Moreover, this extra teaching and remedial help is costing taxpayers a bundle, first at the high school level and then at college. A growing number of parents and taxpayers think they re being double-billed when students need to take courses in college to learn things they should have learned in high school, said attendees at a conference on the topic last week at Assumption College in Worcester. The conference was sponsored by the New England chapter of the National Association of Scholars. There also are indirect costs from remedial ed that damage the fabric of higher education, Stanley Koplik, chancellor of Higher Education for Massachusetts, told the conference attendees.
Remediation also pressures professors to lower their expectations and dumb down their courses.
Worst of all, said Koplik, are the effects that lower standards in colleges place on the K-12 school system. By offering remedial courses, colleges send a message to high school students that they needn t work hard because any material they miss will be covered again in college. In addition, by depressing standards throughout colleges, remediation has the effect of producing ill-prepared high school teachers, said Koplik. This is particularly true since teacher education is among the least demanding of all college majors. There are other problems, as well.