When Pierce Holmes entered ninth grade, the school placed him in 9C, a lower-level algebra class.
Until then, Holmes had always achieved good grades in mathematics, mostly with second-class honors. When he found out that his friend was an honors student in mathematics, he felt that he belonged there too. So he approached a career guidance counselor, who asked him why he wasn’t in his honors math class. “Oh, I’ll give it a try,” Holmes remembers his advisor replying. He was switched to a more advanced class that taught Algebra II and Geometry.
Holmes was “tracked,” or grouped, into a lower-achieving math class. “To be honest, I didn’t think about tracking at all. I was just a kid. “I just go to whatever class they send me to,” Holmes said, adding, “If you’re paying attention, If you don’t, no one will tell you.”
Reflecting on his recent experience as a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, a public policy research organization, Holmes thinks it makes little sense to have to pass up the opportunity to try harder math. Only when it was too late to influence his decision did it become clear to him that this was the moment when he could have been unknowingly sent down a different path. Became.
New research suggests which students are able to take on intellectually stimulating courses like calculus may depend not only on their math aptitude, but also in part on where they attend high school. These courses can make or break admission to coveted universities, leaving talented people behind and reinforcing inequality of opportunity.
Previous research has also shown that students receive different guidance from their counselors, with some students even turning to social media sites like YouTube to decide which math courses to take. America’s lagging math performance could have major consequences.
The complex reality of tracking
Julia Kaufman, a senior policy fellow at Rand University, says eliminating tracking is not the answer. But she argues that there are questions about how to achieve this equitably so that students’ talent for handling difficult mathematical content is not wasted.
According to her research, the factors used to determine how students are grouped vary by both state and school type.
In a report published in February, Kaufman and Holmes suggested that large, low-poverty middle schools are more likely to use performance-based tracking for math placement than high-poverty middle schools. are doing.calledOpportunity structure in elementary and junior high schools considering students’ mathematics learningThe report examined student tracking, teacher qualifications, and support for struggling students in four states: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. This was the first publication based on RAND’s American Mathematics Educators Study. This special report focuses on data from a portion of the study extracted from her 2,505 teachers and her 2,293 principals who work with children in kindergarten through eighth grade.
One of the findings is that the way these schools group students into math groups also varies depending on the income level of the families they serve. Schools with fewer students receiving free or reduced-price lunch were more likely to use parent and family requests, rather than teacher recommendations or graded grades, to group students. The exact reason is unclear, Kaufman said. Perhaps lower-income families are less assertive, she speculates, or perhaps principals don’t value their needs as much.
In general, schools use different types of data when putting kids on the track, Kaufman said. For example, in New York, principals commonly reported using teacher recommendations when deciding where to place students. In contrast, Florida commonly relied on grade-level tests and midterm assessments rather than teacher recommendations to place students into groups.
Some of the differences in the report are puzzling. For example: According to a survey, Texas principals report an increase in “significant barriers” to providing effective K-12 math instruction. These principals say there is increased pressure on teachers to cover the specific content tested in Texas, and that Texas is understaffed and has insufficient time for teachers to prepare lessons compared to the rest of the country. It was revealed that. Researchers say there’s no clear explanation why it’s even worse for Texas educators, as the data shows.
access to opportunities
In his previous work teaching adults seeking to earn their GEDs, Kaufman spent a lot of time thinking about how the education system “starved” students. She said factors outside of their control seemed to pull them down the GED path: where they were born, what opportunities they had, what the schools they attended when they struggled offered them. “Will you do that?” he added.
She says it’s not just what one teacher does in one classroom that helps students succeed, but what schools can do more broadly. That’s what she sees in math tracking as well.
For example, many principals say their schools offer algebra, a key branch in the race to calculus. However, Kaufman said only some students will be able to take algebra, which means some tracking.
This can ultimately push students into an academic journey they don’t even realize they’re on.
Kaufman said students often feel lost and don’t realize they have a choice in the matter. It works fine. But she added that sometimes, especially when children’s grades are divided into lower and upper grades, students can get stuck in the lower track. That can shape students’ self-perceptions, Kaufman says, and can also influence how teachers perceive their students’ math abilities.
Forgetting parts of math can make college even more difficult, she added, and it can happen without anyone discussing it with students or parents.
