Widening the Aperture Through ‘Voices on Math Readiness’

For those of us who follow media coverage of math education, the past year has brought some interesting trends. 

Last fall, the Nation’s Report Card confirmed a trend that many in math education had been witnessing: the lowest math performance for high school seniors in two decades. Only 22 percent of 12th graders scored at or above proficient in mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and nearly half performed below the basic level. What’s worse, the gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students have only grown wider. 

In response to this pattern across roughly 4 million high school seniors, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued an “urgent call for systemic action,” with key recommendations for designing instruction, curriculum, teacher preparation, and systems for monitoring student outcomes. 

At the time, journalists were not paying attention to math education. That shifted two months later, when the University of California San Diego posted a report on the declining math performance of incoming students. Opinion writers leaned into hyperbole. Valid long-term concerns about students’ math skills were overshadowed by the fact that 900-some UCSD students were placed into remedial math courses last year. Suddenly, demeaning depictions of students and demands for reinstating admissions testing proliferated. 

Having worked for years to advance policies that expand math opportunity, I was troubled by the media’s myopic focus on a tiny portion of high school graduates entering a single highly selective university. The UCSD story seemed to be viewing the state of math education through a pinhole camera. 

Math preparation affects students across the country. It involves not just universities, but also school systems, math disciplinary societies, classroom instructors, assessment systems, and, of course, students and their families. The UC system is now weighing whether to reinstate a requirement that applicants take the SAT or ACT—and that has been the new focus of media attention. But any decisions by elite universities about how to choose their freshman class will not address the underlying challenges. 

We need a wider aperture. We need to hear from those who are working to deepen and broaden math opportunity—not just those who are seeking to rank students based on their prior exposure. 

Just Equations has made this point in multiple venues—including op-eds, blog posts, and a special report. It is also important to hear from those educators, researchers, and experts from whom we’ve learned about building the math education of the future. 

To that end, we are releasing the first in a series of commentaries on math preparation. The series, “Voices on Math Readiness,” is designed to deepen understanding of math preparation by uplifting the perspectives of those who are doing the daily work of fostering and improving math learning for all students. Because we know that math skills are central to students’ educational and life opportunities.

Akil Bello weighs in with reasons to be skeptical about assessments that claim to measure students’ math skills. And Federick Ngo explains the insidious ways in which college placement policies can force students with the potential for college success into “math traps” from which it is tricky to escape. 

Akil and Federick will join me next week for the series’ first virtual event, “Voices on Math Readiness: Deconstructing Gatekeepers & Math Traps.” We hope you’ll join us on Aug. 26 at 1 p.m. PDT to explore key aspects of college math preparation that have been overlooked and underdiscussed.

Stay tuned for the next installments in our series. College readiness is a problem worth solving, and Just Equations is committed to elevating solutions and the people behind them.