them: Why do so many students who enroll in North Carolina community colleges right after graduation from high school require remedial instruction in basic courses? I talked about this issue with Dr. Terry Stoops, director of research and education studies for the John Locke Foundation, on a recent edition of Carolina Journal Radio.
You’ll find a transcript of the entire conversation here.
Stoops: We’ve heard a lot about the increasing graduation rate. And it’s been touted as a success and as a signal that we are being successful in our public schools because our graduation rate continues to increase. Well, first, we don’t have a very good sense of why it’s increasing. But second of all, it really begs the question: It is increasing, but what kind of graduates are we getting? What is the quality of these graduates? Are they prepared for the work force, for post-secondary education, or whatever they encounter after high school? And I’m finding increasingly that, no, they are not prepared.
Martinez: How do you know that?
Stoops: It’s the increasing remediation rate at our community colleges. I focus on community colleges because they take in a huge chunk of our graduates — of our high school graduates. And these are individuals that are mostly in the middle as far as achievement goes. We have our best students going to our universities, and we have many of our lowest-performing students going to the military or going into the work force. So this is a good cross-section of individuals going to the community colleges. And what I have found is that the remediation rate — and this is remedial courses in English, reading, and math — is growing in concert with the graduation rate. So, in other words, our graduation rate is increasing, [and] so is the percentage of students who require remediation.
