Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State

Abstract

Ever since the California State University (CSU) first authorized remedial instruction in the mid-1970s, it has been waging an expensive, but losing, battle to eliminate the need for it. In the 1980s, students deemed to be in need of remediation (as determined by a system-wide English Placement Test) numbered somewhere around 42% of the incoming class. This, in turn, caused the California Postsecondary Education Commission to declare that remediation was careening out of control at California’s colleges and to call on the California State University and the University of California to prepare comprehensive plans for reducing the amount of remedial instruction at their institutions (California Postsecondary Education Commission, Promises to Keep). The CSU Board of Trustees responded with a set of initiatives aimed chiefly at high schools to reduce the number of incoming first-year students who would need remediation to no more than 12% by 1990. Among other things, the CSU added four years of high school English to its admissions

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