Cuerpos en el Manicomio

Counselors’ Professional Judgment. Counselors play a key role in the recommendation

of placements and the student prerequisite challenge process in general, and in the use of multiple measures in particular. Interviewees at several colleges described how counselors used professional judgment to interpret various data at their disposal to recommend student

placement and to certify that prerequisites had been met or successfully challenged. Counselors discussed wanting to use a holistic picture of students’ backgrounds, experiences, and goals to override what they often considered to be inaccurate testing results. As one counselor put it, “a really low score and excellent grades . . . raises a flag . . . What happens is sometimes the students get given this test and they don’t have enough information or they don’t take it seriously and . . . they don’t try.” This counselor explained that because community college placement tests are given at local high schools before students are knowledgeable about community college placement procedures and stakes, many students do not take the test seriously or understand the outcomes.

Conflict Between Faculty Members and Counselors. The extent to which counselors

could override placement exam recommendations was criticized by faculty at some colleges, and at other colleges faculty felt they had little role in the matriculation process in general. Although questions about the working relationship between faculty and counselors were not part of our

interview protocol, in their answers to other questions, personnel at four out of the ten subset colleges described conflict between the faculty and counselors over use of multiple measures. At one college, English faculty perceived counselors to be abusing multiple measures to override placement scores and place students into higher level English courses. At this college, and some others, an ideological distinction was evident between English faculty and counselors, with faculty wanting counselors in borderline cases to err on the side of placing students into courses lower than their ability levels. One faculty member argued that students should be placed in lower level classes whenever possible, so that students could improve their grade point average and build higher self-esteem, a philosophy he summed up as “when in doubt, always go lower.” In the words of this instructor, “I kind of want people to take classes lower than they should in some ways because it’s good for them.” At another college, an English instructor promoted “erring on the side of caution and getting students in [lower level English courses] who have some issues . . . They’re at a community college, so it’s a fairly cheap way of learning these skills.”

Faculty Professional Judgment. For their part, some faculty were concerned that their

own professional judgment is not respected in the matriculation process. One English

instructor felt frustrated that “people that don’t know the discipline [are] placing students in the discipline.” According to this faculty member, English faculty could identify Generation 1.5 students “in two seconds… every person in my department would be able to do that, because we’ve been teaching these people for 20 years, and we know who they are.” There was a range of ways in which faculty at different colleges could (or could not) influence their students’

placement decisions once students enrolled in the course. English and ESL instructors often give diagnostic writing sample assessments to their students the first day of class. At some colleges, these are used to adjust placements; at others, they are simply used to inform the instructor of student skill level. One English instructor explained:

Say for example, we have a lot of students who are truly ESL students who don’t belong in the English track. They’ll do the writing sample, and we’ll say, “You know it really looks like you’re really going to have trouble in this class. Have you ever thought of taking an ESL class?”

At another college, ESL faculty members speak with students and fellow instructors in order to move students to different levels. According to one faculty member, “we maybe have a writing sample where we would talk to the teacher of the next level and say, ‘What do you think?’ […] and then we move them back or forth.” At a different college, an English instructor said she had tried to recommend placement changes for students, but it was logistically impossible to re- place students once the semester had already started, due to shortage of space in other courses.

Funding Limitations. Meanwhile, funding shortages in California community colleges

have severely limited the role that counselors can play in the matriculation process. In response to calls for mandated matriculation services, the Consultation Council Task Force on

Assessment (2008) reported that funding at that time (even before the most recent rounds of budget cuts) did not allow for adequate services. For example, in Fall 2006, more than half of students did not receive mandated counseling services (p 4). According to the Task Force, “[a]ssessment without orientation and counseling services denies a student the information he/she needs to make an informed choice about which classes to take” (p 5).

In our research, conducted before the most recent round of cuts, we found multiple examples of the impact of inadequate funding for counseling. A large box accompanying one

college website’s counseling hours states, “DISCLAIMER: Due to staffing levels, advisory services may be limited or not always available.” During a site visit at another college, we saw a large sign in the counseling center stating that although the college is “very pleased that you are seeking counseling services,” due to a heavy volume of students during the first two weeks of the semester, drop-in counseling is limited to 15-minute sessions for counseling related to

immediate enrollment. Students were encouraged to schedule a longer appointment for the “comprehensive assistance you need and deserve” in order to reach academic goals. However, counselors at some colleges described how difficult it is for students to get such appointments in a timely manner. A counselor at one college reported having telephone appointments with students on her cell phone as she walked to and from her car in the parking lot, as a means of trying to reach more students.

In concluding this section, we return to the different perspectives on remediation and acceleration we discussed in the Frameworks and Orientations section earlier. The dominant orientation of most ESL and English faculty we interviewed at the 10 subset colleges valued remediation, as faculty sought to promote policies and practices that aimed to place students into precollegiate coursework designed to address their various academic and linguistic needs

before those students entered college-level coursework. English faculty at one college went as far

as to say that they preferred to place students one level below the level indicated by the placement test, consistent with their belief that remedial English coursework provides a solid foundation for students before moving up through the English sequence. However, as we will discuss further in our conclusions and recommendations, the exploration of options for greater acceleration of US-LM students seems warranted, given the time it takes for students to

progress through precollegiate course sequences, the questionable outcomes associated with such sequences (Bailey, 2009; Bailey, Jeong, & Cho, 2010), and the need for students to experience language and literacy in authentic academic and professional settings.