Old fart here. Been there, done that. There are problems even in very good school disctricts. I had to raise hell to have my kids at the appropriate math level in school. As it was, I supplemented their math education on my own (I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Engineering so I could, and my wife has a MS in teaching English as a Foreign Language so she could hancle the language arts when necessary).
I did not take no for an answer. I got my 6th grade daughter into the most advanced math class the Middle school had. In 7th grade I had to take her to the high school for her math class (there were a number of other parents doing the same with their kids, mostly 8th graders). She was also ~ 50% an online student in 7th grade as many of the classes were far too slow and boring. She skipped 8th grade and I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer - she got placement, not credit. I had her do pre-Calculus the next summer and she did college calculus in 10th grade before dropping out to do early admission at the state university, where she studied engineering. Her brother wasn't quite as advanced and didn't skip a grade, so he did Calculus when he started Running Start in what would have been 11th grade. I would guess that over 2/3's of the students in their Honors / IB classes in high school were the children of highly educated East and South Asian parents.
I am convinced many educational researchers willfully ignore the fact that when they degrade the educational experience for students the more capable parents will either supplement or leave - and the results in student learning among the children of the more capable parents do not reflect the degraded educational experience, but the students of the poorer and/or less capable parents definitely have their education degraded.
To the extent that the schools were doing a good job - I did not intervene. When they did not do an appropriate job - I did.
I have been a 8th grade math teacher, then worked in the Research and Evaluation Dept of a large district, and for decades have evaluated grant funded programs. I spent considerable time advocating to get kids access to the advanced math classes they are ready for. When you say you didn't take no for an answer, look at your credentials. Many if not most parents have no choice but to take no for an answer. The top math track is very well guarded.
Yes, I did have the background to argue with the school and teachers. Frankly, like many other STEM professionals, I had the background to homeschool / tutor my children on any math that my kids hit in school. And I was well off enough that I could and did pay for correspondence classes for certification purposes.
But I am by no means unusual. Our school system, the Issaquah School system, was very good and the neighborhood we lived in was mostly populated with professional workers. The Honors/IB classes that the kids took had ~75% of the students coming from families of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants.
The year my daughter dropped out and did early admission at the University of Washington, she was one of 4 students from the High School who did so.
And in defense of the schools - they are caught in a hard place: The state has mandated so many years of Math, English, … education. Students who move faster will not meet the state educational requirements with respect to time spend in the school classroom. Those kids have to do Running Start / early admission because the school no longer had the needed classes.
The state has not mandated time in class OR mastery at a particular level.
If you take advantage of the system you can push the math to be ready for Calculus in 11th grade and then do Running Start for 11th grade and graduate high school with your associates degree, cutting the cost of college in half. But you have to plan carefully starting in Middle/Junior High school to have the high school prerequisites for the transfer level Community college classes. That is pretty much what my son did.
I didn't communicate very well. I taught in Illinois, in Champaign in a magnet school. Our "magnet" kids applied to get in and were primarily children of U of I professors. We were supposedly a Math Science Magnet but I was the only math teacher in the building who was certified in math. I taught all of 8th grade math, including remedial, standard, pre-algebra, and algebra. The brightest kids were not recommended for algebra. When I tried to move neighborhood kids (low income) into the advanced math, I was told advanced math was for kids of the PTA parents, not the neighborhood kids. I ordered MathCounts materials to have something to challenge the super smart kids who were not in advanced math. I did not plan on competing; I just needed the curriculum. I was then told I had to take a team. I took a black kid, poor kid, and two girls who wanted to go. They won first place.
When I moved to North Carolina, I got a PhD in math ed and worked for a school system, doing program evaluations. I started a small business doing the same thing. We evaluate federally funded programs. When they started funding STEM stuff and requiring pre and post data and SMART objectives, schools would write objectives like "increase the number of minorities in advanced math by x%." They would plan to do this by identifying low scoring minorities and get them to score higher in math. I would pull the pre data for the proposal and find they already had hundreds of top scoring minorities not in advanced math. Scoring high did not equal access. When parents would request their high scoring kids get moved to advanced math, the schools routinely said no, unless they were afraid of the parents. They would say yes if the parents had means and advanced degrees.
