California is home
to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the current force
behind two pathway projects: Statway and Quantway.
An
underlying assumption behind alternative pathways is that mathematics requirements for degrees and/or certificates should
vary according to discipline. California's Student Success Task Force report contends, "Improved student support structures
and better alignment of curriculum with student needs [Emphasis added] will increase success rates in transfer, basic skills,
and career technical/workforce programs." The National
Center on Education and the Economy 2013 report, "What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?" states, "But our research...shows that
students do not need to be proficient in most of the topics typically
associated with Algebra II and much of Geometry to be successful in most
programs offered by the community colleges."
The
Carnegie Foundation, The Charles A. Dana Center at U.T. Austin, and the California Community College Success
Network (3CSN) all promote alternative pathways
to allow students in non-STEM disciplines an option of completing a
university-transferable mathematics course without requiring the students to
demonstrate completion of an intermediate algebra course.
The two California
university systems, the University of California (UC) and the California State
University (CSU) have been cautious in embracing the idea of alternative
pathways in California Community Colleges (CCCs).
One pathway strategy
is to provide students with an alternative
prerequisite to an existing transferable statistics class. The alternative prerequisite does not have
all traditional intermediate algebra topics and does not have elementary algebra
as prerequisite. And in response to this strategy, Nancy Purcille of the UC
Office of the President sent a March 7, 2013 email to CCC articulation
officers:
"The
prerequisite for UC-transferable math courses continues to be intermediate
algebra or equivalent. No attempt at this time will be made by UC to
define specific content/courses that may be deemed “valid” alternate
prerequisites. When submitting a course for TCA review, if CCC faculty
propose a prerequisite that they judge to be the equivalent of intermediate
algebra, then UCOP articulation analysts will treat the prerequisite as such
and evaluate the course outline as usual. UC will not be evaluating the
prerequisites listed – unless it is jointly requested by the CCC and UC
faculty."
This position
appears to respect the tenet that the community college should be able to
decide the appropriate developmental math required to prepare its students for
the articulated transfer-level math course.
The CSU provided a
different position to accommodate alternative pathways. Ken O'Donnell of the CSU Office of the
Chancellor sent a November 2, 2012 email to CCC articulation officers that appeared to be discouraging alternative pathways:
"Please
take this email as a reminder that only courses with a full prerequisite of
intermediate algebra, as traditionally understood, will continue to qualify for CSU Area B4 [math/quantitative
reasoning requirement to transfer].
"The
CSU has made a recent exception for the Statway curriculum, under controlled
and very limited circumstances, so we can evaluate whether other approaches
will satisfactorily develop student proficiency in quantitative
reasoning. In the meantime, we count on the articulation community to
uphold the current standard."
But Ken O'Donnell
sent an April 2013 email acknowledging without objection the strategy of keeping
the intermediate algebra the official prerequisite for the transfer math course
but facilitating CCC student challenges to that prerequisite.
The
CSU Chancellor’s General Education Advisory Committee has looked into this use
of the prerequisite challenge process, and determined that it has no grounds to
comment. How community colleges meet curricular requirements that are
below baccalaureate level is up to the colleges, and not up to the receiving
transfer institutions. In other words, community colleges may participate
in initiatives like Acceleration in Context and the California Acceleration
Project without jeopardizing articulation, because the transferable B4 course
is unchanged; only the intermediate algebra prerequisite is challenged.
Thus both the UC and
the CSU are tacitly giving CCCs the go-ahead to develop alternative pathways.
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