As I listened to this essay, I was transported backward in time to my experience as an economically disadvantaged child in the North Carolina school system during the mid-2000s. My district fought placing me into accelerated courses with similarly spurious reasoning as the kid you described who ended up attending Yale. It was only after a professor of education from UNC, Dr. Mary Ruth Coleman, intervened on my behalf that I was allowed into my school’s G/T program. Years later, I graduated as valedictorian of my class, and I’m enrolled in a chemistry PhD program.
It is a shame that we have to advocate one kid at a time, but I am still doing that today. The original law said all students in any grade who scored at the highest level had to be allowed to enroll in the most advanced math. Districts across the state kept saying they couldn't do this in elementary school, so they would file a waiver. I work with many school districts so I started asking them why not? They said the AG (same as G/T) teachers were teaching advanced math in elementary schools and they could only work with kids identified officially as AG/GT. Many of the kids scoring at the highest level were not AG/GT so they couldn't put them in the classes. The law was then changed to start in 6th grade. By the time the kids are in 6th grade, the fact that they missed out on the most rigorous versions of math in middle school disadvantages them.
I had to fight to have my high performing daughter placed in the advanced math class in middle school in MA. We’re not economically disadvantaged but my suspicion at the time was that the teacher was biased against introverted girls. I have a PhD in educational measurement so I was able to push back on the word salad. I eventually succeeded in getting her placed in advanced math. Her experience was mixed. On the one hand, she succeeded at the math, but she always commented that the teacher played favorites with the boys in the class. Regardless of the teacher bias, my daughter is a top economics student and is winning merit awards. Her calculus professor said she’s one of her most talented students. Thank you for exposing this!
What i was curious about was how did these teachers and administrators and parents justify this discrimination? How were the changes perceived in the school district? What was the discourse?
Also what you said about San Francisco eliminating 8th grade algebra is new to me. How were they placing students into the 9th grade algebra class then?
Many educators and administrators actually didn't try to justify the discrimination. They recognized the problem and worked to change it. However, those who resisted reform often vilified both me and my business co-founder, Dr. Lee Stiff, rather than engage with the data showing qualified students were being excluded.
Those who defended the system used several different approaches. Some claimed research showed that minority and low-income students struggled in advanced math, so placing them there would actually harm them. They accused us of trying to damage these kids by suggesting they belonged in advanced courses. Many argued that students officially labeled "academically gifted" should get priority in advanced classes, even when those students had lower test scores than unlabeled high achievers. The gifted label, they insisted, revealed potential that went beyond what test scores could measure.
The strongest resistance came from the academically gifted departments in schools. In the first large district where school counselors saw our data and tried unsuccessfully to enroll top-scoring students in advanced math, they eventually asked for objective enrollment criteria. The AG department opposed this because, they said, the AG students might not meet such criteria. Much to our surprise, when we looked at the data, many of the AG students actually had low math scores but were still placed in advanced math classes.
They also suggested low-income families couldn't afford tutors, so advanced placement would set these students up for failure, despite no evidence that tutoring was necessary for success. Perhaps most troubling, multiple districts told us they needed high-achieving, self-motivated low-income students in standard classes to help manage inclusion of special education students. Since teachers had to focus on special needs students, they relied on these capable students to work independently and not require attention.
Rather than address the data, they primarily tried to discredit our research and questioned our motives for highlighting these disparities. They also changed reporting methods to make the exclusion patterns less visible, combining achievement levels and altering how information was presented to schools and the public.
People also seemed to think we were advocating to lower the bar so that minority and low-income students could enroll in advanced math.
How did the parents perceive it all? Like with the school where the parents were agitating against lower-income children being placed in the same class, what was their justification? How did the principal get ousted? How did his replacement justify the rollback.
Sorry if it's a lot of questions, but as a parent, I want to understand how these things work on the parent side of things.
We don't know why the principal got moved. He was a well respected principal and he was moved to a different school. We had been working with the School Improvement Team in this school for two years. They were thrilled to learn to use their data, identify kids and move them to advanced math and advanced language arts. The kids' parents were also thrilled. It was the second year, after the first 100+ low income 6th graders were successful and going to be enrolled in per-algebra that the high income parents spoke up. The math teachers wanted the kids moved. The School Improvement Team called us to come to a meeting of the math teachers and the new principal. The math teachers were telling the SIT things like "they are not ready to learn slope intercept..." My business partner was a math ed professor at NCSU and had taught most of the math teachers. They couldn't speak math word salad to us. He was also past president of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and very well liked by math teachers. The new principal sat there on her phone not listening. The math teachers told us she was "from this neighborhood and understood how things worked." Dr. Stiff showed them the data, tried to reason with them, then he got on his knees and said, "okay I am now begging you to let these kids stay in the top track." They just said no. They said parent pressure would be too much.
