Education officials were pleased when results on the state’s Colorado Student Assessment Program math tests showed marked improvement.
In all but one of the eight grades tested, students showed gains in math from last year; only seventh-graders saw a 1 percentage-point decline in the numbers of students who were proficient or advanced in mathematics.
Ninth-graders showed a 5 per centage-point increase among students who were proficient or advanced.
It is evidence that across the state, educators agree about what math students need to know and how to teach it, Colorado Education Commissioner William Moloney said.
“The math community is very much in sync with what has to be done,” he said.
Yet math scores among high school students remain low, particularly for black and Latino students.
Overall, just 31 percent of 10th-graders enrolled in Colorado’s public schools are able to do grade-level math, the latest test results show.
When results are broken down by race, just 10 percent of black and Latino sophomores in Colorado schools are proficient in math; 90 percent are not.
Those scores are “scary,” said Jenna Fleur Lin, a math teacher who tutors high school students in the Cherry Creek School District and runs a free week-long math and science camp at an inner-city Denver church.
“What it means is you have a huge population that’s not going to function properly,” Lin said.
Moloney said one problem is that, unlike elementary and middle school students, high schoolers have the freedom to choose many of their own courses.
“There are still wide variations in what they’re exposed to,” Moloney said. “Some get a lot of algebra. Some get almost none.”
The racial achievement gap, he said, “is not unique to Colorado.” He acknowledged that while nearly all racial groups showed growth in math in grades three through 10, the numbers “show the enormity of the problem that remains.”
He said it raises the question of whether the students are “being exposed to the instruction that (they) need.”
“Are minority youngsters being channelled into challenging programs or are you being (steered) to diminished programs?” he said.
Lin said she believes many students don’t have a solid foundation in math in elementary school.
They are just learning to do calculations but they don’t understand how to connect those elementary steps to higher-level math, Lin said.
“When they start doing algebra, when they start having to do it in depth … that’s when they start falling apart,” Lin said.
Lin, who is black and married to a Chinese engineer, said she believes a racial achievement gap exists in math because lower-income, minority children often get a watered-down lesson compared with students in predominantly white suburban schools, because some teachers don’t believe the poorer students are prepared for more challenging lessons.
Parental involvement is another factor, Lin said.
“Most of the kids who do well are those who have parents who can explain it to them or hire someone to explain it to them,” she said.
Ajah Thomas, soon to be an East High School sophomore, recalls feeling lost when she took algebra in ninth grade last year, even though she’d studied the subject the previous year.
The 15-year-old black student said her algebra class was filled with minority students. “Some whites took algebra, but most of them were in geometry,” she said.
Ajah said she hasn’t felt as though her teachers were invested in her being successful.
“I want to pass. I want to go to college,” Ajah said, “But if I can’t get the teacher to encourage me, where else am I going to get that encouragement?”
Her mother, Chalise Jones, said her daughter’s math scores were abysmal last year.
“They’re not connected to the teachers,” she said. “What people are missing is that education is more than coming to a classroom and lecturing,” she said. “It’s total involvement, getting your arms around your kids.”
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
