Editor’s Note: Chad Aldeman and the Collaborative for Student Success published a report this Tuesday that should make everyone in the Garden State sit up straight and put their nose to the grindstone. We’re publishing Chad’s commentary in full below.
Math Gaps Don’t Start in College
I have a new report out today with the Collaborative for Student Success about math gaps at Rutgers, the flagship public higher education institution in New Jersey. The report is mostly about what happens when lots of students arrive on campus unprepared for college-level math. I document a rising share of students who fall into this camp, and then I spoke with faculty members and students about the consequences. I hope you’ll give it a read.
One of the lessons I want to amplify here is that students didn’t just lose their math skills between the spring of their senior year of high school and when they show up on the Rutgers campus in the fall. More likely, many of them had been falling behind for years, while the K-12 system continued passing them along.
As a coincidence, New Jersey released their new statewide test scores yesterday. I grabbed a picture of the state results below. Most people are going to focus on the changes from left to right. The state was in the first year of a new test, and people are naturally going to want to compare how students are doing compared to the previous year. (The state recommends against these explicit comparisons.)
But I want you to look at the table from top to bottom. This year, 47.9% of New Jersey’s 3rd graders reached the state’s proficiency target in math. That’s not great, but notice that proficiency rates tend to fall over time. For 7th graders, just 37.4% of students reached the state standard.
Now, this could be a function of the state’s benchmarks. Maybe they get artificially more challenging over time. But other states show this same type of waterfall pattern over time. Math is a cumulative subject, and students don’t just naturally recover and improve over time. Instead, more and more students fall off track with each passing year.
For my purposes here, I’m ignoring the 8th grade and high school results. Students take those exams at different points in time and it’s hard to compare apples-to-apples. Still, it’s not a great sign that 60% of New Jersey students couldn’t pass the state’s Algebra I exam…
And that’s where my new report picks up the story. The students who can’t pass an Algebra test will show up at Rutgers, and other New Jersey colleges, in a few short years.
By the time those students arrive on a college campus, the problem will be much harder and more expensive to fix. Rutgers can give students placement tests, adjust their courses, and ask faculty members to help students catch up. But the better time to intervene was years earlier, when the gaps first appeared.
