Why is my A student failing algebra?https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/why-is-my-a-student-failing-algebraAdriana Aviles' son was an A student in math in New York City K-8 schools, she tells David Spector of the New York Post. He got into a top high school. But her honor-roll student is failing algebra.
She tried to help him study. "He stared blankly at the page, completely puzzled by the material. He was completely thrown off by equations that contained fractions." He scored a 10 out of 100 on the test.
Her son now spends four lunch periods a week getting math tutoring to learn the skills he didn't learn in elementary school. Aviles bought "math review books intended for first- through fourth-graders so I can see how much he actually knows, and in which grade he stopped learning."
They live in Queens District 26, considered one of the best in the city. She worked with teachers and administrators at her son's schools, served as PTA president and Community Education Council president, and sits on the Citywide Council on High Schools. Now she feels betrayed by the system that passed him along and the teachers who never told her he needed help.
"I failed too," she writes. "I didn’t scrutinize his work closely or check his performance on state test scores because I figured if his report cards were good then everything was fine." She trusted the grades.
Only recently did she check and realize he'd scored “not proficient” in math on a seventh-grade state exam. But he was getting A's.
Looking back, she sees signs that she missed. There was little homework and a "laidback attitude about missed assignments." Students could revise answers on tests to get a higher grade.
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This isn't just a New York City problem, tweets Catherine Johnson in response to Aviles. "The only reason this didn’t happen to us in our super-expensive suburban school district is that I happened to clean out my 4th grader’s backpack one day & discovered a math test with a grade of 68." The teacher said: “Don’t worry, he understands the concepts.” But he didn't. "I eventually realized my son didn’t have a freaking clue about the concepts or anything else." The next year I gave him the Singapore Math placement test, discovered he was 2 years behind, then bought the Saxon Math books & marched the two of us through them one lesson at a time." It worked, she writes. "He’s teaching algebra this year."
Just for any DU onlurker not familiar with Joanne Jacobs, she is NOT conservative. She's just a non-CRAZY liberal ... and honest in reporting about education news.
Singapore Math and Saxon Math are not new. The former was popular among homeschoolers 25 years ago or so, fairly rigorous, but effective. (Hake-) Saxon Math was popular even earlier, similarly rigorous and similarly effective. It shows how pathetic that one family's PS had gotten that the Mom had to resort to one publisher's placement test to figure out where her son really was, and then after-school her son with the other publisher's textbooks to catch up the two years he was behind.
What are the odds: Reading proficiency is similarly terrible in NY; this lack of Math (and Reading) proficiency is a concealed problem on many states (look for the union label and the magic golden D). "Kicking the can down the road" is doubly reprehensible when the "can" is a child with 6 or 8 or## decades of life ahead.