As far as the other parents, those of the low-income kids, they have no social capital. Many went to their churches for help. The Black Baptist community in Raleigh has all sorts of services to help parents advocate. We would work with them to help them advocate one kid at a time.
Were there behavior issues in the classrooms? I'm surprised that there was so much parental pressure if there weren't factors causing some sort of negative outcome for the kids of the complaining parents. Not justifying it, just trying to understand.
Why did the schools set it up to need teacher approval in the first place when the law asked for something different? What was the stated reason for that?
Math placement had historically been done by teacher recommendation. The law requiring allowing the highest scoring students to also enroll was new. They didn't need to justify doing it by teacher recommendation because they had always done it that way. I taught math in Illinois in the 1980s and it was done that way there. It is historically how math placement has been done.
> When we asked why they didn't add a class, they said there were not more teachers who could teach the rigorous version of algebra and they were already struggling to have enough top track high school math teachers and therefore could not bring any more to the middle school level.
This drives me insane. If a teacher is not qualified to teach Algebra I, then they are not qualified to teach math at any level. Full stop. The content of Algebra I should not be difficult for any adult who has made math their full-time job. How much have we lowered our standards at ed schools if we are graduating math teachers (often with master's degrees) without a fluent grasp of algebra?
Resolve this, and I think the scarcity mindset can go away, though there will always be educators with the paternalistic attitude that holding students back from advanced material is "for their own good".
This happened to me in Pennsylvania. I had the top score on the middle school math placement test, but I was pushed into the standard track because I didn't always do my homework. I didn't always complete homework because I was bored out of my mind.
I remember that was the moment when I realized school was a bullshit exercise not about knowledge or learning, but about power, control, and obedience. Because I don't do well with that, I subsequently rebelled even more.
Luckily I ran into some good and kind teachers later in HS and college and I graduated summa can laude as a Math/CS major.
But that experience gives me a lot of hesitation with my own children now and is why we're trying out homeschooling (which we basically already did during COVID to a lot of success).
It looks like lots of people have relevant anecdotes for this, so I thought I’d add my own. Between middle school and high school, I moved from a “progressive” public middle school in Vermont to a top ranked public high school in Pennsylvania. I had been in Vermont’s version of advanced math, but because Pennsylvania didn’t know how to interpret it I was placed in grade-level algebra. Sophomore year I tried to catch up with the students who had been in the advanced track already, by taking geometry and algebra 2 at the same time. I had A’s in both courses, but when I requested to take honors pre-calculus (which was required for AP Calculus) I was told by my teacher I’d need to work with a private tutor over the summer to catch up. I ended up finishing high school without taking ap calculus, because the school made it so difficult for me to access.
As stated in the article, there seems to be a lack of encouragement for high performing students to move to advanced courses, unless their parents take initiative. Based on my experience, I’d add that non-traditional math courses in public schools seem to have no purpose. By placing all of the advanced math students in a general “advanced math” class, rather than just placing them in algebra, the Vermont school district I was in made it difficult for anyone who ever left to remain on an advanced track.
I’m in NC and very interested in this research. My kid is a mix of Hispanic, South Asian and European. When I advocated for him in public school I was dismissed as an over aggressive Asian tiger mom. When I asked about SSA (subject acceleration) testing his teacher didn’t think this kid with a Hispanic surname would pass. This is in a great” school district. We parents are both highly educated and spent our own money on IQ and achievement tests that placed kid off the charts, with highest scores in quantitative reasoning. Then he passed the SSA test with no prep at all. The district was forced to place him(because of the testing) as gifted/accelerated. Not all parents can afford the time or money for this fight. I lost faith in public ed and moved both kids to private. Now I support vouchers.
I was on a task force, probably in the district you are talking about here, several years ago. Another woman on the task force with me had moved from Charlotte to this district when her son was ready to start middle school. She was a college professor and her husband was a lawyer. They were White and had adopted a Hispanic boy at birth. He was in advanced classes in Charlotte. They moved into an apartment when they first moved to the new district, while they sold their other house. They enrolled their son in one of the best magnet schools. They did not know he was in remedial classes until the school accidentally sent the reading list that was for the other kids. This was a GT magnet and they basically had remedial and gifted classes. The school put their son on the remedial track. I mention the apartment because working on grant evaluations, we would ask schools how they decided who to put in grant-funded remedial programs, and in addition to telling us they look at the mother's pocket book, we also often heard that if they live in an apartment they are thought to need remedial support. This is much easier than using academic data. They never got their son out of this track. This is why she joined this task force that was to promote equity in access for low-income kids. The mayor of Durham came to me several years ago (he is the mayor now, but wasn't then) and told me he thought what I talked about with math placement was only happening to kids whose parents were poorly educated and they were not involved. His son was not recommended for advanced middle school math, although he was very high scoring. He had gone to get that fixed and was told no. He came to me and I taught him how to use the data and the right data-speak and he went back and got his son in. His son ended up going to the NC School of Math and Science. (He did not live in Durham at the time--probably the same district you are in.)
