Algebra teacher Rick Riccio demonstrates scientific notation during a class at Braham Area High School in Minnesota. Credit: Patience Zalanga for The Hechinger Report
BRAHAM, Minn. — It was fourth-period Basic Algebra 8 class on a gray October morning at Braham Area High School. Teacher Rick Riccio had assigned an exercise on converting large integers to scientific notation, but fifteen minutes in, some students had lost focus. Two girls at a back table sang, their worksheets empty. Two boys pulled up games on their laptops, as two other girls discussed what they’d name their children someday.
Riccio tried to reel them in as he walked around answering questions. “You’re a little too crazy today,” he said to the girls in the back. “You gotta settle down and get this done.”
Not all eighth graders are ready for the abstract concepts — like variables, linear functions, slope — that come with Algebra I, some experts and teachers say. Those more complex ideas also require extended concentration, which is difficult for many middle schoolers.
“Eighth grade, they’re just in full-on puberty, hormones,” said Zach Loy, another math teacher at the high school, an hour’s drive from Minneapolis. “Are they capable of sitting down and focusing on one thing for two, three minutes at a time without getting distracted? I see that as being the hardest barrier.”
But under a 2006 Minnesota law designed to boost the number of students going into math and science careers, all eighth graders were required to take Algebra I. At the time, legislators argued that getting more kids through algebra before starting high school would ensure they were on a path to graduate having taken calculus, often seen as a gateway for entry to selective colleges and to well-paying jobs in fields like engineering and medicine.
There was a logic behind that: In a traditional course sequence, finishing calculus is easier if students take Algebra I by eighth grade since they can continue on to geometry, Algebra II, precalculus or trigonometry, and then calculus their senior year.
But a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data shows Minnesota’s law hasn’t worked out as planned. Between 2009 and 2017, the share of the state’s students taking calculus did rise modestly, from 1.25 to 1.76 percent. But other states saw far larger gains, and Minnesota dropped from sixth to 10th place among states for calculus enrollment as a share of total enrollment. (2017 is the latest year for which there are compiled federal data on calculus enrollment, according to U.S. Department of Education spokesperson Alberto Betancourt.)
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national test done every two years, Minnesota fell from second place among the 50 states in 2009 on eighth grade math scores to eighth place in 2022, the latest year of available data.
