How students are advised, and the fix that came too late

Part thirteen

How students are advised, and the fix that arrived in the last year of high school

The General Assembly saw the remediation numbers. Session Law 2015-241, Section 10.13, created Career and College Ready Graduates: community colleges and high schools would work together so that seniors who were not on track could clear the developmental requirements before they graduated. It was to start statewide in 2016‑17. The General Assembly amended the section twice, and the start date kept moving: postponed to 2020‑21, then phased in beginning 2019‑20 with statewide implementation intended for January 2021, then not implemented in 2021‑22 either, with districts finally reported as prepared to implement in 2022‑23. Seven years late.

First, how the advice gets given

Before any of this, a recommendation happens. It is worth knowing what that recommendation is made of. Edstar studied exactly this question for the school counselling department of a large North Carolina district, and the finding was published: the first recommendation comes in fifth grade, when elementary teachers name each child for the advanced sixth grade course or the regular one, and “although all grade 5 students take the math EOG, fifth-grade teachers must make their sixth-grade math recommendations before the test results are available.” The decision that sets a child's mathematics trajectory is taken before the data that would inform it exists.

What fills the gap is whatever each teacher decides to use. The study found no districtwide criteria at all. Eighty-five elementary schools fed the district's middle schools, and the criteria “differed among schools and frequently differed among teachers at a given school”: predicted test scores, course grades, beliefs about work habits, and, in the authors' words, “some teachers actually reported that they placed students on the basis of whether the teachers believed the students would need advanced math later in life. In fact, these teachers didn't believe that many people really needed to learn advanced math to be successful later in life.” No professional development and no formal guidance was provided for any of it.

That study did something else that almost never gets done: it collected the recommendations and then arranged for them to be ignored, so that the children who would have been turned away could be observed anyway. What it found is set out in full here, and it is the strongest evidence in this piece that the problem is the process rather than the standard.

But the deeper finding was not about how the recommendation was made. It was about how many places there were to recommend students into. Edstar worked with Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School for two years through Wake County's Closing the Gap school improvement teams, and what came out of that work was this: the school had one 8th grade algebra class, with about twenty-five seats in it, and had never asked whether more than twenty-five students would qualify. The assumption was that the top twenty-five students would be recommended, and that those were the students who should take it. Nobody had set out to exclude anybody. The recommendation process existed to fill the seats that existed, and the number of seats had never been treated as a question.

This was not one school being unusual. Many schools thought the same way, and the belief underneath it was rarely stated out loud: that only about twenty-five children in a grade can learn algebra that young. Once a school holds that belief, the recommendation process will always confirm it, because the process is asked to produce twenty-five names. The projections did not tell those schools that their teachers were wrong about children. They told them that the class was the wrong size. The published study found the same constraint operating openly in the district it examined: “One middle school actually placed fewer students in Advanced Math 6 than its teachers recommended for it… the school did not want too many students prepared for eighth-grade algebra because the school was not prepared to teach more sections.” The teachers had named the children. The timetable overruled them.

And in a separate statewide North Carolina survey, school counsellors said this out loud. Asked whether they used academic data when advising students on course enrolment, they said they used academic and behavioural data. Asked to describe that data, many described free or reduced lunch status as academic data. A few reported that, lacking any socioeconomic information, they “had to rely on race to identify students who had barriers to learning”. That is not advice about mathematics. The survey is Johnson et al., North Carolina's School Counseling Program Review, Edstar Inc., 2005; the passage is quoted in Stiff, Johnson and Akos, 2011.

The schools did not know either

Here is the part that is easy to miss. It is not only that students were badly advised. It is that the adults doing the advising could not see the outcome they were advising toward.

GEAR UP NC exists to do two things: get students ready for education after high school, and get them access to it, which in practice means FAFSA completion, campus visits, counselling and advising. Readiness has a definition in North Carolina, and it is not the diploma. It is the Minimum Admission Requirements for the UNC System and the Multiple Measures Requirements for the community colleges. So Edstar built each district a report showing where its own seniors actually stood against those requirements. We called it the Tower of Hope, and every senior fell into one of four zones.

Blue

Ready, on somebody's definition

Meets the UNC minimum: four mathematics classes from a specific list, unweighted GPA of at least 2.5, ACT composite of at least 17. Or meets the community college requirements without any developmental coursework: GPA of 2.6, or ACT Math 22 with English 18 and Reading 22 plus the four specific math courses, or a pass on the diagnostic placement test.

