Students failing algebra rarely recover

(l to r) Oscar Flores, Jacob Wong and Melvin Chavez during algebra class 

at James Denman Middle School. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle / SF

California students who fail algebra and repeat the course are pretty much doomed to fail again, a vicious cycle that wastes limited resources and precious learning time, according to a report released Friday.
Just over a third of students in the 24 school districts studied had to repeat Algebra I either in ninth or 10th grade, yet even after a second year of study, relatively few were proficient in the subject.

Of those who took the class in eighth grade and repeated it as freshmen, just 1 in 5 scored at a proficient level on standardized tests. And of those who repeated as sophomores, 9 percent were proficient.
"These results provide powerful evidence that school systems are struggling to successfully teach, or reteach, mathematics to students who are not already performing well in math by the time they reach middle school," said Neal Finkelstein, the lead researcher on the study, which was commissioned by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd. The Sacramento nonprofit focuses on policies and practices to improve teaching in California.

All told, half of all students in the study repeated algebra, geometry or Algebra II.

Yet many students retake the same course taught the same way, sometimes by the same teacher, according to the authors.

The research examined the transcripts and standardized test scores of 24,279 students for six years from
grade seven in 2004 through high school.

Researchers found that the majority of students who were proficient in Algebra I at the end of eighth grade followed an accelerated math track of geometry in ninth grade and Algebra II in 10th grade.
And those students made up the vast majority - 75 percent - of all those in their class who would ever become proficient in algebra by high school graduation.

Not a single student who earned below a grade of D in seventh-grade math went on to take calculus in high school, according to researchers.

The results should be alarming for school officials who are under increasing pressure to produce future workers with high-level math skills for the growing fields of science, technology and engineering, researchers said.

"When students take Algebra I is less important than whether students are ready to take it," researchers concluded in the report.

- sfgate.com