LodiNews reporter Alejandro Lazo is fretting about the fact that high schoolers in Lodi (CA) will have to pass an exit exam that contains - horrors! - items about algebra in order to graduate:
If a dirt-poor journalist has only $4.10 in nickels, dimes and quarters, and he has four fewer dimes than nickels, and twice as many quarters as dimes, how many of each type of coin does this reporter have?
If you can't answer that question and you're a high school senior at the Lodi Unified School District, you're in trouble.
This new district policy ups the ante of a state law taking effect this school year requiring students to take algebra, but not necessarily pass it. The new policy has some teachers and students in Lodi Unified worried that some seniors might not walk across the graduation stage.
Any senior who can't solve the above problem may not be able to find the stage. That counts as an algebra problem that high school seniors are supposed to be worried about? Come on. If those teachers were really worried about their students, they'd have managed to teach them the math skills necessary for the above problem at some point during their four-year tenure.
The new policy comes at a time when algebra skills are considered more and more an entry-level job skill, said John Coakley, coordinator of math at Lodi Unified...Except for the service industry, most jobs will require "at a minimum, some higher computation skills," he said.
The University of California also requires Algebra I, as will the statewide exit exam due to be implemented in 2006. Cal's DOE states that students should have been exposed to algebraic concepts by eighth grade.
Oh, but teachers are skeptical about this whole "algebra" thing:
Some math teachers and students at Lodi Unified don't think the new policy will be successful. "None of us object to the idea," said Doug Smith, head of the math department at Lodi High School. "The problem is that the students coming in are not adequately prepared to do the job."
What? You have four years to teach them basic algebra, and you're the head of the math department. So what if they didn't have pre-algebra in middle school? You can't pass the buck here, Doug. That dog won't hunt. There's no excuse for letting kids out of high school who don't understand how to use variables and algebraic equations - unless, of course, a future in the "service economy" is all you foresee for them.
For 687 students entering Algebra A, only 33 percent of students had a mastery of simple equations. "The 'mastery' level means the minimum amount of skill necessary to have success in the course," Smith said, pointing at one column of numbers.
Sounds like it's time to change the course - add remedial after-hours instruction, slow down the first six weeks, anything. Passing the buck back to the eighth-grade teachers won't do anything to fix this. At some point, some teacher has to say, THIS is where my students will begin to learn algebra.
He is particularly concerned about his special-education students."They can't graduate," he said. "One of my students is at the second-grade level, and he's in algebra because he's a 12th-grader."
Now, that's a different issue. The question then becomes - why has this kid been mainstreamed, and why should he be issued a high school diploma? He's not going to be able to hold a job; why continue with the fiction that he should be enrolled in a mainstream high school?
Tim Stutz, a science and math teacher at Liberty High School, is also worried about what the new requirements might mean for his students. "It's better to let them earn their high school diploma" without the algebra requirement, he said. "Sticking this extra requirement on them is just going to show them they failed at something again."
AARGH. What do you think is going to happen to these kids when they try to go to college or hold a job with this diploma?! You don't think they're going to be told that they're failures then? When they get rejected from UCal, or flunk out, or can't hold down a basic office job, do you really think they'll look back and say, "Well, even if Mr. Stutz couldn't teach us algebra, he sure was compassionate"?
No. They're going to be compared to other graduates, and they're going to realize that their diploma is worth nothing.
One estimate says that only 33% of California's students "graduate with a successful completion of algebra," and I can only conclude that Mr. Stutz is not interested in getting his students out of the bottom two-thirds of California's graduates.
Posted by kswygert at August 26, 2003 12:58 PM