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🕒 7-minute read
When Calculus Students Need Middle-School Math
Something has gone badly wrong when a UC Berkeley mathematics professor has to spend office hours teaching fractions and basic algebra to students enrolled in calculus.
In a startling essay published last weekend in the San Francisco Standard, professor Zvezdelina Stankova says some of the students showing up in her calculus classes are five to eight years behind in math.
Before 2020, 71% of Berkeley’s incoming Calculus I students who took a diagnostic exam were ready or nearly ready for calculus. Berkeley later changed diagnostics, so the comparison isn’t perfect. But by 2023 only 44% demonstrated proficiency in at least five of eight tested topics, while 17% of students tested from 2021 through 2023 got none right.
This is about more than bad math scores. California eliminated its high-school competency examination. UC and CSU eliminated the SAT and ACT from admissions. The California Teachers Association supported important parts of that retreat from objective measurement.
Now professors are discovering what the grades and diplomas sometimes failed to tell us.
We Already Saw This At UC San Diego
I wrote about this problem last November (if you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth the time) after UC San Diego produced similarly disturbing findings. UCSD documented a huge increase in students arriving with severe math deficiencies, including students struggling with basic arithmetic, rounding and elementary concepts.
These were students coming straight from high school.
Consider what had to happen first: Algebra I. Pass. Geometry. Pass. Algebra II. Pass. Perhaps precalculus. Pass again.
Teachers assign the work, administer the tests and issue the grades. Schools award the credits. California hands the student a diploma. Then a university discovers he cannot reliably perform mathematics he supposedly mastered years earlier.
We used to call advancing an unprepared student “social promotion.” This is worse. It is certification without competency.
Through grades, transcripts, credits and ultimately a diploma, the system certifies that learning occurred. Sometimes it didn’t.
Math provides especially brutal evidence because there is little ambiguity about whether someone can solve an equation. But ACT has documented rising grades in math, English, science and social studies. Better transcripts do not necessarily mean better learning.
How We Got Here
California once had an outside check on whether a high-school diploma meant something.
Beginning with the class of 2006, students generally had to pass the California High School Exit Examination in English and mathematics. The premise was modest: before the state certified completion of high school, demonstrate basic competency.
The Legislature suspended the requirement and then killed it permanently. In 2017, Democratic Assemblyman Ash Kalra carried AB 830 eliminating the exam. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it. CTA supported the legislation; its own publication called AB 830 “CTA-supported.”
Then came college admissions.
In 2020, UC’s own Standardized Testing Task Force did not recommend simply discarding standardized testing. UC President Janet Napolitano went further anyway, and on May 21 the Board of Regents approved her plan to phase out the SAT and ACT.
CSU followed. What began as a COVID-era suspension became permanent when its Board of Trustees discontinued SAT and ACT scores in admissions in March 2022.
And there was CTA again. In 2021, its Assessment and Testing Committee recommended that the union “oppose the use of the SAT and ACT for UC and Cal State admissions.”
CTA was hardly a bystander in California’s retreat from academic accountability. It supported eliminating the high-school exit exam and later formally opposed using the SAT and ACT for UC and Cal State admissions.
California stopped requiring minimum competency before granting a high-school diploma, then its public universities stopped using the nation’s principal standardized admissions tests.
They kept the grades, credits and diplomas. What disappeared were outside checks on whether those credentials really meant what everyone said they meant.
This Is Looking Like A Feature, Not A Flaw
Teachers should be the people most determined to know whether children are actually learning. Plenty care deeply about their students. But caring and participating in a system that lowers standards are not mutually exclusive.
One would like to blame the union and spare individual teachers. The facts make that impossible.
Hundreds — probably thousands — of teachers have entered passing grades for students whose work plainly showed they had not mastered the material. They knew what an A, B or C was supposed to signify. And they passed them anyway.
Individual teachers cannot entirely hide behind the union, district policy or administrators. Every passing grade is entered by someone. When a teacher gives credit for material a student plainly has not mastered, that teacher is participating in the deception.
Maybe district policies encouraged it. Maybe administrators discouraged failures. Maybe parents applied pressure. Maybe moving a student along was simply easier. Those explanations matter, but certification without competency requires someone to do the certifying.
CTA is a labor union. It is supposed to protect teachers — their pay, benefits, job security and working conditions. The problem is what happens when protecting adults starts getting in the way of honestly measuring whether children are learning.
CTA’s own policies oppose using standardized-test norms to evaluate bargaining-unit members and resist numerous high-stakes consequences tied to testing.
Objective testing raises uncomfortable questions: Why were students promoted? How does someone earn an A in Algebra II while lacking middle-school math skills? Eventually: Who is responsible?
Those questions are inconvenient for an organization charged with protecting employees. They are essential for children.
Yet California repeatedly moved the other way. When tests expose achievement gaps, attack the tests as inequitable. When students cannot meet a competency requirement, eliminate it. When admissions tests reveal differences in preparation, stop using them.
At some point, that stops looking like reform and starts looking like an accountability escape hatch.
There is nothing compassionate about giving a child a passing grade for material he never learned.
California didn’t accidentally lose its academic warning lights. Its education establishment spent years unscrewing the bulbs.
The Students Get The Bill
The adults benefit immediately from moving an unprepared student along. The student pays later.
If a ninth-grader hasn’t learned Algebra I, tell him and his parents. Give him help. Make him repeat the material. A failing grade isn’t pleasant. Discovering at 19 that years of passing grades were fiction is worse.
By then, the student may already be paying university tuition. Faculty must reteach material taxpayers already paid K–12 schools to teach. Remedial coursework can delay progress toward a degree, consume financial aid and add costs for students.
There is another casualty. Berkeley and UC San Diego turn away enormous numbers of applicants. A seat given to a student whose transcript dramatically overstates his preparation is a seat another student doesn’t receive.
Stankova describes one student who earned A’s in college-level STEM courses but was rejected by UC campuses, while another whose weakest subject was math was admitted to a top UC engineering program.
Neither student was served well.
So, Does It Matter?
Thousands of UC faculty members are now pushing the university to reconsider standardized admissions testing, including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty.
Berkeley professors are encountering calculus students who need basic algebra. UC San Diego has documented the same underlying problem.
Those students didn’t forget everything on the drive to campus.
California’s schools passed them, gave them the grades and handed them diplomas.
Meanwhile, the California Teachers Association and its political allies helped eliminate objective measurements that might have exposed the problem while something still could have been done about it.
We should restore meaningful competency testing and objective measures to college admissions. And we should stop confusing making failure harder to see with making failure disappear.
CTA, its political allies and too many educators spent years making it easier to pass students than to confront the fact that they were not learning.
The children have been paying the price.
Additional Reading
Below the paywall are a bunch of additional reading recommendations if you want to take a deeper dive. More resources, more cartoons, exclusive videos and more are available to our paid subscribers!
