Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra (from USA Today)

Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Peering beneath the hood of a national push to have all students take algebra by eighth grade, a new study out today finds that many of the nation's lowest-performing middle-schoolers are in way over their heads. They take algebra and other advanced math courses before they've mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and problem-solving with fractions.
For more than a decade, "algebra for everyone" has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).

But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.

Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.

How low? On par with a typical second-grader's, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.

"It's hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don't know arithmetic," he says.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Adam Gamoran, who has advocated pushing more low-achieving high schoolers into algebra classes, says these students get more from algebra classes than from general math classes. "In their zeal to extend this reform ever more broadly, some mistakes have been made," he says, but he hopes the findings don't cause a backlash against challenging low achievers to do harder math.

Loveless, who directs Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don't. "It's really counterfeit equity," he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.

Gamoran says algebra concepts "should be introduced earlier in students' mathematical studies — it's not like there should be no algebra and then, in eighth grade, all algebra."

Loveless agrees. But he says for kids who don't have adequate skills in eighth grade, schools should hold off on placing them in algebra until high school.