As part of its redesigned school performance and support framework, last month Virginia adopted a new math acceleration indicator which will nudge schools to enroll more middle school student in advanced math courses.
Research suggests that advanced math courses are good for students—but only if those students are ready to handle the material.
The trick for policymakers, then, is to nudge students who are ready for advanced math classes to take them, but without pushing students who are not yet ready into classes where they won’t be successful.
States are pursuing this in two ways. A few leading states including Washington, Texas, and North Carolina have adopted “automatic enrollment” policies, where they require school districts to give high-scoring students the chance to take advanced math courses. If a student proves they are ready, these policies make the advanced math course the default option.
Under automatic enrollment policies, students can still opt out if they want to, but switching to an opt out model addresses many of the equity issues involved with the traditional opt in system. That’s one of the major selling points that helped automatic enrollment policies win the Collaborative’s inaugural March Mathness tournament last spring.
As a consultant helping Virginia revamp its school performance and support framework, we noticed two important things about advanced math course-taking across the Commonwealth. One, access to advanced math courses is already pretty high. Across Virginia, nearly half of the 8th grade class took an advanced math course last year (mostly Algebra I), and almost every middle school had at least some students who were doing so. That suggested that the advanced pathway is prevalent across the state, and schools might be able to expand access without too much trouble.
And two, the percentage of students in those classes who earned a passing score on the end-of-course assessment was extremely high (nearly 98%). That suggested that schools were perhaps being a little too choosy about which students were being given those acceleration opportunities.
So how to balance access and success? One approach would be to give credit for each one separately. This is what a do at the high school level when they want to encourage more students to take Advanced Placement classes. Under this model, they give points to a school based on the percentage of students who enroll in advanced courses. Additionally, the school earns points based on the percentage of students who pass those classes (or the test that’s tied to it.)
The risk with this model is that a school or district could over-index on either access or success. At the extremes, they could enroll every kid to maximize on access, or they could only enroll the valedictorian and try to maximize on success. Even if they aimed for the middle, they would still have to make their own decisions about which students should be accelerated. And those local decisions can often result in inequitable outcomes.
So in Virginia, we handled it a different way. Modeled off a similar version in Florida, we built one indicator that balances both access and success. It starts by looking at student performance. Which students are ready to succeed in advanced math courses? The ones who already do well on math tests.
This “ready students” measure uses a unique denominator to recognize students with the potential to succeed in advanced high school mathematics in grade 8. “Ready students” will include any middle school student in grades 6-8 who is already taking a high school-level math class, plus any grade 8 student who scored advanced on the grade 7 math test in the prior year. In this way, it only expects schools to accelerate students who have clearly demonstrated that they are ready for advanced math coursework.
This also creates a built-in way for the state to nudge schools to look carefully at their 7th grade test results. To maximize their points on this new indicator, Virginia middle schools will have to make sure that students who are performing well—regardless of their race or income or gender—have access to advanced math opportunities.
