The Gates Foundation will spend $110 million on better, faster remedial programs to boost community college completion rates, Melinda F. Gates said in the concluding speech at the American Association of Community Colleges’ meeting in Seattle.
“You can educate your students according to new models that yield dramatically better results for a fraction of the cost,” the foundation’s co-founder said. She praised programs at El Paso Community College, which lets high school students take its placement test, Mountain Empire in Virginia, which has fast-tracked remedial classes, and Washington state’s I-BEST, which lets students take college-level classes while completing basic skills work.
It’s estimated 60 percent of community college students take at least one remedial course. Only about 25 percent of remedial students earn a degree within eight years.
Six national groups representing nearly 1,200 community colleges signed a pledge to boost completion rates to 50 percent over the next decade, reports the Seattle Times.
While his wife was speaking in Seattle, Bill Gates visited a Math My Way class at Foothill College in Silicon Valley, reports the Los Altos Town Crier. College instructors have worked with math teachers to create a middle-school version of the college remedial course designed to get students caught up before they start high school.
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at 8:30 pm
How about getting rid of programs like Investigations, Everyday Math, Math in Context, CMP, Core Plus, and IMP? Replace them with solid “content-based”, teacher-centered programs; do away with small groups, and actually teach math? That might reduce the need to re-teach the math in community colleges since it would have been done right the first time around.
at 5:57 am
Interesting…how many efforts by the Gates have ever been successful in education? SLCs didn’t work. I haven’t really followed them…what else have they tried only to revamp numerous times?