We were in WCPPS. Its size is unmanageable and there is no accountability to the parents. Correct math tracking is a non negotiable for us (dad engineer, grandpa engineer, grandpa statistician). I have a higher ed background. Because math is sequential, I believe it’s very hard to get caught up in future years. Your research proves it. I’m sending this article to our private schools leadership. Thank you for the work you do. There is nothing worse than wasted talent and missed opportunities.
BTW, Lee Stiff and I were asked to write a book to help parents understand how to advocate to get their kids into academically successful kids into advanced classes. We self published it on Amazon. A year ago, I was asked to update it for NC parents, by a grant-funded program that is working in many districts with the goal of getting more low-income kids into rigorous courses in high school. With almost no one now scoring level 5 in 9th grade math, they didn't have the law to back them. I updated the book for them. It is here:
Unfortunately my experience is that parents need to be willing to be highly disagreeable with school administration to keep their kids on a good track through public schools.
If you make yourself a thorn in their side, your kid has top-quartile teachers every year. If you are agreeable and go with the flow, you'll often get below-median teachers. Unfortunate zero-sum dynamics. Ideally it would be solved by higher standards in hiring and retention, but that's been an intractable fight in most places.
Thank you for summarizing and sharing your important research. It strikes me that there are so many points at which black and brown students and systematically undermined. Even if affirmative action was too blunt a remedial instrument, to expect the kind of rigorous, time consuming research that you have done to uncover each undermining method, and then to fight multiple political battles at state and local levels to remedy each, seems to be an unreasonable burden to place on those suffering the disadvantage.
It’s not clear what the current status is, and that’s the problem.
Previously, access to advanced high school math in North Carolina started with Algebra I in 8th grade. Students who weren’t placed into 8th grade algebra were effectively shut out of the advanced math track altogether. Despite no formal policy saying so, the data showed that students who missed this early placement almost never caught up, even when they later excelled in standard math classes. The law passed in 2018 was meant to change that. It aimed to create an objective, test-score-based pathway so that top-scoring students, even if they didn’t take algebra until 9th grade, could move into Honors or AP math, which had rarely happened before.
But now, we can't tell if it's working. In recent reports to the General Assembly, the NC Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) only includes aggregate figures for students in grades 6–12 who scored at the top level and were then placed in "the next advanced math course." They don’t break it down by grade level or course, so we can't see what’s happening with middle school algebra, which is critical.
Compounding this lack of clarity is the fact that, since 2019, the state changed the test cut scores and stopped reporting middle school Math I scores on the School Report Cards. The only public Math I data is for high schools, and for several years in a row, the state reports “too few students” scoring at Level 5 to report at all. (You can figure the percentage from the Dashboards where they report Level 4, and too few to report for Level 5, and then they also provide Level 4 + Level 5).
This obscures the very information the law was meant to surface.
In working with schools across NC, I've asked educators if they noticed this disappearance of Level 5 scores in high school Math I. Many hadn't. Nor had they been informed of the cut score change or its consequences. Some schools told me they weren’t even aware the law existed. Others thought it only applied to “gifted” students because the rollout was handled by staff in the Academically Gifted (AG) programs, so general ed teachers and counselors didn’t hear about it.
A year or so ago, I helped a Columbia PhD student doing her dissertation on this law. In researching with her, I went back into the data and realized just how much visibility we’ve lost. What was once a data-driven policy meant to address inequity now operates under a reporting system that makes accountability nearly impossible.
I don’t know whether Superintendent Mo Green is fully aware of what’s happened. It would be difficult for anyone to tell, given how the data is now reported. The Columbia student had been told that there was research that showed that the Wake Forest Rolesville students who were moved to advanced math were not successful in advanced high school, implying that the success is temporary. I was aware of that research study, and it made no sense. The whole picture is complicated so I patched together a youtube video for her to help her understand how the law came to be and where we are now. It is unprofessional, but you are welcome to view it if you are interested.
I am in favor of universal screening, but its ability to remove racial gaps is way oversold.
A major reason that the screening program in Broward County, Florida managed to attract so many minority students is that the program significantly lowered the required standard for "disadvantaged" students (low income or ELL). This was known as "Plan B".
