And that’s why I responded there in my usual flippant manner. 
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If I were god, college admissions would be near the bottom of my list.
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I 1000% agree that remediation should happen earlier in a student’s schooling before they move on to the next level of education. And I am specifically referring to California public schools which cannot be compared to public schools in New England. COVID helped exacerbate a problem that already existed in California public schools, and now these deficits are showing up, and have been for the last few years, at the college level where it is the last chance to intervene.
There is no public policy in Cali advocating for UC’s and CSU’s to re-teach 8th grade math or any math, but the problem is there, and at this point it needs to be tackled at every education level.
It’s amazing that you know so many gifted math teachers, if any of them are looking to relocate to California there are plenty of open math teaching positions here.
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I think what hits me the most, besides my initial shock at how many students were unprepared, is the fact she took the remedial classes and still can’t pass them.
We can blame COVID for many students’ poor academic performance, but starting over now, what do we attribute a college freshman who can’t pass algebra at UCSD?
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A student can’t really ‘start over’ from pandemic era learning losses (assuming that’s part of this student’s issue.) Missing foundational math concepts can be difficult to overcome as an adult.
But, to move the conversation forward, this student might also have unsupported/undiagnosed dyscalculia and/or math phobia, to take two possibilities. (Dyscalculia can have several distinct root causes.) Both of those should have been caught by K-12 teachers at some point.
I live in New York and have personally seen the effects to Common core on both me and my sister. I ended having to take Trig +Stats this year instead of Alg. 2 Honors this year, which means I won’t be able to take precalc.
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My parents were both educators.
The various teaching conferences (here’s one example)
are fantastic convenings for both experienced/master teachers to share their experiences, and for “up and comers” to hone their craft.
Do the districts in California pay for their teachers to take the online classes and attend these conferences? My takeaway from my teacher family members and friends is that there is no sense in reinventing the wheel. Teachers spend so much time trying to figure out ‘how can I explain fractions and help kids work through the problems when they aren’t getting it the first, third, fifth time?”
There is an expert math teacher out there who is teaching OTHER teachers the tricks and concepts and visual cues that some kids need.
I was a terrible math student K-12 and as a result, always got the terrible math teachers. My kids were “natural” math students who lived, ate and breathed math. And as a result, they got the FANTASTIC math teachers. So I’ve seen both sides of it. The teachers who bring in artichokes and pineapples for the lessons on Fibonacci numbers, and fun competitions for “lightening rounds” solving word problems. I spent my math classes filling out worksheets. But weak math teachers can become strong math teachers! Stock market challenges, construction projects with marshmallows, buying carpet for the school library and learning to calculate the area under a curved window…. there are teachers who LIVE to teach other teachers how to do this!
One would think that if she retook Algebra 1, then took Algebra 2 and Precalculus, and got A’s in all those classes, that she would not have huge gaps in her understanding of Algebra. I suspect that some of the blame lies not only with Covid challenges, but with rampant grade inflation. How could she get A’s in Algebra 2 and Precalculus but have huge gaps in algebra? Why were the teachers in these classes giving her A’s and sending her the (false) signal that she was at the top of the learning curve for this material?
Here’s our experience: My son is taking Algebra 1 this year, and the teacher told us at Parents Night that she “doesn’t grade homework for correctness, but for effort.” We have seen assignments come home in which our son got 75% of the problems right, but received a 100% for the assignment.
This grade inflation does students a real disservice. It is so harmful because students are grossly misled about their performance and understanding of the material. And you end up with cases like that above in AP Calculus (or later in undergraduate) where students are given accurate feedback for the first time in their math education and are faced with the realization that they have huge gaps.
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Not just in math.
Gaps in skills will show up very quickly in chem and physics. Kid is an A math student but getting C’s in HS chemistry.
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At some point, future employers are not going to allow 3 do-overs or give someone an “A” for effort.
This is not the real world. Blaming it on this or that may work in HS or college but no one will care about excuses. When other people depend on your work as a teammate, your inability to solve a problem hurts them and they dont want to hear about why your education suffered during COVID.
She said in the article, she was able to get As & Bs in the classes, because of the school policy for re-taking tests. In that school, you were able to retake the same test over and over until you got the grade you wanted, so you didn’t really have to learn the material. If you saw the same problem 5x, you could probably fake your way through it.
Our county schools have this same policy. My kids did not in the private/city school system. I am very glad they did not.
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So I did some more reading. Issue with math readiness in college probably had always existed, but just not in the lime light like they are now.
I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised, since I do recall in undergrad back in 1990 that math professors specifically calling out students from LA unified high schools (Think the movie Stand and Deliver) that they need to get plugged into math tutoring ASAP due to a systematic lack of basic skills prevalent at that time. But back them, those students some ended up dropping out and the rest of us didn’t know why.
It’s funny to me that here we have threads that discusses if parents should push their kids into max rigor math classes in middle school, while UCSD is finding 900 of their freshmen can’t do math at a college level.
Like the “K” shaped economy, do we have a “K” shaped education system where the top gets better while the bottom drops lower? Or do we actually have a rat race where no one actually knows the actual layout of the course they run on?
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I guess based on anecdotal evidence, we’ve got the K shape. Many more kids being tagged as gifted- whether or not they are, and many more kids getting lost at the bottom.