I have volunteered in churches in Raleigh to go with the Advocacy Committees the Black Baptist churches have to help parents advocate for their kids. There was no way the schools were going to allow a poor black kid access to advanced math regardless of his scores unless he had advocates they were afraid of. You were credentialed enough by yourself not to need a group from your church and a math education researcher to help you.
I did not realize that the schools were that short of math teachers. If you have enough kids to fill a classroom, it isn’t inherently harder or more expensive to teach a room of kids Algebra rather than pre-Algebra, or Algebra 2 for that matter. I would think that the problem comes when you only have a few kids ready for a more advanced class, but if you can fill the classroom, schools should go for it. Why artificially ration the advanced classes?
Daughter # 2 came out to Utah to spend a year with me and my second wife. She was in Junior high, but was a good student, so she did math at the High school - my arranging. When she returned to Philadelphia the High school tracked her as if she had not already covered the material. Her artist mother was not concerned or particularly involved.
The schools should be testing all the kids and pushing all the kids who can handle the material into the more advanced classes. The ones who can’t handle it can drop back to the standard classes.
I don’t see how advanced elementary school teachers can handle the variation in competence in non-math subjects either. A substantial number of kids in 5th grade will have reading levels from 10th to college level while a number of other kids still reading at early elementary level.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding here. You say "it isn’t inherently harder or more expensive to teach a room of kids Algebra rather than pre-Algebra, or Algebra 2 for that matter."
When I was in my 20s teaching in Champaign, as a new teacher, I didn't know how things worked. I had so many bright kids who were ready for Algebra but not in it, and I suggested to the principal that we create another Algebra class. It would have been easy and cost no more money for me to teach another Algebra. In that case, you might think it could be done. I was told that we cannot send more kids into the high schools on the advanced math track because there are not enough high school math teachers who can teach advanced math. So, we are limited to one class per middle school.
When I was on a task force comprised of school counselors, head of math departments, and math educators we met for multiple years addressing the issue of lack of advanced access for high scoring kids. The school counselors had started using "data driven decisions," and writing objectives, and they found they could not get top scoring students access into advanced math even when their scores were higher than those already in them. The math department finally said the same thing I heard in Champaign: There are not enough math teachers in the high schools who can teach advanced math.
Algebra in high school is what I call Algebra Light. This is why it is so important to take Algebra in middle school. You are much more likely to get a qualified math teacher in middle school and much more likely to get a football coach teaching you some pretend version of Algebra in high school. Almost no one ever moves into an advanced math class if they take Algebra in high school because they would be unprepared.
Back to your misunderstanding. It is not just as easy to teach Algebra compared with arithmetic if you do not have the slightest understanding of Algebra. I work with elementary and middle school math teachers (for federal grants) who have memorized computational steps with no understanding of concepts. I tutor my grandkids and the neighbor kids. They are taught sayings and songs to help memorize steps, with no idea what they are doing. I have my granddaughter make math videos with me as a way to teach her. We recently made this one about understanding vs memorizing sayings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6aJ3naJW0
FYI, they teach the kids Kentucky Chicken Fried for Keep Change Flip, which is how you divide fractions.
I did not know that the math and science teaching coverage was so tight in High School.
I went to Baltimore Polytechnic, a city wide magnet engineering high school, in the late 60’s. I think one of my math teachers was a mathematician by background but taught high school because he liked coaching basketball. He was actually a very good math teacher. I was told that he was a good basketball coach as well. I seem to remember having him for analytic geometry - we did some doubling up on math classes.
I taught my kids how to handle fractions and pre-algebra word problems when they were in elementary school. I flashcarded them much earlier and did my own supplementation on long multiplication and division as well.
