Background: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, American students have demonstrated substantial losses in achievement (Amplify, 2021; Domingue et al., 2021; Dorn et al., 2020; Storey & Zhang, 2023), while chronic absenteeism doubled after the pandemic, with the largest increase among low-income students (Chang et al., 2022; Dorn et al., 2021). Among…

By the late 1960s, the most offered courses in American community colleges were remedial reading, remedial writing, and remedial arithmetic. The success of the early efforts in community colleges was marginal at best, as is evidenced by a 1968 study indicating that nearly 90 percent of all remedial students failed or dropped out of remedial…

In the 1980s and 1990s important demographic, economic, and social changes will affect the nation's schools, families, and workplaces. In anticipation of these developments, there is renewed interest in formal educational attainment and basic academic skills. A concerted national effort to address the current crisis in basic skills development…