article: Why did San Francisco schools stop teaching algebra in middle school

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Actually, nearly all the middle school model schools I'm familiar with *do* have tracking - the teams are tracked. There's typically a high team, a middle, and a low one for each grade (or several, depending on the size of the school). I'm also not familiar with any middle schools other than small private ones where students don't change classrooms within the team. The kids still move, not the teachers. A team has 4 teachers - I'm familiar with exceptions, like a school I knew where every teacher on the team taught social studies during the same period and a school where teams were English, Social Studies, and Science and all math was tracked and between teams - but those are sort of tweaks of the model for individual school needs and situations. The "ideal" set up is four teachers, one hallway per team.

 

Like I said above, I have mixed feelings about this change in general - I think there are reasons that having an algebra for all or even an algebra for most in 8th grade stance may not be good. Vocational tracks were mentioned above, but I would hope that kids who aren't academically ready or simply weren't prepared properly by not great schooling would still be able to take a college bound track of schooling in high school. Relegating kids to "vocational" (despite the fact that I'm 100% in agreement that we need to offer better vocational education) if they're not ready for algebra I in middle school seems too rigid. Some bright kids just aren't.

 

But... anyway... the middle school model isn't the issue. Thousands and thousands of schools have been using the middle school team model to track kids and have an algebra I course for some and not others just fine. And it also means that the limited resources argument shouldn't apply. If you have a team or half a team worth of kids ready for algebra, then it doesn't cost more, you have to have a teacher to teach math. Sure, there's marginally more materials needed, but not so much more money. It's clearly a philosophical shift, not a resources one.

 

I agree with you that it should not take more teachers to teach tracked math or to phrase it more positively, to teach students where they are, rather than to force them into a notional average path that may not fit.  

 

Also if you have a school with multiple grades, then you can have a mixed class of students taking the best fit math course.  (My own algebra class was a mix of 8th and 9th graders in a 7-9 school.)

 

The team arrangement I described was what I observed when I was getting my ed degree.  Hopefully it was an aberration, because I don't think it suited the students well.  One of the worst aspects I observed was that students had to meet gifted or accelerated benchmarks in both math and reading in order to be in the set of students within the team that were doing honors work.  (There were 4 rooms within the team taught by pairs of teachers - two did math/science and two did English/history.)  The consequence was that a student who was ready in math but not in reading was shut out of higher level work.  [it was really a soup sandwich and was part of my decision not to do classroom teaching.]

 

One concern I have is that in some areas, to be competitive for selective colleges requires hitting calculus.  That can be tough to do if you don't start algebra until 9th grade.  

[MarkT]

I tend to be an advocate for public education, as fellow forum members who know me are aware. However, one thing about the educational system that has bothered me from childhood (my mom was a teacher) was how the school district would—at regularly scheduled intervals—leap between pedological models, and often embracing diametrically opposed  ideas from one session to the next. 

 

Nothing has really changed in that regard. I tend to be in favor of Common Core reforms (certainly believing that students should both be able to understand concepts and explain their reasoning), but at the District-level is seems one needs to "drink the kool-aid." So instead of educational reforms being gradual and reasoned, they leap to extremes and those who question the fringe elements are treated as counter-revolutionaries. Crazy.

 

Unfortunately Common Core ties everything into Grade level (aka age cohort).  The should have used Elementary level 1..n,  Middle School level 1, etc.  This would have allowed common sense achievement or mastery for math placement instead of grade.

 

I also believe for high school level math they should have picked either Integrated or Traditional and stuck with that.  One of the proposed benefits was that when a student moved the math covered in previous school X it would be very similar to new school Y.  This is totally not the case here in AZ.

 

My family moved during my high school years (within New York state) and both schools used the then high quality NYS Regents program so the transition was seamless.

[tm919]

I tend to be an advocate for public education, as fellow forum members who know me are aware. However, one thing about the educational system that has bothered me from childhood (my mom was a teacher) was how the school district would—at regularly scheduled intervals—leap between pedological models, and often embracing diametrically opposed  ideas from one session to the next. 

 

Nothing has really changed in that regard. I tend to be in favor of Common Core reforms (certainly believing that students should both be able to understand concepts and explain their reasoning), but at the District-level is seems one needs to "drink the kool-aid." So instead of educational reforms being gradual and reasoned, they leap to extremes and those who question the fringe elements are treated as counter-revolutionaries. Crazy.

Agreed...The common core standards aren't really as bad as people make them out to be -- overall I kind of like them. But switching kids to a new approach just as they start prealgebra (or another critical point) is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention those kids in the transition have to prep for and take both the old and new testing systems in the same years, where we are. I'm hoping that by the time my daughter needs to take the tests, they'll only have to take 1 set per year. I feel badly for those 3rd graders taking both sets of tests week after week.

Edited June 25, 2016 by tm919