I had half expected to volunteer at the local high school to help with math tutoring when I retired, but it looks likely that the outstanding press of computer security work is likely to keep me employed for some time yet. We will see if I have the energy for it then. As it is, I am well into my 70’s and am trying to teach myself geometric algebra now.
I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering - Materials. My wife has her MS in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. We were more than capable of handling instruction at any level necessary. When she skipped 8th grade, out daughter no longer had time to do the math track in the schools. So I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer, serving as the more convenient tutor. Of all math classes, that was the hardest for me as it had been 50 years since I had taken it and classic Geometry is not something that is used very much otherwise. She learned an honest A. I had her do pre-calculus by correspondence over the next summer so that she could do college credit calculus in 10th grade. We had planned on her doing Running Start, but she was accepted by the early admissions program so she dropped out of high school and went to the University after 10th grade.
I am convinced many educational researchers willfully ignore the fact that when they degrade the educational experience for students the more capable parents will either supplement or leave - and the results in student learning among the children of the more capable parents do not reflect the degraded educational experience, but the students of the poorer and/or less capable parents definitely have their education degraded.” 100% I’ve also witnessed this as both a parent and an educator.
I, for one, feel disappointed that study's authors seem to have halved the baseline data rather than cubing it as the name of the program suggests. It seems to show a clear disregard for mathematical definitions and may also be false advertisement.
Seems like someone should point out that excluding “chronically absent” students is a terrible design choice if this literature wants to speak to effects on the population as a whole, which it needs to do if you want to roll out at scale.
This is what economists call the difference between “average treatment effect on the treated” and “intention to treat” type estimates, and is a straightforward source of problems when scaling programs from small studies.
Yes! To be fair, though, it turns out that wasn't the source of the incorrect data. It was actually a combination of (i) presenting school-level data but labeling it as district-level data, and (ii) spreadsheet fluency:
This article confirms something I've watched play out for years: the research used to justify restricting access to advanced math keeps falling apart when anyone bothers to check it. The Healdsburg data discrepancy is striking, but the bigger story is the California Math Framework, which drew on this same body of work to delay algebra and discourage ability grouping across the entire state.
The effect of these policies is always the same. Kids who could be moving ahead in math get held back, and the justification is always "equity." But as this article makes clear, the families with resources simply route around the system. They hire tutors, they enroll in outside programs, they leave for private schools. The kids who actually get stuck with the watered-down curriculum are the ones from families who can't buy their way out.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the errors in this research consistently point in one direction. When your baseline is off by 20 percentage points and the gap just happens to make your program look like a miracle, that's not a rounding error. When cited studies don't actually support the claims being made, and when the pattern repeats across multiple cases, you have to start asking who benefits from keeping the gates closed on advanced math and why the evidence for doing so keeps turning out to be unreliable.
Parents and teachers deserve research that survives scrutiny before anyone reshapes how millions of children learn mathematics.
Many thanks for your breakdown of this issue, especially the point about how easily a compelling narrative can form around data that isn’t being closely interrogated. The baseline discrepancy alone is hard to ignore, but the cohort issue feels even more significant in terms of how conclusions are being drawn. The equity point also lands. When the evidence is weak, the consequences aren’t evenly distributed and that’s where this becomes more than just a methodological debate.
I suppose the challenge is what happens next. If trust in the research base is this fragile, it raises a bigger question about how schools and policymakers are meant to evaluate competing claims in the first place.
Out of interest, what would you see as a realistic standard for evidence in education research that schools could actually use when making decisions?
My experience with YouCubed is a bit limited, but I’ve always appreciated their emphasis on conceptual understanding as the foundation for solving math problems. At the same time, I’ve felt a gap in how much they acknowledge the importance of sustained practice to really build and maintain proficiency.
