MAA Blog: What Exactly is High School Math?

By Dave Kung, Director of Policy; Lindsay Fitzpatrick, Senior Lead - Policy and Implementation, Charles A. Dana Center, with research and writing support from Education Strategy Group and Student Achievement Partners

“What are students doing in their high school math classes?!?”

If you’ve spent any time at all with college math faculty, you’ve heard this question. Of course, just because you put a question mark at the end, doesn’t mean it’s actually a question. This one usually comes off as more of a complaint.

An upcoming report gives us a partial answer – one based on data, not on presumptions. Re-Envisioning Mathematics Pathways to Expand Opportunities: The Landscape of High School to Postsecondary Course Sequences gives a clearer picture of students’ math trajectories as they move from middle school through high school, using data from more than a dozen states. And while we can’t tell what content is being discussed (or how it’s being talked about) in those classes, knowing which courses they are taking can tell us a lot about students’ course enrollment patterns – and what we need to work on.

The report delves into a treasure trove of data, including students’ progression through mathematics course sequences in middle school and high school, as well as mathematics enrollment data for 11th and 12th grade. The report contains important information for those of us who see these students in our college math classes.

Lots of 12th grade students aren’t taking any math.

Some states require four years of high school math; others just three, or even two. And some students who take algebra in 8th grade, an accelerated option that positions students to take four years of mathematics traditionally including Calculus, end up not taking any math in their senior year. How many? The numbers might surprise you.

Of the 13 states that submitted this data, the percentage of 12th graders taking a math course ranged considerably, from 56% up to 98%. Not surprisingly, states requiring four years of math were at the top, all over 80%, with Georgia (98%) leading the way. States requiring just two or three years of math were on the lower end, from 56% to 85%. Notably, states requiring four units of math had a median of 82% of seniors taking math; states requiring fewer units had a median of just 65%.

So when you’re meeting students for the first time in your Fall classes, remember that a significant chunk of them haven’t been in a math class for 15 months! And if you’re ever in a position to influence policy, remember that in states that require four years of math, students actually take (drum roll please…) four years of math.

The path to Calculus still dominates.

Although courses like statistics, quantitative literacy, or data science are most appropriate for about ⅔ of postsecondary degrees awarded, only a very small percentage of the 11th and 12th grade students who are taking math courses are in those paths. The vast majority of those students are taking algebra-based course sequences aimed at Calculus.

(We hope you share our worry that such non-STEM tracks might become places where minoritized students’ STEM dreams might go to die. Read more about the need to attend to equity issues while updating math curricula in our May ‘22 DC Connections column.)

Of the courses not aimed at Calculus, Statistics is the most popular math course for high school seniors. Outside of one outlier (52% of DC’s math-taking seniors enrolled in Statistics), a median of 15% of math-taking seniors are in the course.

If we weren’t aware before the pandemic, the last two-plus years have crystalised the importance of Quantitative Literacy or Quantitative Reasoning (QL/QR), courses that encourage students to apply their math knowledge to the issues of the world. Those courses are next on the list of seniors’ math classes not aimed at STEM students. States that have made concerted efforts to align high school courses with higher education systems’ requirements have made impressive gains on this front. In Arkansas, for example, the percentage of students across the state taking QL increased by 58 percent from the 2017-2018 school year to 2020-2021, now standing at 18%. (We hope all of those students could figure out what the percentage was in ‘17-’18!)

A fundamental principle guiding the Dana Center’s work is that students in the transition years from high school to college should be taking math courses aligned with their aspirations. So it’s encouraging to see that more students who are headed toward the Social Sciences have access to Statistics courses, and those headed toward the Humanities have access to a QL course that more closely fits their needs. And we are diligently working with states like Arkansas to ensure that their STEM-interested students aren’t among them.

Access to accelerated math sequences remains inequitable by race and income.

In the world we imagine, access to accelerated course sequences (some of which end with high school Calculus) isn’t correlated with race and income. Sadly, that’s not our current world.

Looking at students taking Algebra I or higher in 8th grade (an “accelerated” sequence), we see the same racial and economic patterns that have plagued American education systems for centuries. While earlier access to Algebra 1 has proven to lead to positive academic outcomes and increases the likelihood of STEM participation, not all middle-school students have equitable access to those accelerated math options. In the 11 states that provided disaggregated data, white students made up a relatively higher percentage in these accelerated sequences, with Black students and those experiencing poverty making up a lower percentage (as compared with non-accelerated sequences). The same pattern holds for Latino students – with the notable exception of Georgia where representation of Latino students was roughly the same in and out of the accelerated courses.

Generally speaking, states reported that Black and Latino students and students eligible for the National School Lunch Program make up a higher percentage of the traditional sequence than the accelerated sequence, whereas for white students, it is the reverse. Furthermore, the students eligible for the National School Lunch program in most cases had the biggest difference in representation from traditional to accelerated sequence.

We should note something missing from these data. Although we surveyed all 50 states (plus D.C.), many states could not provide the sort of detailed data we asked for, leaving the state of math course taking more uncertain. Just 9 states were able to provide all the data we requested. The data analyses in the report are primarily based on 13-17 states, depending on the topic.

If these findings intrigue you and if you want to know more about the mathematical course-taking patterns of middle- and high-school students – actual live ones, not the idealized ones in our heads – the full report will be out by the end of July. Sign up here to be notified when it’s available.

Re-Envisioning Mathematics Pathways to Expand Opportunities: The Landscape of High School to Postsecondary Course Sequences is a joint project among the Charles A. Dana Center, Education Strategies Group, and Student Achievement Partners.

Dave Kung leads the policy work at the Dana Center, which includes in-depth policy analysis and the development of tools and briefs for systems, regions, and states. He also serves as Director of MAA Project NExT, a professional development program serving math faculty early in their careers.

Lindsay Fitzpatrick leads the Launch Years Initiative for the Dana Center, a national effort to equitably implement and align modern math pathways in over 20 states, with and through partner organizations. This work includes the alignment of math courses, content, and related policies from K–12 to higher education systems to streamline the transition and increase student success.