Assignment 9

1 The state that started a trend by making high school students tackle Algebra II is now abandoning the policy in a move praised by school districts for affording more flexibility. But some policy experts are nervous because nearly 20 states have followed Texas’ lead in requiring the vigorous course.

2 Supporters say fewer course mandates give students more time to focus on vocational training for highpaying jobs that don’t necessarily require a college degree, such as at Toyota’s factory in San Antonio or oil and chemical giant BASF’s facilities on the Gulf Coast.

3 But critics say Texas—often watched for education policy—is watering down its standards. They note that test scores and graduation rates have improved since the tougher curriculum was adopted in 2006.

4 “Algebra II is a really, really powerful predictive value on whether kids go to college, but it goes on and on after that: more likely to have a full-time job, have a job with benefits, be healthier,” said Patte Barth, director of the Center for Public Education, a policy group affiliated with the National School Boards Association.

5 “It’s not just for the college bound.”

6 Sixteen other states and District of Columbia now require Algebra II for most students, while Minnesota and Connecticut will do so soon. But Texas will join Florida—two of the country’s most populous states— in dropping the requirement when its Board of Education gives final approval to a curriculum overhaul next week.

7 That’s prompting some education groups to keep close tabs on other states because Texas’ class-room policy can have national implications. The state’s heavy reliance on tougher standardized testing under then Gov. George W. Bush became the model for the Federal No Child Left Behind law. Texas’ textbook market is so large that edits made for its classrooms can affect books sold nationwide.

8 “It’s funny that the banner-turning state would be backing off not so many years later,” said Jennifer Dounay Zinth, a policy analyst at Education Commission of the States.

9 She said her group is watching but hasn’t seen similar moves in other Algebra II-requiring states so far.

10 Legislators overwhelmingly approved the change in May, even though Texas’ higher education commissioner, Raymond Paredes, said removing mandates for advanced math and science would leave more students ill-prepared for college and technical careers.

11 Florida scrapped a similar policy in April. But unlike Texas, Florida is among 45 states embracing national Common Core standards, meaning its students are expected to master some skills taught in Algebra II.

12 Texas’ about-face came after strong pressure from Jobs for Texas, a coalition of 22 industry trade groups that argued the state’s curriculum was too rigid and no longer met the needs of the modern workforce.

13 Coalition spokesman Mike Meroney said that with fewer state-mandated courses, school districts can better work with local employers to build curriculums that prepare high school graduates to move directly into highpaying jobs.

14 “A lot of experts believe that problem solving is not exclusively learned in Algebra II,” Meroney said. “It is a good healthy debate, but it shouldn’t be a panacea.”

15 The state had allowed students to avoid taking Algebra II under the stricter rules by earning a “minimum diploma,” and about 20% of students did so. But lawmakers said it wasn’t enough.

16 The new changes still require Algebra II for honors diplomas, which can ensure automatic admission to Texas public universities, or for diploma plans focusing on science, technology, engineering and math courses, or STEM.

17 Vocal critics include powerful lobbying group Texas Association of Business, which accused Texas of dumbingdown curriculum. The Texas Latino Education coalition said the change could allow students from lowincome backgrounds to skate through high school despite having college potential.

18 But parent and teacher groups supported the change, saying it afforded flexibility to school districts, which can still require Algebra II. Stephen Waddell, superintendent in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville, said mandating Algebra II was unnecessary because most high schoolers take it anyway.

19 “The only way you are going to get flexibility is not requiring every single thing a student has to take,” Waddell said.

20 Isabel Hutt credits Algebra II for dramatically raising her SAT scores, but the 16-year old admits she wouldn’t be in the class if it weren’t required. She plans to study Spanish and social work in college.

21 Chris Witte, who oversees chemical giant BASF’s production facility in Freeport, Texas, said his company offers lucrative jobs for individuals with two-year degrees or focused high school career training.

22 “Is Algebra II required for every job out at our site? The answer is no,” Witte said.

23 Witte said the course is beneficial, but he and Texas lawmakers argued the vigorous math course was pushing some students to drop out.

24 But the Texas Education Agency reported last summer that an all-time high---nearly 88% of students from the Class of 2012—graduated on time. It was the fifth consecutive year of improvement.

25 Students’ scores on college entrance exams also improved. According to data released in March, Texas students’ ACT scores matched the national average of 20.9%, and 48%, compared to 44% nationally, met math benchmarks that included being ready for college-level Algebra.

26 Officials in Washington State recently compared school districts with and without more strenuous requirements and found no correlation between graduation rates and higher standards, said Dounay Zinth, the education policy analyst.