Popular descriptions of this research (such as the NYT and WaPo articles cited here) has usually omitted this crucial fact. It is not clear what the results would have been without this lowered standard. The students who were missed were not the top "geniuses" as implied, they were mostly students with scores significantly below the threshhold required for middle class english speaking students ("Plan A").
Thanks. I had not seen this paper. I read it in the NYT. What I am talking about is not lowering any standards for math enrollment. That makes this a bad example for what I am talking about. Good to know.
I just read the paper you're referencing, and the claim that they lowered the standards to boost representation is not accurate.
It’s true that the district had two different IQ thresholds for gifted eligibility: students who were not low-income and not English learners (called “Plan A”) needed to score at least 130 on an IQ test, while students who were economically disadvantaged or English language learners (“Plan B”) could qualify with a score of 116. That setup was already in place before the district started universal screening, and I’ll admit, it is a bit odd to have two standards like that. But the key point is that those thresholds did not change when the screening program was introduced.
What did change was how students were selected for testing. Previously, the district used a “guess and check” referral system where only students nominated by teachers or parents were tested. That meant a lot of kids, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, never got tested at all, even though some of them would have met the existing standards.
The universal screening program gave all second graders a nonverbal ability test, and those who scored above a certain cutoff were referred for a full IQ test, using the same thresholds as before. When everyone was screened, rather than just the students someone guessed might be gifted, the number of disadvantaged students identified as gifted tripled.
Interestingly, many of the students from the Plan B group who were identified through universal screening didn’t just meet the lower Plan B threshold of 116, they actually scored at or above the Plan A threshold of 130. Figure 4 in the paper shows this clearly. So even among students who were supposed to benefit from a “lower bar,” a substantial number were performing at the same level as students held to the higher standard. These students weren’t being missed because of ability; they were being missed because no one had thought to test them.
In short, the district didn’t lower the bar. They applied the existing standards more fairly by giving all students a chance to be evaluated. That shift exposed how many high-ability students were being overlooked by the old referral-based system. You would have to wonder why, if they think an IQ 116 student would benefit from the more rigorous enriched curriculum of the gifted program, why wouldn’t they have that standard for non-disadvantaged students? If I had a non-disadvantaged kid with IQ 118, I would think it not fair that he couldn’t get into the gifted programs. Of course, if I had enough money, I would just get him tested outside of school and make them put him. (This is how it is done.)
I see that due to the cost of universal screening, they went back to the guess and check methods and the percentages of gifted students went back to the per-universal percentages.
When you have the laziest, the least intelligent, and the least capable people in charge of educating children, this is the kind of bull$h*t you are going to get. And we are going to get more and more of it because the pool of idiocy from which schools are pulling applicants, and from which they are promoting administrators, is getting much, much worse each year.
You have to opt out. You can not put your children in the hands of these people.
"It's not about lazy teachers or incompetent administrators." True, the administrators are not incompetent. They are clearly competent at subverting norms of fairness and meritocracy in favor of their own classist goals and powerseeking.
Maybe it worked differently in my school, but I am surprised and horrified to learn that the way that I was tracked to advanced math was structured like this and if I didn't stand out "in the right way" (Coming from a white middle class family) I might not have gotten in despite doing well academically.
I'm 31 and I remember the drama associated with placing into Algebra I in 8th grade. One student's dad was said to have made an uproar to get his son into the class. So weird
Could be. His son wasn't good at math and didn't take Calculus as a senior in HS anyway. It was more of an attempt to ensure his son had access to the same resources everyone else had by using the very emotional status plays that academic standards are supposed to ignore.
Why the swipe at upper middle class parents? These decisions are being made by teachers and school bureaucrats, not by parents, regardless of their class.
It’s also interesting that we are constantly told that tests are racist and classist, and that we need subjectivity and the milk of human kindness, but then, according to this analysis, the tests are actually the thing being fair and giving poor kids a shot.
The upper class parents do put pressure on the schools. One of the reasons often given for not using data is that it would hurt the low income and minority kids. It would help them, but I hear this so often that I think it is something to say to make it look like you have good intentions.
In my 40-year career in high tech as a software engineer I can count on one hand, literally, the number of American-born black and brown colleagues where I’ve worked. I’ve wondered what mechanism could produce this disparity. Could it be something like this? I also wonder if/how male vs female students might be affected.
As I listened to this essay, I was transported backward in time to my experience as an economically disadvantaged child in the North Carolina school system during the mid-2000s. My district fought placing me into accelerated courses with similarly spurious reasoning as the kid you described who ended up attending Yale. It was only after a professor of education from UNC, Dr. Mary Ruth Coleman, intervened on my behalf that I was allowed into my school’s G/T program. Years later, I graduated as valedictorian of my class, and I’m enrolled in a chemistry PhD program.