Green

Close, and it turns on a subscore

Has the 2.5 GPA and the ACT composite, but the subscale scores fall short. May enrol at a community college without remediation if the subscores are just high enough. Nobody in this zone has been told which side of the line they are on.

Yellow

Some but not all

Will not be admitted unless something changes while there is still time to change it.

Red

Meets none of the requirements

On track to graduate. Not on track to enrol anywhere without remediation first.

In the baseline year, about 60% of students graduating from GEAR UP high schools met neither the UNC minimum admission requirements nor the community college multiple measures, and nearly 80% scored below the ACT benchmarks in both math and English.

The schools had not known. These students were passing. They were graduating. The graduation rate looked fine and the report card looked fine, because the diploma requirement and the admission requirement are two different standards and only one of them is published. Until somebody built the report, a district could not answer the question “how many of our seniors can actually enrol somewhere without remediation?” It is not that the answer was bad. It is that the question had no owner.

Edstar evaluated the pilot itself. The evaluation was carried out jointly by Janet Johnson of Edstar and Carol Cutler-White, the Principal Investigator of GEAR UP NC, over two years, 2017‑19. It used the GEAR UP NC high schools and their partner community colleges as the study sites, which is why it could follow the same students from the high school classroom to the college placement desk: Johnson, J. & Cutler-White, C., Career and College Ready Graduates Pilot Implementation in GEAR UP NC High Schools, Edstar Inc. and GEAR UP NC, September 2019 (opens in new tab). The problem it was built to solve was real and large. In 2014, about 60% of graduating seniors in those high schools met neither the UNC System minimum admission requirements nor the community college multiple measures. Nearly 80% scored below the ACT math and English benchmarks. Three-year graduation rates at ten of the partner community colleges ran from 16% to 33%. And the research the state was working from was blunt: about half of students who need one semester of mathematics remediation leave without graduating, and more than 70% of those who need two.

Then, what happened when the state tried to intervene

Almost nothing reached them, and almost nothing followed them.

Nobody told the parents

Schools originally planned to explain the importance of CCRG in written communication to parents. None did.

The teachers did not know why either

One teacher who taught the course for two years wrote: “A lot of my students in the CCRG see no benefit in the work just to get college credit for the module if they pass it.” She did not think documentation mattered, because she did not expect her students to enrol. Comments like that were not unusual.

The wrong students were in the room

46% of the students served were not seniors at all, and about a third of the seniors who were served already met the GPA or ACT benchmark and did not need it. Schools said they used specific criteria; when the data disagreed, they explained that they had simply served everyone enrolled in a particular course.

Nothing was written down

In 2017‑18, 86% of participating students took the diagnostic placement test before the modules. Only 13% took it afterwards. There was no standard way to record completion on a transcript. Asked how a community college would know what a student had finished, half of staff said they did not know. The colleges could not report how many of their 2018 entrants were eligible for gateway math because of CCRG.

The completion figures follow from that. Under the RISE model, of 357 students who attempted Tier 1, 17% passed and 59% never finished it. Eighty-nine of them moved on to Tier 2 without passing Tier 1. Only 47 students reached Tier 3, where 8% passed and 84% did not complete. Across the module-based version, 48% of all students moved to the next module without having passed the one before. A few schools had switched the adaptive pacing off outright, but the common pattern was ordinary classroom management: half of schools said they used the adaptive feature and then moved students into a new module anyway, to keep the class together.

Students passing each RISE tier

GEAR UP NC high schools, 2018-19

Source: Johnson, J. & Cutler-White, C., Career and College Ready Graduates Pilot Implementation in GEAR UP NC High Schools, Edstar Inc. and GEAR UP NC, September 2019 (opens in new tab). Full report linked in the sources below.

What a remedial course costs the student

The legislature knew the size of this. The finding written into the record when Career and College Ready Graduates was created was that, of the students who graduated in 2013 and went straight to a North Carolina community college, 52% were required to take up to ten remedial courses. Not ten weeks. Ten courses. And in North Carolina only about 25% of community college students ever attempt a college-level mathematics course at all.

A developmental course is not a normal course with a different name. It carries no credit toward the degree, and the federal financial aid rules treat it in ways most families never hear about until it is happening to them.