Old fart here. Been there, done that. There are problems even in very good school disctricts. I had to raise hell to have my kids at the appropriate math level in school. As it was, I supplemented their math education on my own (I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Engineering so I could, and my wife has a MS in teaching English as a Foreign Language so she could hancle the language arts when necessary).
I did not take no for an answer. I got my 6th grade daughter into the most advanced math class the Middle school had. In 7th grade I had to take her to the high school for her math class (there were a number of other parents doing the same with their kids, mostly 8th graders). She was also ~ 50% an online student in 7th grade as many of the classes were far too slow and boring. She skipped 8th grade and I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer - she got placement, not credit. I had her do pre-Calculus the next summer and she did college calculus in 10th grade before dropping out to do early admission at the state university, where she studied engineering. Her brother wasn't quite as advanced and didn't skip a grade, so he did Calculus when he started Running Start in what would have been 11th grade. I would guess that over 2/3's of the students in their Honors / IB classes in high school were the children of highly educated East and South Asian parents.
I am convinced many educational researchers willfully ignore the fact that when they degrade the educational experience for students the more capable parents will either supplement or leave - and the results in student learning among the children of the more capable parents do not reflect the degraded educational experience, but the students of the poorer and/or less capable parents definitely have their education degraded.
To the extent that the schools were doing a good job - I did not intervene. When they did not do an appropriate job - I did.
I have been a 8th grade math teacher, then worked in the Research and Evaluation Dept of a large district, and for decades have evaluated grant funded programs. I spent considerable time advocating to get kids access to the advanced math classes they are ready for. When you say you didn't take no for an answer, look at your credentials. Many if not most parents have no choice but to take no for an answer. The top math track is very well guarded.
My previous reply was not optimal.
Yes, I did have the background to argue with the school and teachers. Frankly, like many other STEM professionals, I had the background to homeschool / tutor my children on any math that my kids hit in school. And I was well off enough that I could and did pay for correspondence classes for certification purposes.
But I am by no means unusual. Our school system, the Issaquah School system, was very good and the neighborhood we lived in was mostly populated with professional workers. The Honors/IB classes that the kids took had ~75% of the students coming from families of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants.
The year my daughter dropped out and did early admission at the University of Washington, she was one of 4 students from the High School who did so.
And in defense of the schools - they are caught in a hard place: The state has mandated so many years of Math, English, … education. Students who move faster will not meet the state educational requirements with respect to time spend in the school classroom. Those kids have to do Running Start / early admission because the school no longer had the needed classes.
The state has not mandated time in class OR mastery at a particular level.
If you take advantage of the system you can push the math to be ready for Calculus in 11th grade and then do Running Start for 11th grade and graduate high school with your associates degree, cutting the cost of college in half. But you have to plan carefully starting in Middle/Junior High school to have the high school prerequisites for the transfer level Community college classes. That is pretty much what my son did.
I didn't communicate very well. I taught in Illinois, in Champaign in a magnet school. Our "magnet" kids applied to get in and were primarily children of U of I professors. We were supposedly a Math Science Magnet but I was the only math teacher in the building who was certified in math. I taught all of 8th grade math, including remedial, standard, pre-algebra, and algebra. The brightest kids were not recommended for algebra. When I tried to move neighborhood kids (low income) into the advanced math, I was told advanced math was for kids of the PTA parents, not the neighborhood kids. I ordered MathCounts materials to have something to challenge the super smart kids who were not in advanced math. I did not plan on competing; I just needed the curriculum. I was then told I had to take a team. I took a black kid, poor kid, and two girls who wanted to go. They won first place.
When I moved to North Carolina, I got a PhD in math ed and worked for a school system, doing program evaluations. I started a small business doing the same thing. We evaluate federally funded programs. When they started funding STEM stuff and requiring pre and post data and SMART objectives, schools would write objectives like "increase the number of minorities in advanced math by x%." They would plan to do this by identifying low scoring minorities and get them to score higher in math. I would pull the pre data for the proposal and find they already had hundreds of top scoring minorities not in advanced math. Scoring high did not equal access. When parents would request their high scoring kids get moved to advanced math, the schools routinely said no, unless they were afraid of the parents. They would say yes if the parents had means and advanced degrees.