It is a shame that we have to advocate one kid at a time, but I am still doing that today. The original law said all students in any grade who scored at the highest level had to be allowed to enroll in the most advanced math. Districts across the state kept saying they couldn't do this in elementary school, so they would file a waiver. I work with many school districts so I started asking them why not? They said the AG (same as G/T) teachers were teaching advanced math in elementary schools and they could only work with kids identified officially as AG/GT. Many of the kids scoring at the highest level were not AG/GT so they couldn't put them in the classes. The law was then changed to start in 6th grade. By the time the kids are in 6th grade, the fact that they missed out on the most rigorous versions of math in middle school disadvantages them.
I had to fight to have my high performing daughter placed in the advanced math class in middle school in MA. We’re not economically disadvantaged but my suspicion at the time was that the teacher was biased against introverted girls. I have a PhD in educational measurement so I was able to push back on the word salad. I eventually succeeded in getting her placed in advanced math. Her experience was mixed. On the one hand, she succeeded at the math, but she always commented that the teacher played favorites with the boys in the class. Regardless of the teacher bias, my daughter is a top economics student and is winning merit awards. Her calculus professor said she’s one of her most talented students. Thank you for exposing this!
Every paragraph was crazier than the last.
What i was curious about was how did these teachers and administrators and parents justify this discrimination? How were the changes perceived in the school district? What was the discourse?
Also what you said about San Francisco eliminating 8th grade algebra is new to me. How were they placing students into the 9th grade algebra class then?
Many educators and administrators actually didn't try to justify the discrimination. They recognized the problem and worked to change it. However, those who resisted reform often vilified both me and my business co-founder, Dr. Lee Stiff, rather than engage with the data showing qualified students were being excluded.
Those who defended the system used several different approaches. Some claimed research showed that minority and low-income students struggled in advanced math, so placing them there would actually harm them. They accused us of trying to damage these kids by suggesting they belonged in advanced courses. Many argued that students officially labeled "academically gifted" should get priority in advanced classes, even when those students had lower test scores than unlabeled high achievers. The gifted label, they insisted, revealed potential that went beyond what test scores could measure.
The strongest resistance came from the academically gifted departments in schools. In the first large district where school counselors saw our data and tried unsuccessfully to enroll top-scoring students in advanced math, they eventually asked for objective enrollment criteria. The AG department opposed this because, they said, the AG students might not meet such criteria. Much to our surprise, when we looked at the data, many of the AG students actually had low math scores but were still placed in advanced math classes.
They also suggested low-income families couldn't afford tutors, so advanced placement would set these students up for failure, despite no evidence that tutoring was necessary for success. Perhaps most troubling, multiple districts told us they needed high-achieving, self-motivated low-income students in standard classes to help manage inclusion of special education students. Since teachers had to focus on special needs students, they relied on these capable students to work independently and not require attention.
Rather than address the data, they primarily tried to discredit our research and questioned our motives for highlighting these disparities. They also changed reporting methods to make the exclusion patterns less visible, combining achievement levels and altering how information was presented to schools and the public.
People also seemed to think we were advocating to lower the bar so that minority and low-income students could enroll in advanced math.
How did the parents perceive it all? Like with the school where the parents were agitating against lower-income children being placed in the same class, what was their justification? How did the principal get ousted? How did his replacement justify the rollback.
Sorry if it's a lot of questions, but as a parent, I want to understand how these things work on the parent side of things.
We don't know why the principal got moved. He was a well respected principal and he was moved to a different school. We had been working with the School Improvement Team in this school for two years. They were thrilled to learn to use their data, identify kids and move them to advanced math and advanced language arts. The kids' parents were also thrilled. It was the second year, after the first 100+ low income 6th graders were successful and going to be enrolled in per-algebra that the high income parents spoke up. The math teachers wanted the kids moved. The School Improvement Team called us to come to a meeting of the math teachers and the new principal. The math teachers were telling the SIT things like "they are not ready to learn slope intercept..." My business partner was a math ed professor at NCSU and had taught most of the math teachers. They couldn't speak math word salad to us. He was also past president of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and very well liked by math teachers. The new principal sat there on her phone not listening. The math teachers told us she was "from this neighborhood and understood how things worked." Dr. Stiff showed them the data, tried to reason with them, then he got on his knees and said, "okay I am now begging you to let these kids stay in the top track." They just said no. They said parent pressure would be too much.
As far as the other parents, those of the low-income kids, they have no social capital. Many went to their churches for help. The Black Baptist community in Raleigh has all sorts of services to help parents advocate. We would work with them to help them advocate one kid at a time.
