I don’t often write about my personal experience with my children’s schools. However, this post comes at a unique time in our nation when more and more families are experiencing questions of quality and trust in the public school system. I have always been an adamant advocate for public schools, and ensuring all students receive the very best our systems have to offer. Like George Washington Carver believed, I too am a firm believer that “Education is the key that unlocks the golden door to freedom.” But when systems begin to make access more challenging for students, we have to question the motivations behind those decisions. And when laws must be enacted to ensure that we are providing the very best to our students, we have to ask the question: are our public school systems broken?
My son attends a Title 1 middle school in our district. According to North Carolina’s School Report Card, the school consists of 52% economically disadvantaged students, and last year, boasted 51% of their students were proficient in math, while 53% were proficient in Reading.
In full transparency, since writing this piece, I have successfully advocated for my son’s placement in Math I, thanks to intervention from the district. However, that placement comes with a caveat: he must continue taking Math 8 while simultaneously completing Math I through North Carolina’s Virtual Public School (NCVPS) in the spring. While I am grateful that he will have the opportunity to pursue advanced mathematics, I cannot help but wonder: Have we really removed the barrier, or have we simply found a way around it for one child?
According to Bridget O’Brien’s “Siblings of Influence,” younger kids naturally copy people they view as bigger, stronger or more capable. My youngest son has been doing exactly that for as long as I can remember. His older brother loved Pokémon, so he loved Pokémon. His older brother played baseball, so he played baseball. Competitive enough that he would never admit it, my youngest has always held a deep admiration for his big brother. So when he decided to follow in his brother’s footsteps and attend our district’s only early college, I wasn’t surprised. I knew the school well. When the Early College first opened, I was part of its founding faculty and later led its English department through several of its formative years. Since then, the school has established itself as one of the strongest in North Carolina and, within our district, is the only high school to earn an A rating.
Perhaps that is why my thirteen-year-old son has had his heart set on attending our district’s Early College since his older brother was admitted two years ago. Alike in many ways, my youngest has always had to work a little harder in math—but not always under ideal circumstances. In sixth grade, his math teacher was a communications major. In seventh, he had a certified math teacher, though one with fewer than five years of classroom experience. In North Carolina, where ongoing teacher shortages have made access to qualified, experienced teachers increasingly uneven, this is hardly unusual. However, in mathematics, those gaps compound. A poor foundation one year might influence a student’s possibilities years later, because the content builds so heavily on the one before it. For my son, this mattered a lot: passing Math I in the eighth grade is a prerequisite for admission to our district’s Early College.
When North Carolina passed its advanced mathematics enrollment law in 2019, the goal was to decrease the subjectivity that has long influenced course selection and increase fair access to challenging math pathways. In the past, teacher recommendations were a major factor in determining admittance to advanced coursework, and occasionally, it depended on whether parents possessed enough educational “know-how” to advocate for acceleration.
In mathematics, the stakes of certain placement decisions are exceptionally high. Before their freshman year, a student’s high school math trajectory may be limited if they fail to complete Math I by the end of eighth grade. Early placement has long-standing impacts on a student’s ability to advance through the course sequence, and enroll in Advanced Placement mathematics, and the number of weighted courses they can ultimately take before graduation. These factors impact their GPA, class rank, college admissions, and future opportunities. For my son, the impact is even more immediate: the door to our district’s Early College closes completely if he does not take Math I in the eighth grade.
Still, a decade later, a significant kind of gatekeeping persists in North Carolina. For students who meet the highest achievement level, the state’s automatic-enrollment does exactly what it was intended to do. A seventh-grader scoring a Level 5 on the state’s end-of-grade (EOG) assessment is automatically enrolled in Math I. However, for students who fall just below that score, placement decisions return to local districts. There, decisions are subject to a slew of additional criteria including more assessments, teacher recommendations, and discretionary judgments. All practices which the NC’s Advanced Math Law was intended to restrict.
This is exactly where my son landed. After earning an A in Accelerated Math 7/8—a condensed course covering two years of middle school math in a single year—and scoring a Level 4 on the state EOG, just three scale-score points shy of a Level 5, my son was still denied placement in Math I by his principal. The decision boiled down to his score on a locally administered, curriculum-based assessment, given at the end of seventh grade. According to the state, a Level 4 student is on track for college and career readiness and exhibits a “thorough understanding” of grade-level criteria. Thorough. Yet a single vendor-based assessment was permitted to outweigh both a year of successful accelerated coursework and the state’s standardized measure of proficiency?
My son’s experience left me with three questions about how much control local districts still have over access to advanced math. First, when a school moves its best math students into Math I, what happens to their grade-level test scores? Second, why should a single local test be more important than a year’s worth of successful achievement in an accelerated math course and a state EOG demonstrating proficiency? Lastly, what proof is there that local tests are assessing Math I readiness and not something else entirely if they are being used to determine placement decisions? All of those questions point to the possibility that North Carolina eliminated one type of gatekeeping while providing ample space for another.
