By E. R. Cancell

Students in Boston can’t pass the MCAS  in math because they’re not being taught the material until a year or more after they take the tests.
How can a student pass a test when he hasn’t been taught it yet?
There is an explanation for this problem. When the educational reform winds swept through the system, the state mandated that basic math be replaced with more rigorous courses.

The problem is that the students are being tested on Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, and statistics and probability.  But the majority of Boston students take Algebra I-Part One in their 9th grade year, Part Two in their 10th grade year, Geometry in their 11th grade year, and Algebra II in their senior year. For those students, it’s unfair to take the MCAS in the 10th grade.

Not all Boston students face this problem. A small number of students take Algebra in 9th grade, Geometry in 10th grade, Algebra II in 11th grade and then a choice of pre-calculus or calculus in 12th grade.

The sequence at Boston Latin School (the school with the state’s highest MCAS scores) assumes that students will take Algebra in the 8th grade and follow the above sequences a year earlier.  For high schools that regularly prepare students to attend prestigious institutions of higher learning, most students are expected to have taken Algebra in the 8th grade.

One would think that it would make sense for Boston’s curricular sequence to require Algebra in 8th grade. In fact, in the early 1990s the Algebra Project attempted to do just that in Boston. This curricular reform, ironically, has dropped off the school agenda.

Designing an accountability system that requires students to pass a difficult exam to receive a high school diploma is a laudable attempt to bring high standards to all Massachusetts students.  However, when the majority of students in the state’s largest city will not be exposed to the material on which they will be tested, the accountability system becomes a cruel hoax. Boston must either admit defeat and lobby to change the test or they must change the mathematics curricular sequence.

E. R. Cancell was a high school English teacher and is presently a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he is focusing on education policy in the area of standards and accountability.
 

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