The Algebra Gatekeepers
educationprogress.org
educationprogress.org
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...
Such a low bar, but even in the most recent school year, most 8th graders could only study Algebra I via an online course or summer school, i.e. most had no access to an in-person Algebra I course during the school year.
This at a district with average per-pupil operational spending of over $27k.
That the following had to be done is sadly the state of affairs in the US:
> In 2018, North Carolina passed House Bill 986, Session Law 2018-32, which included Part II: Enrollment in Advanced Mathematics Courses. This legislation established § 115C-81.36, requiring that "any student scoring a level five on the standardized test for the mathematics course in which the student was most recently enrolled shall be enrolled in the advanced course for the next mathematics course in which the student is enrolled."
Edit to add:
This is also the kind of thing that machine learning/"algo" skeptics/detractors skip over or ignore when evaluating automation: humans are often wrong.
Like, it was not a mistake during red lining laws that you had to go into a bank personally.
It's the same rationale more liberal localities use to hold back academically strong students and keep them in classrooms with everyone else. Except you need a critical mass of engaged students and an environment where the less-engaged students are less likely to self-segregate and stick to themselves. I think this is why the liberal policy has roundly failed to achieve the outcomes studies promised. But for the same reason, I would think the risk to the studious kids of adding a minority of bright kids with poor study habits would be minimal. OTOH, the academically successful cohort succeeds precisely because their parents segregate them into higher performing environments; they're not thinking quantitatively or care about averaged group outcomes. What they're doing works for them, so they're gonna fight back tooth-and-nail.
There are parallels here with the rationale many used to justify racial segregation, and that stills echoes today in terms of the distribution of parents who understand how the system works. But by-and-large I think what undergirds the parental hand-wringing and pushback today are more direct heuristics--the failure to choose to opt into Algebra, etc, communicates unsuitability for the higher socio-economic class.
the bullsh*t it creates.
Educational systems invariably lapse into patterns where autodidacts are rewarded for pretending they received their wisdom from the educational system.
Some cooperate, some refuse...
You seem to imply the intent is to allow strong students to advance more quickly. Except the data does not show that correlation, it shows that skill and advancement are not correlated. It is a different intent.
Maths is such a wide field that terms like "advanced" have little meaning imo. Or rather, advanced doesn't have to mean complex, and even complex doesn't have to mean inscrutable. But then even simple problems can turn out to be fiendishly hard.
Substitute Algebra with Combinatorics and you will be fine.I do not understand this Algebra worship.Speaking as someone who graduated magna cum laude in in College Math.
A compromise would be to have two streams:The left-brained folks should follow the Algebra ->Geometry->Calculus track;the right-brained folks should have a Combinatorics ->Geometry ->Calculus track.
That's way too late, BTW. In most of the developed world, loosely "algebraic" thinking is introduced starting from the earliest grades, generally phrased as "here's how you should reason to solve these complex, 'multiple step' word problems". "Single-step" word problems (as we'd call them in the U.S.) are effectively unknown, since they're pointless (except as a curiosity); the whole point of word problems is to introduce complex reasoning about mathematical operations, which then seamlessly motivates formal algebraic reasoning.
(A good review article on this approach: Persson, Ulf and Toom, André: Word Problems in Russian Mathematical Education, available at: https://cs-web.bu.edu/faculty/gacs/toomandre-com-backup/my-a... )
I'm a product of NC schools. When going to grade school in the 90s I did not realize that those schools desegregated less than 10 years prior. The advanced classes were essentially all white. Those advanced classes in early grade school position you for the slow track, or the fast track.
So you're agreeing that Algebra I is viewed as an "advanced" class in the context of Junior High math. (Obviously this is not the same sense of "advanced" as pre-calc or calculus. That should go without saying.)
No, I'd say Algebra I isn't an advanced class, but rather the "gatekeeper" class you have to pass to get into the actual "advanced" classes.
> Research in the 1990s found that in California, Latino students scoring above the 90th percentile on standardized tests had only about a 50% chance of being placed in college preparatory classes, while Asian and white students with similar scores had more than a 90% chance.
The data is split by community ( Black, Latino, White, ...). Whites and Asians fare the best (see also their fig. 6.1). Kids from other communities are prevented from getting the same opportunities as kids from these two communities performing equivalently.
So it is not that Asian kids don't matter, it is that the data indicates that Asian kids already seem to be treated reasonably well.
> EVAAS is a statistical tool that could predict with remarkable accuracy which students would succeed in advanced courses.
Then
> The table demonstrates a strong correlation between EVAAS predictions and actual student performance. Students were grouped into probability ranges based on their predicted likelihood of success in 8th grade Algebra I, and their actual performance was then tracked.
So both the input (EVAAS predictor) and output (success in 8th grade algebra) are continuous variables (as shown in the first and last columns of the table mentioned in the quote), and they use this strong correlation to study access to 8th grade algebra against non-academic factors by using the EVAAS predictor as a control variable. I am not a professional statistician but honestly it looks pretty solid to me, or at least far more rigorous than most education science I have come across.
What they are then saying is that if you control for probability of success, Black and Hispanic children are significantly less likely to be admitted in 8th grade Algebra than White and Asian students. Looking at racial differences is not a particularly contentious way of studying bias in American society.
Of course they could have looked at other factors: economic and social class, gender, etc. This is the tragedy of sociology: you can't study social bias without being accused of introducing bias in how you study it...
Surely you can't be surprised that not everyone shares that belief??
They actually do. They just group the advanced classes in an elite "prep schools" track, whereas everyone else gets the crappy "vocational schools" track. The worst part about this is the pathological incentives it creates among teachers. No one wants to teach bad students, so the "vocational" track gets the worst teachers, and the divergence in outcomes becomes ingrained.
That's not true, but maybe there are too few good teachers who do that...
"The enrollment process created additional barriers for students and families. When students went online to select their courses, in many school districts they could not see classes that required teacher recommendations and may not have known those courses existed. Students who requested placement in advanced classes were frequently told they could not enroll, even when they had strong academic credentials. Students had no pathway to demonstrate their readiness or earn their way into these courses through their academic performance. They had to be recommended by a teacher."
Maybe this system shouldn't be set up this way? Who set up the system I wonder.
Sure it does. There is a vested interest in some to ensure a desired peer group of the classes their kids take. More generally, to ensure 'space's at the top for those that get the teacher recommendations. Bluntly speaking, it's racist as shit. The data presented is a case study of systemic racism.
UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany and France are the systems I'm aware of and they all have different levels of maths you can study at high school. I'd be surprised to learn of any country the offers no options or specialisation before University.
What? How is this a waste of human potential? Presumably the kids that didn't take HS Algebra took other classes instead, and probably did well at those. Not taking Algebra does not make you a failure at life, it does not waste human potential on a massive scale.
The article repeatedly mentions kids who were forced to retake classes/material that they had already achieved mastery on. Moreover the way the system is set up, not taking Algebra in junior high means that you won't be allowed to take the most advanced math classes in the final years of high school. Either of these amounts to a serious waste of potential.
It also seriously impacts college access, since your average college course requires either "College Algebra" (which has a severe weed-out effect on those who didn't already achieve mastery in K-12 math, because you can't really teach the entirety of K-12 in one college semester!) or even calculus.
The real craziness is in K-12 education itself. Colleges have just evolved their own "system" to cope with that in the most practicable way while preserving the world-class standards they care about. (Gen-ed college courses is another example. In most of the world, providing 'gen-ed' is the job of high school!)