A telling example is Catawba County. Due to a lack of qualified teachers, the district did not offer Math I to eighth graders who would have qualified during the 2018-19 school year. Rather, the students took the Grade 8 EOG and stayed in Advanced Math 8. The district reported a growth index above 12 in its report to the state, affirming that it was “pleasantly surprised” by the level of progress certain pupils showed. District administrators determined the outcome as proof that even their “high-flying” math pupils profited by sticking with the eighth-grade math curriculum.
Oddly enough, the outcomes that Catawba highlighted may reveal more about how mathematical learning actually occurs than it does about the need to retain advanced students in Math 8. According to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, practice makes mathematical thinking more automatic, making mathematical concepts and processes quicker, more precise, and less mentally taxing. In a similar vein, the National Research Council found that regular exposure to mathematical processes, reasoning, and problem-solving techniques improves students’ ability to apply those skills in new mathematical situations. Given another year of exposure to and practice with comparable mathematics topics, it is hardly surprising that kids who have already been classified as high-performing will show greater growth.
In North Carolina, school growth is tied to principal compensation. Principals have the potential of earning thousands of extra dollars under the state’s principal wage structure, depending on whether or not a school meets or exceeds expected growth. This raises an uncomfortable question: What happens when the decision that benefits a student’s academic future is not necessarily the decision that benefits a school’s accountability measures?
Before permitting a Level 4 student to enroll in Math I, districts and schools often examine other factors that may effectively bar that student from accessing advanced coursework. This is contrary to NCDPI’s own recommendations that districts should consider Level 4 students for Math I provided there is “appropriate evidence.” And while local boards may be allowed to conduct diagnostic tests, those tests are meant to be used as “supplemental content enrichment” for students already enrolled in a high school-level math course. No where does legislation suggest that diagnostic testing should act as an extra prerequisite for Math I admission.
This is to say nothing about how those tests often do not sufficiently measure a student’s actual mathematical skill. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, for example argue that these assessments often present a problem of construct-irrelevant variance, in which performance is dependent on skills or situations that are typically unrelated to the topic the test is intended to evaluate. If these assessments are being used to demonstrate mathematical readiness, this is particularly worrisome. What are we assessing if a test depends on a student’s ability to manipulate its technology?
Variance is only part of the issue. Districts in North Carolina have openly acknowledged that accurately condensing middle school math standards is challenging. Newton-Conover City Schools, for example, informed the state that during the 2018-19 school year, they were concerned students would have gaps in Math I because they were unable to sufficiently compact the curriculum in Grades 6 and 7. A local placement assessment that tests material which was never taught to students, risks conflating opportunity to learn with readiness. This speaks more to a teaching and pacing problem than a student’s capacity for acceleration.
In my son’s case, this local measure is doing something remarkably consequential. It has effectively outweighed both an A from a year-long accelerated math course as well as a Level 4 on a highly standardized state-mandated End-of-Grade measure, while simultaneously placing emphasis—yet again—on teacher recommendations for upper-level math placement. If a local assessment is being given more weight than any of the other indicators, and we are back to relying on the very teacher recommendations that NC’s advanced math placement law was meant to curtail, then districts ought to be prepared to present evidence that demonstrates how these assessments reliably predict a student’s ability to succeed in NC Math I.
North Carolina’s automatic-enrollment law was a significant effort to address the historical inequities of subjective course placement, which have disproportionately affected minority students in the state. However, the impacts of gatekeeping are not limited to any one demographic. Barring a student from enrolling in Math I has the potential of impacting a student’s ability to enroll in subsequent math courses. Unlike some other disciplines, Math is a highly cumulative subject. Advanced math classes offer access to weighted coursework, are associated with four-year college attendance, STEM study, and subsequent labor-market opportunities. A decision about what math class a thirteen-year-old student can take then becomes a choice about how far that student is permitted to go.
Only a handful of states have automatic enrollment policies for advanced-mathematics. North Carolina should serve as a national model for increased opportunities. But when a bar for guaranteed access turns into yet another barrier, that promise becomes meaningless. What is the purpose of a law if we are simply going to return students, who fall just below the automatic threshold, to the same labyrinth of local discretions, extra tests, opaque cut scores, and subjective measures? The state must decide if allowing districts to enact hurdles with arbitrary rules is truly a valid means of limiting admission for students to take advanced courses. In truth, these decisions should lie with students, parents and guardians, and not a singular principal, school or system.
An interesting article published recently by Education Week provides notable insights into advanced math placement. In the study, more than 50,000 students were examined to evaluate the relationship between Algebra I placement and academic achievement. Researchers found that students who were academically prepared to take Algebra I in eighth grade consistently outperformed similarly prepared peers who delayed enrollment until ninth grade. The findings reinforce an important outcome, that administrators across the state ought to be aware of: delaying access to advanced mathematics for students who are ready may actually do them a disservice.
My son now has access to Math I, but only by completing two mathematics courses simultaneously. I am grateful that the district intervened, but I cannot help wondering how many other students will be required to demonstrate their readiness over and over again before being given the opportunity to advance.
My son may have missed the automatic math enrollment by three-scale points. But what he should not miss out on is the opportunity to demonstrate what he can do next.
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