Were there behavior issues in the classrooms? I'm surprised that there was so much parental pressure if there weren't factors causing some sort of negative outcome for the kids of the complaining parents. Not justifying it, just trying to understand.
Why did the schools set it up to need teacher approval in the first place when the law asked for something different? What was the stated reason for that?
Math placement had historically been done by teacher recommendation. The law requiring allowing the highest scoring students to also enroll was new. They didn't need to justify doing it by teacher recommendation because they had always done it that way. I taught math in Illinois in the 1980s and it was done that way there. It is historically how math placement has been done.
> When we asked why they didn't add a class, they said there were not more teachers who could teach the rigorous version of algebra and they were already struggling to have enough top track high school math teachers and therefore could not bring any more to the middle school level.
This drives me insane. If a teacher is not qualified to teach Algebra I, then they are not qualified to teach math at any level. Full stop. The content of Algebra I should not be difficult for any adult who has made math their full-time job. How much have we lowered our standards at ed schools if we are graduating math teachers (often with master's degrees) without a fluent grasp of algebra?
Resolve this, and I think the scarcity mindset can go away, though there will always be educators with the paternalistic attitude that holding students back from advanced material is "for their own good".
Thank you for fighting the good fight.
This happened to me in Pennsylvania. I had the top score on the middle school math placement test, but I was pushed into the standard track because I didn't always do my homework. I didn't always complete homework because I was bored out of my mind.
I remember that was the moment when I realized school was a bullshit exercise not about knowledge or learning, but about power, control, and obedience. Because I don't do well with that, I subsequently rebelled even more.
Luckily I ran into some good and kind teachers later in HS and college and I graduated summa can laude as a Math/CS major.
But that experience gives me a lot of hesitation with my own children now and is why we're trying out homeschooling (which we basically already did during COVID to a lot of success).
It looks like lots of people have relevant anecdotes for this, so I thought I’d add my own. Between middle school and high school, I moved from a “progressive” public middle school in Vermont to a top ranked public high school in Pennsylvania. I had been in Vermont’s version of advanced math, but because Pennsylvania didn’t know how to interpret it I was placed in grade-level algebra. Sophomore year I tried to catch up with the students who had been in the advanced track already, by taking geometry and algebra 2 at the same time. I had A’s in both courses, but when I requested to take honors pre-calculus (which was required for AP Calculus) I was told by my teacher I’d need to work with a private tutor over the summer to catch up. I ended up finishing high school without taking ap calculus, because the school made it so difficult for me to access.
As stated in the article, there seems to be a lack of encouragement for high performing students to move to advanced courses, unless their parents take initiative. Based on my experience, I’d add that non-traditional math courses in public schools seem to have no purpose. By placing all of the advanced math students in a general “advanced math” class, rather than just placing them in algebra, the Vermont school district I was in made it difficult for anyone who ever left to remain on an advanced track.
I’m in NC and very interested in this research. My kid is a mix of Hispanic, South Asian and European. When I advocated for him in public school I was dismissed as an over aggressive Asian tiger mom. When I asked about SSA (subject acceleration) testing his teacher didn’t think this kid with a Hispanic surname would pass. This is in a great” school district. We parents are both highly educated and spent our own money on IQ and achievement tests that placed kid off the charts, with highest scores in quantitative reasoning. Then he passed the SSA test with no prep at all. The district was forced to place him(because of the testing) as gifted/accelerated. Not all parents can afford the time or money for this fight. I lost faith in public ed and moved both kids to private. Now I support vouchers.
I was on a task force, probably in the district you are talking about here, several years ago. Another woman on the task force with me had moved from Charlotte to this district when her son was ready to start middle school. She was a college professor and her husband was a lawyer. They were White and had adopted a Hispanic boy at birth. He was in advanced classes in Charlotte. They moved into an apartment when they first moved to the new district, while they sold their other house. They enrolled their son in one of the best magnet schools. They did not know he was in remedial classes until the school accidentally sent the reading list that was for the other kids. This was a GT magnet and they basically had remedial and gifted classes. The school put their son on the remedial track. I mention the apartment because working on grant evaluations, we would ask schools how they decided who to put in grant-funded remedial programs, and in addition to telling us they look at the mother's pocket book, we also often heard that if they live in an apartment they are thought to need remedial support. This is much easier than using academic data. They never got their son out of this track. This is why she joined this task force that was to promote equity in access for low-income kids. The mayor of Durham came to me several years ago (he is the mayor now, but wasn't then) and told me he thought what I talked about with math placement was only happening to kids whose parents were poorly educated and they were not involved. His son was not recommended for advanced middle school math, although he was very high scoring. He had gone to get that fixed and was told no. He came to me and I taught him how to use the data and the right data-speak and he went back and got his son in. His son ended up going to the NC School of Math and Science. (He did not live in Durham at the time--probably the same district you are in.)
