At least 2,500 ninth-graders in Prince George’s County will abruptly move this week from a standard one-year algebra course into a two-year program, shielding the struggling students from a state graduation test this spring that officials said they were likely to fail.
The highly unusual shift comes midway through the school year in one of Washington’s largest suburban school systems and in some respects runs counter to a regional trend of pushing students to take higher-level mathematics as early as possible.