We’ve seen this story play out before in San Francisco. Progressive educators attack tracking and advanced math courses on the grounds that equity demands everyone be in the same classroom. Somehow this was supposed to improve things for the mostly black and Hispanic students who were falling behind without doing any harm to the mostly white and Asian kids who had previously been in the advanced classes.
Eventually, San Francisco figured out that it didn’t work. Apart from making life much harder for the advanced kids, some of whom had to take a year of math in summer school to keep up with their college-bound peers in other cities, getting rid of Middle School algebra did nothing for the students on the other end of the achievement gap. The city eventually reversed course once the failure of de-tracking became undeniable.
The same story has been playing out…
