Faithful, long-suffering San Franciscans, mark your calendars: algebra for middle schoolers will make the ballot in March 2024. 

Specifically, voters will be asked to weigh in on a measure urging the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to again offer Algebra I to eighth graders, after the district scrapped the course in 2014. At the time, administrators justified their decision with a vague hodgepodge of equity-related concerns. Eighth graders, particularly black and Hispanic students, were failing out of mandatory algebra classes at high rates, admins said, which put them at a comparative disadvantage in high school. It wasn’t an option to allow high-achievers to test into the course, because ‘tracking’ (separating students based on demonstrated ability) was “simply wrong.” And anyway, wasn’t the whole paradigm of test-based math instruction increasingly passé? “What it means to be good in math is no longer about answer-getting and speed,” an administrator said at the time. “To be truly deeply proficient in math, you have to defend your reasoning and understand how a mathematical situation would apply in the real world.”

It was inspiring rhetoric from a cadre of Paulo Freire-reading bureaucrats. But how has the decision played out, ten years on? Well, a recent study of the policy found that “large ethnoracial [enrollment] gaps” in both AP and ‘District-defined’ advanced math courses “did not change in the post-reform period,” though overall enrollment in AP Calculus, which requires a strong foundation in algebra, initially fell sharply. Subsequent reforms allowing students to enroll in summer Geometry and Algebra II/Pre-Calculus “compression” courses attenuated this drop, but did nothing to alter persistent disparities in black and Hispanic enrollment in AP math. Conclusion? The ‘reform’ did little for the struggling students it purported to help, though it did make life harder for those who must now take faster-paced courses to stay on track.