Before the program, there is no aid at all

Federal rules are explicit: “A student enrolled solely in a remedial program is not considered to be in an eligible program.” A student parked in a developmental sequence before being admitted to a degree programme is not eligible for a Pell Grant. Once inside a programme, Pell can pay for developmental courses, but only about one year of them, thirty semester hours, counts toward enrolment status.

It burns the clock that never resets

A Pell Grant has a lifetime limit of six full awards. That limit is calculated from the money paid out, and nothing in the rules exempts developmental coursework from it. A student who spends a year on courses that carry no credit toward the degree has spent a year of Pell and has five left. The aid is finite. The courses do not move them any closer to finishing.

The grades still count against them

Developmental grades must be included in the qualitative half of satisfactory academic progress, the standard a student has to meet to keep receiving aid, even where the hours are not counted in the completion-pace calculation. North Carolina's current framework grades these courses A, B, C or F, with no D, and notes that although the grades stay out of the institutional GPA they “can still factor into their financial aid GPA requirements.”

And it takes longer

Students who took remedial courses and still graduated took about eleven months longer to finish, and were 74% more likely to drop out along the way. A randomised trial at CUNY found that moving students out of a prerequisite remedial sequence and into support alongside the real course raised three-year associate degree completion by half, with the wage gain running through the shortened time to degree.

So the bill for a placement decision made in fifth grade arrives about a decade later. It is paid in Pell eligibility that buys no credit, in semesters that do not shorten the degree, and in the fairly good odds of leaving without one. Of first-time degree-seeking students in North Carolina's community colleges, 38% pass a credit-bearing mathematics course within three years. The other 62% are the students this whole system spent thirteen years advising.

What became of it

In autumn 2017, fourteen community college mathematics faculty, high school mathematics teachers and the Wake County mathematics curriculum coordinator met to write an enhanced version of the statewide mathematics course, and delivered it to the UNC System Office for review. The March 2019 implementation report to the legislature said it would be presented to the State Board of Education for approval as a fourth math class. As of our evaluation in September 2019, that course had not been approved and had not been created.

Something else was created instead. A course appears on the state's mathematics options chart revised June 2020, marked “New option”: 2013 – CCRG Mathematics. It is not on the April 2019 chart. One credit, senior year, standard weighting, delivering the same EdReady developmental modules the pilot had used. Districts assigned students to it by grade point average rather than by any measure of mathematics: one district's registration guide told juniors with an unweighted GPA between 2.2 and 2.799 that they were required to take it as seniors.

And here is how the remedy described itself, in a county course catalogue quoting the policy straight:

“CCRG Mathematics is a fourth math credit, but it is not a 4th level mathematics course. As such, this class does not meet the minimum admissions requirement for the UNC System.” The course built to stop students needing remedial mathematics was itself a course that does not qualify them for the state's own universities. Part twelve's dropped word, one more time: a fourth math, not a fourth level math.

Then it ended. Session Law 2025-56, signed 3 July 2025, repealed Career and College Ready Graduates. The Department's transition notice is unsentimental about it: the EdReady platform “will no longer be available for the upcoming school year, due to the repeal of CCRG. Student schedules will need to be updated accordingly. Remove students from CCRG Math and schedule them for Math 4 or another appropriate math course.” Course 2013 was still active on the March 2025 options chart. On the April 2026 charts it sits in the Disabled Courses Chart and cannot be scheduled for 2026‑27; on the chart for students entering ninth grade in 2026‑27 it does not appear at all. Ten years, one repeal, and a retired course code.

Did any of it reduce the number of students needing remedial math? Nobody has published an answer. The March 2017 progress report to the legislature describes a plan, not results. The Community College System's most recent Student Success Initiative report tracks pass rates among students already in developmental courses, not whether fewer students land there. The one early signal that did surface was not encouraging. Comparing autumn 2019 with autumn 2018, students arriving with an unweighted high school GPA below 2.2, the band placed into transition courses, completed first-year college-level math and English at lower rates at the RISE pilot colleges, while the same band at non-pilot colleges improved. In May 2021 the community college presidents voted to stop the statewide RISE rollout, citing exactly that: first-year completion of college-level math and English declined for students placed in transition courses. The law has now been repealed without anyone establishing whether it worked. Ten years, and the question it was written to answer was never measured.