I have volunteered in churches in Raleigh to go with the Advocacy Committees the Black Baptist churches have to help parents advocate for their kids. There was no way the schools were going to allow a poor black kid access to advanced math regardless of his scores unless he had advocates they were afraid of. You were credentialed enough by yourself not to need a group from your church and a math education researcher to help you.
I did not realize that the schools were that short of math teachers. If you have enough kids to fill a classroom, it isn’t inherently harder or more expensive to teach a room of kids Algebra rather than pre-Algebra, or Algebra 2 for that matter. I would think that the problem comes when you only have a few kids ready for a more advanced class, but if you can fill the classroom, schools should go for it. Why artificially ration the advanced classes?
Daughter # 2 came out to Utah to spend a year with me and my second wife. She was in Junior high, but was a good student, so she did math at the High school - my arranging. When she returned to Philadelphia the High school tracked her as if she had not already covered the material. Her artist mother was not concerned or particularly involved.
The schools should be testing all the kids and pushing all the kids who can handle the material into the more advanced classes. The ones who can’t handle it can drop back to the standard classes.
I don’t see how advanced elementary school teachers can handle the variation in competence in non-math subjects either. A substantial number of kids in 5th grade will have reading levels from 10th to college level while a number of other kids still reading at early elementary level.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding here. You say "it isn’t inherently harder or more expensive to teach a room of kids Algebra rather than pre-Algebra, or Algebra 2 for that matter."
When I was in my 20s teaching in Champaign, as a new teacher, I didn't know how things worked. I had so many bright kids who were ready for Algebra but not in it, and I suggested to the principal that we create another Algebra class. It would have been easy and cost no more money for me to teach another Algebra. In that case, you might think it could be done. I was told that we cannot send more kids into the high schools on the advanced math track because there are not enough high school math teachers who can teach advanced math. So, we are limited to one class per middle school.
When I was on a task force comprised of school counselors, head of math departments, and math educators we met for multiple years addressing the issue of lack of advanced access for high scoring kids. The school counselors had started using "data driven decisions," and writing objectives, and they found they could not get top scoring students access into advanced math even when their scores were higher than those already in them. The math department finally said the same thing I heard in Champaign: There are not enough math teachers in the high schools who can teach advanced math.
Algebra in high school is what I call Algebra Light. This is why it is so important to take Algebra in middle school. You are much more likely to get a qualified math teacher in middle school and much more likely to get a football coach teaching you some pretend version of Algebra in high school. Almost no one ever moves into an advanced math class if they take Algebra in high school because they would be unprepared.
Back to your misunderstanding. It is not just as easy to teach Algebra compared with arithmetic if you do not have the slightest understanding of Algebra. I work with elementary and middle school math teachers (for federal grants) who have memorized computational steps with no understanding of concepts. I tutor my grandkids and the neighbor kids. They are taught sayings and songs to help memorize steps, with no idea what they are doing. I have my granddaughter make math videos with me as a way to teach her. We recently made this one about understanding vs memorizing sayings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6aJ3naJW0
FYI, they teach the kids Kentucky Chicken Fried for Keep Change Flip, which is how you divide fractions.
I did not know that the math and science teaching coverage was so tight in High School.
I went to Baltimore Polytechnic, a city wide magnet engineering high school, in the late 60’s. I think one of my math teachers was a mathematician by background but taught high school because he liked coaching basketball. He was actually a very good math teacher. I was told that he was a good basketball coach as well. I seem to remember having him for analytic geometry - we did some doubling up on math classes.
I taught my kids how to handle fractions and pre-algebra word problems when they were in elementary school. I flashcarded them much earlier and did my own supplementation on long multiplication and division as well.