We were in WCPPS. Its size is unmanageable and there is no accountability to the parents. Correct math tracking is a non negotiable for us (dad engineer, grandpa engineer, grandpa statistician). I have a higher ed background. Because math is sequential, I believe it’s very hard to get caught up in future years. Your research proves it. I’m sending this article to our private schools leadership. Thank you for the work you do. There is nothing worse than wasted talent and missed opportunities.
I could tell you were talking about WCPSS.
BTW, Lee Stiff and I were asked to write a book to help parents understand how to advocate to get their kids into academically successful kids into advanced classes. We self published it on Amazon. A year ago, I was asked to update it for NC parents, by a grant-funded program that is working in many districts with the goal of getting more low-income kids into rigorous courses in high school. With almost no one now scoring level 5 in 9th grade math, they didn't have the law to back them. I updated the book for them. It is here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1GCYNWV?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_H5S2ACT60V7W6FFYS3BW&social_share=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_H5S2ACT60V7W6FFYS3BW&bestFormat=true&previewDohEventScheduleTesting=C&csmig=1
Unfortunately my experience is that parents need to be willing to be highly disagreeable with school administration to keep their kids on a good track through public schools.
If you make yourself a thorn in their side, your kid has top-quartile teachers every year. If you are agreeable and go with the flow, you'll often get below-median teachers. Unfortunate zero-sum dynamics. Ideally it would be solved by higher standards in hiring and retention, but that's been an intractable fight in most places.
Thank you for summarizing and sharing your important research. It strikes me that there are so many points at which black and brown students and systematically undermined. Even if affirmative action was too blunt a remedial instrument, to expect the kind of rigorous, time consuming research that you have done to uncover each undermining method, and then to fight multiple political battles at state and local levels to remedy each, seems to be an unreasonable burden to place on those suffering the disadvantage.
What is the current status? What does the new (2025) NC superintendent, Mo Green, have to say?
It’s not clear what the current status is, and that’s the problem.
Previously, access to advanced high school math in North Carolina started with Algebra I in 8th grade. Students who weren’t placed into 8th grade algebra were effectively shut out of the advanced math track altogether. Despite no formal policy saying so, the data showed that students who missed this early placement almost never caught up, even when they later excelled in standard math classes. The law passed in 2018 was meant to change that. It aimed to create an objective, test-score-based pathway so that top-scoring students, even if they didn’t take algebra until 9th grade, could move into Honors or AP math, which had rarely happened before.
But now, we can't tell if it's working. In recent reports to the General Assembly, the NC Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) only includes aggregate figures for students in grades 6–12 who scored at the top level and were then placed in "the next advanced math course." They don’t break it down by grade level or course, so we can't see what’s happening with middle school algebra, which is critical.
Compounding this lack of clarity is the fact that, since 2019, the state changed the test cut scores and stopped reporting middle school Math I scores on the School Report Cards. The only public Math I data is for high schools, and for several years in a row, the state reports “too few students” scoring at Level 5 to report at all. (You can figure the percentage from the Dashboards where they report Level 4, and too few to report for Level 5, and then they also provide Level 4 + Level 5).
This obscures the very information the law was meant to surface.
In working with schools across NC, I've asked educators if they noticed this disappearance of Level 5 scores in high school Math I. Many hadn't. Nor had they been informed of the cut score change or its consequences. Some schools told me they weren’t even aware the law existed. Others thought it only applied to “gifted” students because the rollout was handled by staff in the Academically Gifted (AG) programs, so general ed teachers and counselors didn’t hear about it.
A year or so ago, I helped a Columbia PhD student doing her dissertation on this law. In researching with her, I went back into the data and realized just how much visibility we’ve lost. What was once a data-driven policy meant to address inequity now operates under a reporting system that makes accountability nearly impossible.
I don’t know whether Superintendent Mo Green is fully aware of what’s happened. It would be difficult for anyone to tell, given how the data is now reported. The Columbia student had been told that there was research that showed that the Wake Forest Rolesville students who were moved to advanced math were not successful in advanced high school, implying that the success is temporary. I was aware of that research study, and it made no sense. The whole picture is complicated so I patched together a youtube video for her to help her understand how the law came to be and where we are now. It is unprofessional, but you are welcome to view it if you are interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv1-wXWVQx0
This was to explain the research she was hearing about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV_Pjl_cUp4
I am in favor of universal screening, but its ability to remove racial gaps is way oversold.
