When summer school opened Monday at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., where I teach, remedial courses in math had more students than any other subject.
That is because of the high failure rate not only in math courses, but also on the state’s standard of learning exams in math. The summer school pattern is similar in most high schools around the country where kids will be trying to learn the math they never figured out during the year.
I worry that we’re pushing many kids to grasp math at higher levels before they are ready. When they struggle, they begin to dread math, and eventually we lose thousands of students who could be the scientists and engineers of tomorrow. If we held back and took more time to ground them in the basics, we could turn them on to math.
The experience of T.C. Williams teacher Gary Thomas, a West Point graduate who retired from the Army Corps of Engineers as a colonel, is emblematic of the problem. This year, Thomas had many students placed in his Algebra II class who slid by with D’s in Algebra I, failed the state’s Algebra I exam and were clueless when it came to the most basic pre-requisites for his course. “They get overwhelmed. Eventually they give up,” Thomas says.
English and social studies teachers face the same problem when school officials, more interested in boasting about the numbers of kids in higher-level courses than in what they really learn, place students without the requisite skills in advanced placement classes.
Push to younger students
Pushing students to the next level of math before they are ready is endemic in schools across the country, and is most pronounced in the move to have younger and younger children take algebra.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that from 1990 to 2007, the percentage of eighth-graders taking algebra went from 16 percent to 31 percent. California has been in the forefront of pushing kids into algebra: By 2009, 54 percent of its eighth-graders were taking algebra, the result of an initiative by California’s State Board of Education. Why the early push? It’s driven by the fact that some younger students wanted, and were capable of, more challenging math. But that’s not true for all students.
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