The Cost of Remedial Education - Mackinac Center

The Cost of Remedial Education:
How Much Michigan Pays When Students Fail to Learn Basic Skills
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Appendix I: Educational Failure and the Need for
Remediation: The Human Cost
by Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D.
In my capacity as a teacher of Michigan college students, both on regular faculty at
Central Michigan University and on a continuing basis as an instructor of CMU-administered
extension courses, I have come to suspect that between a third and a half of entering
freshmen have considerable difficulty in comprehending an article from a news magazine
such as Time or Newsweek.
The students lack knowledge of grammar, exhibit poor vocabulary, and have done
little reading beyond assignments in the unchallenging textbooks that constitute the printed
basis of their high-school curriculum. They find it extremely difficult to disengage from the
deeply lodged habit of relying on personal narrative and subjective opinion in their
confrontation with facts and the world. They react emotionally to problems that can only be
solved intellectually. 36 They struggle to find the right words to articulate intuitions that
remain nebulous and unstated.
When CMU in cooperation with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy staged a
debate in Mt. Pleasant in April 1997 on the subject of declining standards at Michigan public
universities, one CMU faculty member performed the experiment of sending the 20 students
from his upper-division humanities course to report on the occasion. He later let me see
these documents, with personal identifications of the writers removed. Although the
audience at the event was given much in the way of framework—an outline of topics to be
addressed and questions to be posed, skillful moderation, spoken summaries by the
participants—the students in question could make little out of what they had witnessed.
Asked to reprise the main points of contention and sketch the arguments on both sides, they
unanimously failed to do so, falling back instead on random personal observations of the
physical setting and tangential expressions of their own confusion.
Students lack
knowledge of
grammar, exhibit
poor vocabulary,
and have done little
reading beyond
assignments in the
unchallenging
textbooks that
constitute the
printed basis of
their high-school
curriculum.
It therefore should come as no surprise that I endorse the findings of Dr. Jay
Greene’s report on the cost of remedial education to the Michigan economy. Greene paints a
stark picture of the problem in economic terms. Using cautious numbers, he carefully
concludes that educational failure—which is what the large and growing need for remedial
education signifies—is costing Michigan’s economy at least $311 million and perhaps (still
conservatively) as much as $1.15 billion yearly.
36
Walter J. Ong, Jr., Orality and Literacy; The Technologization of the Word (London: Methuen,
1981). Ong notes that the mental style of people who have not assimilated the demands of literacy
tends to be egocentric and combative, hence unsuited to subtle analysis or meditation: “Many, if
not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal
performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge
from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separates the knower from the
known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge
within a context of struggle” (pp. 43-44).
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