A major reason that the screening program in Broward County, Florida managed to attract so many minority students is that the program significantly lowered the required standard for "disadvantaged" students (low income or ELL). This was known as "Plan B".
Popular descriptions of this research (such as the NYT and WaPo articles cited here) has usually omitted this crucial fact. It is not clear what the results would have been without this lowered standard. The students who were missed were not the top "geniuses" as implied, they were mostly students with scores significantly below the threshhold required for middle class english speaking students ("Plan A").
The original research paper is here. Check out figure 4. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21519/w21519.pdf
Thanks. I had not seen this paper. I read it in the NYT. What I am talking about is not lowering any standards for math enrollment. That makes this a bad example for what I am talking about. Good to know.
I just read the paper you're referencing, and the claim that they lowered the standards to boost representation is not accurate.
It’s true that the district had two different IQ thresholds for gifted eligibility: students who were not low-income and not English learners (called “Plan A”) needed to score at least 130 on an IQ test, while students who were economically disadvantaged or English language learners (“Plan B”) could qualify with a score of 116. That setup was already in place before the district started universal screening, and I’ll admit, it is a bit odd to have two standards like that. But the key point is that those thresholds did not change when the screening program was introduced.
What did change was how students were selected for testing. Previously, the district used a “guess and check” referral system where only students nominated by teachers or parents were tested. That meant a lot of kids, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, never got tested at all, even though some of them would have met the existing standards.
The universal screening program gave all second graders a nonverbal ability test, and those who scored above a certain cutoff were referred for a full IQ test, using the same thresholds as before. When everyone was screened, rather than just the students someone guessed might be gifted, the number of disadvantaged students identified as gifted tripled.
Interestingly, many of the students from the Plan B group who were identified through universal screening didn’t just meet the lower Plan B threshold of 116, they actually scored at or above the Plan A threshold of 130. Figure 4 in the paper shows this clearly. So even among students who were supposed to benefit from a “lower bar,” a substantial number were performing at the same level as students held to the higher standard. These students weren’t being missed because of ability; they were being missed because no one had thought to test them.
In short, the district didn’t lower the bar. They applied the existing standards more fairly by giving all students a chance to be evaluated. That shift exposed how many high-ability students were being overlooked by the old referral-based system. You would have to wonder why, if they think an IQ 116 student would benefit from the more rigorous enriched curriculum of the gifted program, why wouldn’t they have that standard for non-disadvantaged students? If I had a non-disadvantaged kid with IQ 118, I would think it not fair that he couldn’t get into the gifted programs. Of course, if I had enough money, I would just get him tested outside of school and make them put him. (This is how it is done.)
I see that due to the cost of universal screening, they went back to the guess and check methods and the percentages of gifted students went back to the per-universal percentages.
When you have the laziest, the least intelligent, and the least capable people in charge of educating children, this is the kind of bull$h*t you are going to get. And we are going to get more and more of it because the pool of idiocy from which schools are pulling applicants, and from which they are promoting administrators, is getting much, much worse each year.
You have to opt out. You can not put your children in the hands of these people.
"It's not about lazy teachers or incompetent administrators." True, the administrators are not incompetent. They are clearly competent at subverting norms of fairness and meritocracy in favor of their own classist goals and powerseeking.
Maybe it worked differently in my school, but I am surprised and horrified to learn that the way that I was tracked to advanced math was structured like this and if I didn't stand out "in the right way" (Coming from a white middle class family) I might not have gotten in despite doing well academically.
I'm 31 and I remember the drama associated with placing into Algebra I in 8th grade. One student's dad was said to have made an uproar to get his son into the class. So weird
Probably a good move by the dad.
Could be. His son wasn't good at math and didn't take Calculus as a senior in HS anyway. It was more of an attempt to ensure his son had access to the same resources everyone else had by using the very emotional status plays that academic standards are supposed to ignore.
Why the swipe at upper middle class parents? These decisions are being made by teachers and school bureaucrats, not by parents, regardless of their class.
It’s also interesting that we are constantly told that tests are racist and classist, and that we need subjectivity and the milk of human kindness, but then, according to this analysis, the tests are actually the thing being fair and giving poor kids a shot.
The upper class parents do put pressure on the schools. One of the reasons often given for not using data is that it would hurt the low income and minority kids. It would help them, but I hear this so often that I think it is something to say to make it look like you have good intentions.
In my 40-year career in high tech as a software engineer I can count on one hand, literally, the number of American-born black and brown colleagues where I’ve worked. I’ve wondered what mechanism could produce this disparity. Could it be something like this? I also wonder if/how male vs female students might be affected.
This is exactly why you don't see them. It used to be the same for females but not as much any more.
It makes me feel sick in my stomach. I am so glad you and your colleagues have done this work.