A big reason California students are pushed to take higher math in high school is to see that they satisfy the admission requirements to a state four-year university. And yet 68 percent of students who haven’t passed one of the required courses, Algebra II, by the end of 11th grade don’t even enroll in math as seniors, giving up on the possibility of applying to a UC or CSU school.
That puzzling statistic is among the data from
an extensive research study by San Francisco-based research organization WestEd’s
Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning of math courses that 24,000 students in two dozen districts took – or didn’t take – in middle and high school. Those findings point to great success for a minority of students – about one out of five – who take Algebra I by the end of eighth grade, geometry by the end of ninth and Algebra II by the end of tenth; many