27 Graduation rates in Indiana also didn’t dip with increased standards, she said.

28 Both states require Algebra II, as do Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.

29 “There’s a fear that if we set higher standards for all students, more students will drop out,” Dounay Zinth said. “And the data do not bear that out at all.”

30 Conventional wisdom holds that in Thomas Friedman’s metaphorically flat world, all students, no matter their talents or proclivities, should leave high school prepared for both college and high-tech work (American Diploma Project, 2004). This implies, for example, that all students should master Algebra II, a course originally designed as an elective for the mathematically inclined. Indeed, more than half of U.S. states now require Algebra II for almost all high school graduates (Zinth, 2006).

31 Advocates of Algebra advance several arguments for this dramatic change in education policy: • Workforce projections suggest a growing shortage of U.S. citizens having the kinds of technical skills that build on such courses as Algebra II (Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, 2007). • Employment and education data show that Algebra II is a “threshold course” for high-paying jobs. In particular, five in six young people in the top quarter of the income distribution have completed Algebra II (Carnevale & Desrochers, 2003). • Algebra II is a prerequisite for College Algebra, the mathematics course most commonly required for postsecondary degrees. Virtually all college students who have not taken Algebra II will need to take remedial mathematics. • Students most likely to opt out of Algebra when it is not required are those whose parents are least engaged in their children’s education. The result is an education system that magnifies inequities and perpetuates socioeconomic differences from one generation to the next (Haycock, 2007).

32 Skeptics of Algebra II requirements note that other areas of mathematics, such as data analysis, statistics, and probability, are in equally short supply among high school graduates and are generally more useful for employment and daily life. They point out that the historic association of Algebra II with economic success may say more about common causes (for example, family background and peer support) than about the usefulness of Algebra II skills. And they note that many students who complete Algebra II also wind up taking remedial mathematics in college.

33 Indeed, difficulties quickly surfaced as soon as schools tried to implement this new agenda for mathematics education. Shortly after standards, courses, and tests were developed to enforce a protocol of “Algebra II for all,” it became clear that many schools were unable to achieve this goal. The reasons included, in varying degrees, in adequacies in preparation, funding, motivation, ability, and instructional quality. The result has been a proliferation of “fake” mathematics courses and lowered proficiency standards that enable districts and states to pay lip service to this goal without making the extraordinary investment of resources required to actually accomplish it (Noddings, 2007).

34 Several strands of evidence question the unarticulated assumption that additional instruction in Algebra would necessarily yield increased learning. Although this may be true in some subjects, it is far less clear for subjects such as Algebra II that are beset by student indifference, teacher shortages, and unclear purpose. For many of the reasons given, enrollments in Algebra II have approximately doubled during the last two decades (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2005a). Yet during that same period, college enrollments in remedial mathematics and mathematics scores on the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have hardly changed at all (NCES, 2005b; Lutzer, Maxwell, & Rodi, 2007). Something is clearly wrong.

35 Although we cannot conduct a randomized controlled study of school mathematics, with some students receiving a treatment and others a placebo, we can examine the effects of the current curriculum on those who go through it. Here we find more disturbing evidence: • One in three students who enter 9th grade fails to graduate with his or her class, leaving the United States with the highest secondary school dropout rate among industrialized nations (Barton, 2005). Moreover, approximately half of all blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians fail to graduate with their class (Swanson, 2004). Although mathematics is not uniquely to blame for this shameful record, it is the academic subject that students most often fail. • One in three students who enter college must remediate major parts of high school mathematics as a prerequisite to taking such courses as College Algebra or Elementary Statistics (Greene & Winters, 2005). • In one study of student writing, one in three students at a highly selective college failed to use any quantitative reasoning when writing about subjects in which quantitative evidence should have played a central role (Lutsky, 2006).

36 One explanation for these discouraging results is that the trajectory of school mathematics moves from the concrete and functional (for example, measuring and counting) in lower grades to the abstract and apparently nonfunctional (for example, factoring and simplifying) in high school. As many observers have noted ruefully, high school mathematics is the ultimate exercise in deferred gratification. Its payoff comes years later, and then only for the minority who struggle through it.

37 In the past, schools offered this abstract and ultimately powerful mainstream mathematics curriculum to approximately half their students—those headed for college—and little if anything worthwhile to the other half. The conviction that has emerged in the last two decades that all students should be offered useful and powerful mathematics is long overdue. However, it is not yet clear whether the best option for all is the historic Algebrabased mainstream that is animated primarily by the power of increasing abstraction.