Kelsey Piper at The Argument:
UCSD has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.
In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”
Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.
“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. “The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.”
After reviewing the report on which this was based, Piper interviewed some high school math teachers about it:
“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”
The students are missing so many prerequisites that teaching them calculus is basically hopeless. And indeed, almost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.
“My exam results when I was teaching it were mostly: One student (who actually has most of the prerequisite skills) gets a five and maybe one more ekes out a three and everyone else gets ones and twos,” the teacher told me. “I wasn’t allowed to grade in a way that would hold them accountable.”
“What would happen,” I asked, “if you did grade based on their actual mastery of calculus?”
“If I was failing all the kids who weren’t doing on-level work, that would be almost all,” she told me. “The kids would all be trying to drop the class to preserve their GPAs, because that is the set of kids that cares about class rank. And if all the kids drop, they just won’t run the class at all.”
A sense that something dire is happening in American public education is widespread across the political spectrum. As Piper says, the situation at the University of California is worsened by a combination of widespread grade inflation and their decision to stop requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. But this is far from the only sign of trouble.
Somebody needs to hold students accountable and give them appropriate grades long before they get to high school math. Sadly, nobody in the American educational system has any incentive to do that.
Politically, I think this is a particular problem for Democrats. For the past 50 years voters have generally ranked Democrats as more trustworthy on education, but that is no longer true; the combination of woke fads, excessive "equity," and passing students who have learned nothing has depressed Americans' view of public schooling and the party most associated with it.
1 comment:
“If I was failing all the kids who weren’t doing on-level work, that would be almost all,” she told me.
American Education has finally reached equality! Everybody's an idiot now!
Basically what people have been saying forever: you're never going to lift everybody up, you're only going to drag everybody down.
Post a Comment