math requirements at community colleges: unaligned and overdone

first blogged on G+ 

Some remedial math classes unnecessary at community colleges, study says | McClatchy:   “We concluded that even though the first year of community college doesn’t require any Algebra II and very few community college students will ever need Algebra II, many kids are being kept out of community college programs because they haven’t taken that math in high school and don’t know it. And that seems to us very unfair,” said Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington."

A study of community colleges (above) finds that they require more math than is necessary for most degrees (and schools do not teach some of the math necessary for some, complex measurement.). Also, remediation is overdone. These findings are not new: I have blogged about similar findings that show unchecked remediation and stringent math requirements being the biggest hurdles to greater degree completion in the US.

remediating remediation 

How the most hi-stakes test in the US is not the SAT but the Accuplacer and how one community college eliminated remediation and students did just fine.

mass higher ed and the dropout problem (too much math)
"You can listen to the Leon Levy Lecture by Paul Attewell entitled Mass Higher Education and the Dropout Problem up at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Attewell touches upon the US math-obsession deriving from devotion to the liberal arts core, not exactly what you would expect in a talk at the famous Institute, located on Einstein Drive. Einstein, of course, would be pleased as he hated traditional pedagogy and rote schooling."