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Yes, definitely grade inflation was a part of it, but there were other factors. D25 did not have a math teacher for 10th grade, instead there were different substitute teachers who cycled in and out of the class. Why? Because they could not find a qualified teacher to fill the position, this also was the case for her 10th grade English class. She and her classmates had to learn the content on their own, that is when we first got her a math tutor.
In 11th, the teacher allowed re-takes and that probably helped her maintain an A that year. But she also had to take a statewide math test at the end of 11th grade, all public California public high school juniors are required to take the same math test. The test places a student in a certain proficiency band, 1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest. D25 scored a 4 on the test. So the AP Calc teacher senior sees these results and thinks okay this kid is going to be fine. Well he did not allow re-takes and did not review concepts in class even when students were failing the quizzes and this was a good thing in a certain way but also he did not help them fill the holes in their knowledge. Like I mentioned the class average was a D which some may think was an accurate reflection of the class’s abilities. The other AP Calc teacher did allow his students to re-takes tests and that teacher’s class average was a B. In the end my daughter’s class scored higher on the AP exam than the other Calc class so it looked like they were all proficient once they moved on to college. I hope this story highlights, along with the one featured in the Chalkbeat article, that many, many factors have contributed to high math grades in high school but low math knowledge and proficiency. These factors include grade inflation, inexperience teachers, lack of teachers, missing foundational math skills from middle school and probably elementary as well, adoption of common core standards without proper implementation, varied curriculums some created by districts without oversight, lack of training for math teachers…I could go on and on. Why does this happen? Pressure from states about graduation rates especially in low income schools.
Public education needs a lot of reform and assistance, there is no simple and fast fix. And right now higher ed needs to help out until the K-12 districts can get it under control.
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I have one of those kids who wasn’t ‘math ready’ for college. I think her first ACT math score was 13 or 14 (high on 2nd try), but her reading scores were in the 30s so had a high enough score to get into college. She did have to take a 100 level math course to graduate from college as a core requirement, and she took it at a local college over the summer. She got an A. Did that make her ready for college calc? No. She took one summer class, went every day, did the problems and had a lot of help daily if she needed it. Really, she knew no more math than when she started, just concentrated for 6 weeks and passed the tests.
Was she not college ready? I’d say she was as she now has a masters degree and is a teacher. She never had any interest in a STEM major but can teach classes on art, art history, history, English with very little prep. Just not math.
She can function in life, do her taxes, make change at stores (she worked at Starbucks for years). She could be a lawyer but not an engineer or doctor.
I guess universities could require those who need remedial help to attend community colleges for the first few years, but then you are going to run into the problem of kids not wanting to do that (not the college experience they wanted) and just never going to college. California has a better feeder system from community college to a state college or university than most states do so might work there but not, say, in Montana where students can’t get to a cc that doesn’t have on campus dorms to either attend a full course load or take just a math class.
As pointed out above, California doesn’t use test scores anymore, so how would they have known my daughter wasn’t a mathy kid? She had Bs in her hs math classes. She graduated from hs with a decent GPA. She could write beautifully (both literally with cursive penmanship and figuratively in essays). If not required by a core class, she never would have taken a math class. How would UCSD or any other college know that her math skills were that of an 8th grader?
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Even many of the most selective colleges have math courses that theoretically should not be necessary for students able to get admitted to those colleges:
- Harvard Math MA and MB (slow paced calculus, presumably with review of earlier math).
- Yale Math 1100a and 1110b (slow paced calculus with precalculus)
- Princeton MAT 100 (precalculus)
- Brown Math 0050 and 0060 (slow paced calculus with precalculus)
- Columbia Math UN1003 (precalculus)
- Cornell Math 1101 (precalculus)
- Amherst Math 105 and 106 (slow paced calculus with precalculus)
- Williams Math 102 (precalculus)
- Swarthmore Math 015X (precalculus support course for students enrolled in calculus 1)
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< Horrified Stare >
You dare write that! Here, in the hallowed forums of CC?!
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My concern and question in all this re: the disaster that is K-12 education in the US is when (or whether!) there will be a cohort coming through that’s ‘back to normal’ as in performing similarly to kids who graduated HS in 2019. To be clear, I know things were not peachy then. But they’re way worse now.
Like, I get it. A lot of kids spent 1-2 years of school remote, learning more or less nothing. And I can buy the argument that pre-K kids who were remote/home in those years were set back as well.
But at some point is no cohort going to get back on track? Did covid break the system as much as it broke the kids? Like kids born in 2024 say. Is the HS class of 2042 going to be as bad off as the HS class of 2025?
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I’ve actually wondered if the high school class of 2026 is the closest to being “back to normal”. They had 7th grade in quarantine, but then 8th grade was return to in-person (mostly!). So the first “real” math class for many was 8th grade Algebra 1, and that was in-person.
The batches that might be worst are those that had 8th and 9th grade in full quarantine, so high school class of 2024 and 2025. My prediction is that every year from here on out gets much better. But that’s just my hypothesis and guess.
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I’m not sure about that. When the class of 2026 showed up as freshmen at our HS (when my D23 was a senior), they were widely ridiculed as feral – as if Covid quarantines reversed any progress that middle schoolers should have made, not just in academics but also socialization. I assume it got better (my S26 is in that class, and to defend his honor, I should say that he never acted feral as far as I know, and his friends seem reasonably well-adjusted). But this was also the class that encountered ChatGPT as soon as they started high school. Covid learning/socialization losses + AI during those formative HS years is not a great recipe for success, generationally.
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