In 2014, too many kids were failing eighth-grade algebra, so San Francisco got rid of it.
This was part of a broader movement called “detracking,” an initiative advocated by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) and others in the world of math education. This would lead schools to stop offering advanced or remedial classes in favor of placing all students, regardless of ability, in the same classes. Tracking “too often leads to segregation, dead-end pathways, and low quality experiences, and disproportionately has a negative impact on minority and low-socioeconomic students,” the NCSM warned.
So San Francisco took the plunge. No students would take algebra in eighth grade. The hope was that the step would address the city’s glaring inequities regarding which students were high performers in math.
“We decided to detrack both out of the best academic interests of the students and out of a moral imperative,” San Francisco math teacher Kentaro Iwasaki told me. “Tracking mirrors the segregation in our society, maintains the haves and the have-nots. The segregation within our schools — if we walk down a hallway and we see a high-track class, it’s generally white and Asian students, and low-track classes generally Black and brown students.” Iwasaki had taught math at Mission High School in San Francisco prior to the detracking initiative.