Top students can benefit greatly by being offered the subject early. But many districts offer few Black and Latino eighth graders a chance to study it.
This is why Progressives should never be put in charge of anything, ever. It doesn’t matter how well they speak, how nice they look or what degrees they have, they can only destroy. The issue is whether or not advanced students should have the option of taking Algebra in eight grade. Most students take in ninth.
Do bias and inequality keep Black and Latino children off the fast track? Should middle schools eliminate algebra to level the playing field? What if standout pupils lose the chance to challenge themselves?
What bias? Teachers are mostly Democrats, and Democrats invented the Ku Klux Klan, but they aren’t mean to Black and Latino children.
What inequality? Equality of opportunity is what we shoot for. All schools should accommodate students, even Black and Latino students, who are sufficiently advanced to take Algebra in eight grade. If Black and Latino students don’t have the intellectual horsepower at that age, then equality requires that they not participate.
What is a Black or Latino student? Since enough people have lied about their ethnicity to take advantage of BPOC privilege, there must be an objective way to determine who qualifies or omit ethnicity as a tracked attribute.
But racial and economic gaps in math achievement are wide in the United States, and grew wider during the pandemic. In some states, nearly four in five poor children do not meet math standards.
I believe that students should be challenged in school to accomplish a little more than they thought they could. Each student, regardless of any other attribute. I have no idea what Progressives believe. Gaps are irrelevant if we are doing the best we can for every student.
Many school districts have traditionally responded to divergent achievement levels by simply separating children into distinct pathways, placing some in general math classes while offering others algebra as an accelerated option. Such sorting, known as tracking, appeals to parents who want their children to reach advanced math as quickly as possible.
Tracking should appeal to all parents. If the less academically capable students kept failing because class was too difficult, they’d like tracking also. Instead, Progressives find it more comfortable to allow the slowest student to set the pace for the class.
Every student should be challenged. Pragmatically, the only way to do that is to group by ability. IQ is a real thing. You can argue about it, but it isn’t meaningless. Putting a 70 IQ student in with a 120 IQ student and expecting both to thrive means that much intellectual potential will never be developed.
But tracking has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on inequality. Around a quarter of all students in the United States take algebra in middle school. But only about 12 percent of Black and Latino eighth graders do, compared with roughly 24 percent of white pupils, a federal report found.
It’s only uncomfortable for Progressives who don’t understand what “equality of opportunity” means. They find it difficult to understand that people are individuals with particular strengths and weaknesses.
Why are fewer Blacks and Latinos taking Algebra in eighth grade? I don’t know. That’s not the school’s problem. I can come up with a bunch of plausible reasons, but it would take additional research to find out, and the reason is probably not pertinent.
- Blacks and Latinos attend schools that don’t offer Algebra in eight grade.
- The families of Blacks and Latinos don’t value education, so the students lack a work ethic.
- Blacks and Latinos just want to graduate and aren’t worried about speeding up the time line.
- Blacks and Latinos are statistically weaker in math.
There are probably more, but racist teachers isn’t the answer.
Since then, the number of middle schools that offer algebra has risen to about 80 percent from 60 percent. But white and Asian American students still pass state algebra tests at higher rates than their peers.
Don’t allow smarter students to take Algebra in eighth grade, and those students will go to a different school. Parents get pissed when you mess with their children. In a decade, all the Black and Latino students will be concentrated in low performing public schools, and the Conservatives will be blamed for destroying public education.
When I was graduating from high school, Cleveland started busing. Black students from parts of Cleveland were bused to Cleveland schools with more White students. Over time, the White families all moved to Parma because that seemed like a stupid idea.
Do we have to fully play out every stupid Progressive idea to it’s inevitable failure? So many students are being damaged by their utopian dreams.