I had half expected to volunteer at the local high school to help with math tutoring when I retired, but it looks likely that the outstanding press of computer security work is likely to keep me employed for some time yet. We will see if I have the energy for it then. As it is, I am well into my 70’s and am trying to teach myself geometric algebra now.
I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering - Materials. My wife has her MS in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. We were more than capable of handling instruction at any level necessary. When she skipped 8th grade, out daughter no longer had time to do the math track in the schools. So I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer, serving as the more convenient tutor. Of all math classes, that was the hardest for me as it had been 50 years since I had taken it and classic Geometry is not something that is used very much otherwise. She learned an honest A. I had her do pre-calculus by correspondence over the next summer so that she could do college credit calculus in 10th grade. We had planned on her doing Running Start, but she was accepted by the early admissions program so she dropped out of high school and went to the University after 10th grade.
Yes! “
I am convinced many educational researchers willfully ignore the fact that when they degrade the educational experience for students the more capable parents will either supplement or leave - and the results in student learning among the children of the more capable parents do not reflect the degraded educational experience, but the students of the poorer and/or less capable parents definitely have their education degraded.” 100% I’ve also witnessed this as both a parent and an educator.
Very well organized report. Thanks for your fine work.
I, for one, feel disappointed that study's authors seem to have halved the baseline data rather than cubing it as the name of the program suggests. It seems to show a clear disregard for mathematical definitions and may also be false advertisement.
Seems like someone should point out that excluding “chronically absent” students is a terrible design choice if this literature wants to speak to effects on the population as a whole, which it needs to do if you want to roll out at scale.
This is what economists call the difference between “average treatment effect on the treated” and “intention to treat” type estimates, and is a straightforward source of problems when scaling programs from small studies.
Yes! To be fair, though, it turns out that wasn't the source of the incorrect data. It was actually a combination of (i) presenting school-level data but labeling it as district-level data, and (ii) spreadsheet fluency:
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/the-evidence-crisis-in-math-reform-fd8
This article confirms something I've watched play out for years: the research used to justify restricting access to advanced math keeps falling apart when anyone bothers to check it. The Healdsburg data discrepancy is striking, but the bigger story is the California Math Framework, which drew on this same body of work to delay algebra and discourage ability grouping across the entire state.
The effect of these policies is always the same. Kids who could be moving ahead in math get held back, and the justification is always "equity." But as this article makes clear, the families with resources simply route around the system. They hire tutors, they enroll in outside programs, they leave for private schools. The kids who actually get stuck with the watered-down curriculum are the ones from families who can't buy their way out.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the errors in this research consistently point in one direction. When your baseline is off by 20 percentage points and the gap just happens to make your program look like a miracle, that's not a rounding error. When cited studies don't actually support the claims being made, and when the pattern repeats across multiple cases, you have to start asking who benefits from keeping the gates closed on advanced math and why the evidence for doing so keeps turning out to be unreliable.
Parents and teachers deserve research that survives scrutiny before anyone reshapes how millions of children learn mathematics.
Many thanks for your breakdown of this issue, especially the point about how easily a compelling narrative can form around data that isn’t being closely interrogated. The baseline discrepancy alone is hard to ignore, but the cohort issue feels even more significant in terms of how conclusions are being drawn. The equity point also lands. When the evidence is weak, the consequences aren’t evenly distributed and that’s where this becomes more than just a methodological debate.
I suppose the challenge is what happens next. If trust in the research base is this fragile, it raises a bigger question about how schools and policymakers are meant to evaluate competing claims in the first place.
Out of interest, what would you see as a realistic standard for evidence in education research that schools could actually use when making decisions?
My experience with YouCubed is a bit limited, but I’ve always appreciated their emphasis on conceptual understanding as the foundation for solving math problems. At the same time, I’ve felt a gap in how much they acknowledge the importance of sustained practice to really build and maintain proficiency.
You can't build conceptual understanding without simultaneously building procedural fluency.