"Testing, testing. . . ."

 The Boston Globe ran a piece recently about a controversy in the Cambridge Public Schools.  The issue is not unique to Cambridge, and its resolution, I think, illustrates the hopeless situation that the convergence of racial and economic issues has gotten us into.

In 1960-1, I was among the first children in the US to do Algebra I in 8th grade.  The idea of giving Algebra I to exceptional students had developed, I believe, in response to Sputnik.  When I went into 7th grade at North Bethesda Jr. High I was given a battery of standardized tests, and placed in an advanced 7th grade section with more demanding math classes.  This practice eventually enabled me and many of my classmates to take calculus in our senior year.

The Cambridge Public Schools, along with thousands of other districts around the country, had been following the same practice for decades until 2017, when they began a gradual three-year period that eliminated the distinction between "grade-level" math and "advanced math" tracks.  The reason was that most of the children in the advanced tracks were white or Asian, while most of those in the grade-level track were black or Hispanic.  That led to a severe backlash from white and Asian parents whose kids would inevitably fall behind comparable peers in suburban districts.  Many of them hired private math tutors--although exactly how that will enable them to do calculus in 12th grade is not clear to me.

The backlash succeeded in 2023 in securing a commitment to restore Algebra I in eighth grade within a few years, and further pressure inaugurated it in the 2025-6 school year.  This time, however, it was not an option only for exceptionally qualified students, but for everyone. This has turned out to be a disaster.  60 percent of the eighth grade math students failed the course, and will have to retake it in 9th grade.  

The story is not unique to Cambridge. San Francisco in 2014 led the way in doing away with Algebra I in eighth grade. After a whole decade of controversy 82 percent [sic] of parents to return it, and the district voted to bring it back this fall, after twelve years of holding back the development of their smartest students.  Neighboring Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University, ended tracking in middle school math classes in 2019, leading to a long series of legal battles.  Similar events have taken place in Minnesota, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, and in parts of New York City.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Baseball Greatness, developing my own methodology (based on the work of others) to identify the best players in the history of the American and National Leagues. It established something very clearly.  Out of more than 20,000 men who had reached that level, there were around 650 who had at least briefly been good enough to lead their team to a pennant.  I am convinced that the same is true of any complex field of human endeavor: there is a small minority of us who are much better than anyone else.  The reason these school districts have stopped trying to identify and meet the needs of that minority is that they happen to be disproportionately white and Asian, and the districts feel that accelerating their math development will give them a greater edge over other students later in life.  That will make what they call the "equity gap" worse.  Of course, if we continue to dumb down our public schools, richer parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and that will have at least as bad an impact on the equity gap.

Something parallel has happened in college admissions, where the entire University of California system and its State University system forbade students from submitting SAT scores in the early 2020s.  A number of elite private schools, including Columbia, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, and the University of Texas at Austin, made submission of the SATs, which have long been attacked as racially biased, optional.  The last 7 colleges on that list, however, have now reversed themselves, because the optional policy led them to admit too many students who could not do the work.  

I'm afraid that we will not be able to deal with this very important issue sensibly as long as the gap between success and failure in our economy is so great.  We didn't mind getting certain students better prepared for college in the days that high school graduates still earned a decent living--such as in the 1950s.  And when we thought of our nation as engaged in a critical common enterprise such as competing in various ways with the USSR, we appreciated the need to develop the talented people that we had.  "Equity," it seems, means trying to reduce everyone to a level just below the current mean.  That is a catastrophe, both politically, as the controversies in these various regions have shown, and nationally.  And since our new Gilded Age seems to be for the time being self-perpetuating, I don't know when it can be remedied.