An Inner-City High School Makes an X-ample of Itself in Math

Kelly Reese stood in silence at the chalkboard, where this was waiting for him:

“Demonstrate the steps that show b 2-2b = 35 when b = -5.”

It is a simple problem in algebra, but after completing one step, Reese was stumped.

“When I was doing it I was thinking about adding and subtracting,” said Reese, a ninth grader at Dunbar High School. He added where he should have multiplied.

Reese, 16, like millions of high school students before him, is struggling with the study of mathematical equations with unknown variables, a common requirement for college admission. A chronic absentee who started at quarterback on the freshman team, Reese is unsure whether he wants to go to college or be an auto worker.

Either way, Dunbar High officials are sure that he needs algebra. This year, the inner-city school decided on its own to require nearly all of its 400 ninth graders to take Algebra I. School officials plan to use the results of the Dunbar experiment to build a case that all Dayton students should be required to take algebra, and perhaps also geometry, to earn a diploma.

Currently, only public high schools in Louisiana and scattered districts elsewhere require every student to study algebra. In all but the most academically oriented schools, most students have been either frightened or steered into less challenging mathematics courses.

“There was a time when Dayton’s economy supported this kind of sorting (of students),” said Leon Love, Dunbar’s principal. “A student could graduate from high school, get a job in a factory and make more money than a teacher. Then all that changed, 10 to 15 years ago. We have changed to more of a service economy.”

Once dominated by factories that produced automobile parts and refrigerators, Dayton’s economic base has shifted to technological businesses such as Mead Corp., which compiles electronic data bases, and NCR Corp., the computer maker. The factories that remain have been modernized and computerized; they now employ highly skilled labor.

“They (students) think basic mathematics is going to be sufficient, because they think they’re going to be stamping things,” said Sue Elling, executive director of the business-financed Dayton-Montgomery County Public Education Fund. “But they need very sophisticated skills in measurement and estimation. They need to know how to think mathematically and problem-solve.”

To many students, it may be a mystery why they have to solve math problems that involve X and Y, nut educators say that algebra teaches fundamental skills--logical thinking and problem-solving --that are needed in either the workplace or in college.

A College Board report describes algebra and geometry as “gatekeeper” courses that could open college opportunities to minorities. The board president, Donald M. Stewart, has urged “serious consideration of a national policy that all students take algebra and geometry.”

Other educators doubt that the nation could reach the ambitious goal of becoming first in the world in math and science achievement by the year 2000 unless all students learn at least algebra.

“How can we do that without having every student take algebra? That’s a scandal!” said Janice Earle, who directs the Center on Educational Equity at the National Assn. of State Boards of Education.

Taking heed of the landmark 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” most states set higher math requirements for high school graduation. Little evidence of this can be found, however, in recent scores on either the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Some educators suspect that many students have been allowed to meet the new requirements the easy way--by taking more courses in basic math--known as general math, consumer math, business math or, at one time in Dayton, “Math for Life.” Typically, these courses involve arithmetic drills with ever-longer strings of numbers.

“Most states have increased math requirements since ‘A Nation at Risk,’ to very little effect. They didn’t define the content of courses,” Earle said. “It’s the most superficial of cosmetic changes.”

Dunbar’s experiment in mandatory algebra has proved to be no simple solution, either. About 60% of the ninth graders, including Reese, failed the course last fall and are covering the same material again this semester.

Teachers attributed the high failure rate primarily to absenteeism, which runs about 20% daily at Dunbar, and lack of effort.

“With their work habits, their attendance, they wouldn’t be doing well in any course,” said Ronald Rogacki, math department chairman.

Reese conceded that he missed many classes. “When they put me back to start all over again, I was kind of mad,” he said. “If I would have just come (to class) I would have passed, because I could do the algebra.”

His teacher, Shirley Cooper, agreed. She said she expects Reese to pass this semester.

Teachers also said that many students manifest problems with math skills they should have mastered long ago--such as basic operations, fractions, decimals and negative numbers. (Reese, for instance, had miscalculated b 2 to be -10 by adding -5 and -5, instead of multiplying the numbers to get +25.)

Teachers said they have slowed the algebra course to allow time for reviewing such skills, but students continue to stumble over them.

“I get confused with the x’s and the y’s and the negatives,” said Davida Golding, 15, who passed algebra last semester and is aiming for law school. “Fractions are hard. I didn’t understand them in elementary school, junior high. . . . So, you get to high school and don’t know what you’re doing.”

A less concrete problem is the students’ lack of confidence. They have absorbed others’ low expectations of them and share the “math anxiety” that pervades American society.

“A lot of our kids, when you say ‘algebra,’ there’s a mental block,” said Love, the principal. “A lot of kids say they can’t do it.”

Lamont McCoy, 15, earned a B in algebra last semester but still expresses some doubt about his abilities in the subject. “When I see a big, long problem, I think I can’t do it, that it’s very difficult,” McCoy said. But he is warming up to the subject, he said, because “I kind of like challenges.”

An odd thing happened last October when Dunbar’s ninth graders took a state math-competency test: They performed better in algebra than in basic arithmetic. Only 21% of the students did average or better in arithmetic; 51% of them scored at those levels in algebra.

School officials cited the test results as evidence of how challenging a student and raising expectations can improve performance. “Kids will learn whatever we teach them,” Love said.

Even with the high failure rate last semester, school officials said the ninth graders as a group learned more math than they would have in a basic math course. In the past, they said, failure rates in basic math courses at Dunbar have been about as high.

“My perspective is if you’re put in an algebra course, and even if you learn 50%, isn’t that better than 0% if you never take it?” Supt. Franklin L. Smith said.

There is one dissenter among the six math teachers at Dunbar. Carlin Miller has opposed algebra for all students. She feels that some just do not have the ability to learn the subject.

“Not everybody can be Picasso. Not everybody can be (Dayton track star) Edwin Moses,” Miller said. “Can’t everybody handle it, so I don’t think it’s fair to them. . . . If they hear it over and over again, if they hear it 10 times, they might get it, but they don’t have 10 times to take it. High school is only four years.”

Similar arguments led the school board to bypass Smith’s 1986 proposal to make algebra a graduation requirement for all Dayton high school students.

“I met with some degree of opposition from school board members and members of the community who thought it was too high a standard,” Smith said. “As a matter of expectations, people could not believe these kids could pass algebra.”

The Dunbar experiment is part of Smith’s effort to build a case for mandatory algebra, which he may propose again this fall.

Jo Helen Williams, Dayton’s supervisor of secondary math, would like Smith to go a step further and propose that all high school students take both algebra and geometry. The state of Ohio requires two years of high school math but, like most states, does not specify which courses.

Smith said that requiring geometry, the course usually taken after Algebra I, is unnecessary. “If we get the algebra they’ll take geometry,” he said.

At Dunbar, Rogacki estimated that this year’s ninth graders would spend three semesters on Algebra I instead of the usual two. They would then take a semester of “informal geometry” to meet state math requirements.

“We’re trying to make learning the math the variable, rather than the time spent in class,” Rogacki said. “I’m optimistic about this. I think it’s going to take a couple of years before it can be evaluated, but I think we’re on the right track.”

Williams suggested that Dunbar, whose students have the social problems of the urban poor, could serve as a national model if nearly every ninth grader does learn algebra.

“If it can work at an inner-city school, it can work anywhere,” she said.