Revisiting the Legacy of San Francisco’s Detracking Experiment

Even years later, San Francisco Unified School District casts a shadow over attempts to quash long-standing disparities in math.

In 2014, the district pushed algebra to ninth grade from eighth grade, in an attempt to eliminate the tracking, or grouping, of students into lower and upper math paths. The district hoped that scrapping honors math classes and eighth grade algebra courses would reduce disparities in math learning in the district.

For advocates, it struck at the very core of why only some students perform well in math.

When districts slot students into math classes based on ability they send conspicuous messages to those on the lower track that they are not smart enough, says Ho Nguyen, who was a K-12 math and computer science program administrator in San Francisco during the district’s detracking attempt. It’s not that it’s always intentional, he’s quick to add. But these hierarchies affect students’ belief systems and also tend to lower teachers’ expectations of students labeled worse at math, Nguyen says. Those attempting to reform this practice contend that all students are mathematically brilliant, he says.

Researchers have shown that districts around the country don’t use the same criteria when grouping students into higher or lower math classes. That was true in San Francisco, Nguyen says. Plus, he adds, it’s common for tracking to focus on narrow factors such as test scores that don’t account for discrepancies in opportunities to learn math that accrue throughout a student’s academic career.

So for Nguyen and other advocates, moving algebra to ninth grade made the district a beacon because, he says, it was the first urban district in the country to untrack students. For him, it wouldn’t be less rigorous either, since California’s Common Core math standards had by then incorporated more algebraic material in eighth-grade courses.

Nevertheless, the attempt was tense. That’s in part because algebra is considered a critical point in the race to calculus. When students take algebra can affect whether they get into calculus — considered a key factor in competitive college admissions processes — along with other factors such as whether schools offer enough courses for students or what advice students receive from guidance counselors. So when the district announced that algebra wouldn’t be introduced until the ninth grade, some parents became upset, believing that the delay impaired their children’s math learning and college ambitions. Critics also challenged the arguments and data used by the district to justify the policy.

This year San Francisco unraveled its nearly 10-year experiment. The Board of Supervisors voted to bring back middle-school algebra, and a city ballot measure to reinstate eighth-grade algebra passed with about 82 percent of the vote. By then, California’s K-12 math framework, the state-level guide for math instruction, had altered language about the ninth-grade algebra approach.

Now that the firestorm has passed, some say the initial judgments were too harsh: The percentage of students enrolled in math classes in San Francisco beyond Algebra II increased from 2018 to 2021, according to data recently highlighted by detracking advocate Kentaro Iwasaki, founder of Concentric Math. It shows that a common argument against detracking — that it hurts students by holding them back from higher level math courses — is wrong, Iwasaki says. (Though he wasn’t working in the district at the time, Iwasaki’s detracking work provided some of the basis for San Francisco’s effort, and he was consulting with the district during the experiment.)

But Iwasaki admits that changing when students take algebra didn’t overturn math disparities in the district. So he and others argue that improving community and student experience would have alleviated the disparities. But is that true, and if so what would it look like?

Performing the Autopsy

Proponents of the detracking effort see themselves as fighting against the tide of the country’s education system and, even more difficult, its culture.

Tracking is a racist and classicist system because it adversely impacts Black, Hispanic, Native American and some groups of Asian students by disproportionately denying them access to higher math courses once they have been pushed into lower math paths, says Nguyen, formerly of San Francisco Unified. It connects to long-standing inequalities in the education system: “Anytime there’s an increase in learning diversity, our system segregates,” he says. Districts separate students with IEPs, students who need language development or those with behavioral issues from the main classroom. Nguyen maintains that the tendency is rooted in a “white supremacist” vision of the social order, going back to segregation: “It’s in the water,” he says.

Families who have benefited from tracking support it because they want to preserve their children’s advantage, Nguyen says. Students in upper-track math courses are no smarter or better at math than others. But their families have managed to give them a jump-start through additional after-school programs, tutors and other resources, he says. These advantages have been denied to many historically disadvantaged students, which is why it’s unfair to use tests or grades to decide who gets access to higher math courses — and the science, technology, engineering and math careers those courses can unlock, he adds. It’s worse when class and race intersect, he says.

But even before San Francisco ended its experiment, the data coming out of the district had become bitterly contested.

An often cited paper from Stanford University researchers demonstrated mixed results, ultimately concluding that the reform did not crucially reduce disparities among students taking advanced math courses.

Still, the change was working, according to Nguyen and Iwasaki. They contend the district eliminated tracking in middle and high school without seriously harming enrollments in AP Calculus, based on the data three years after implementation from the Stanford study.

But detracking is just one component, and can be a fairly technical solution concerning math disparities, Iwasaki says. If the work had continued, it could have confronted the causes of those math gaps through instructional and curricular changes, providing professional development, shifts in how classrooms are structured and the mindset of students and teachers, he says. For instance, at Mission High, a San Francisco school that got rid of tracking, Iwasaki and others worked with the counseling office to determine which students should be scheduled in classes together to maximize their potential for success. For instance, they used teacher observations to identify which students or groups of students would perform well in that class. They also worked with students and teachers to identify how the strain of negative stereotypes might threaten students’ learning.

It had to be rolled out at the district level, Nguyen says. But because of limited resources, concentrating on collecting data from — and providing additional professional learning supports to — just a few schools with high levels of underrepresented students would have shown better how much the change benefited disadvantaged students, Nguyen argues. The district also should have devoted more resources for teacher support, such as coaching, he adds.

Conversely, critics see San Francisco’s failed experiment as a reflection of a flawed approach.

Relying on data obtained from public records requests, the advocacy group Families for San Francisco claimed the district misinterpreted the research, and therefore misled parents, when it declared that the efforts boosted the number of students in higher math courses and reduced the number of students forced to retake Algebra I, Geometry or Algebra II. What’s more, they argued, the district’s policy actually introduced new inequalities in access to advanced math courses because private schools and wealthy parent teacher associations could fund additional course offerings.

Tom Loveless, a former Brookings Institution researcher and author of a book about detracking, says that in the years after the policy’s adoption, assessment data shows that gaps in math achievement widened in the district. Detracking doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is achievement gaps, Loveless argues. It’s common for students who struggle in math to also struggle in other subjects, and that can lead them to develop “anti-school behaviors,” like poor attendance or behavioral problems, and these characteristics must be addressed, he argues.

In Loveless’ view, tracking can sometimes increase equity by expanding opportunity. Districts should make a greater effort to accelerate mathematically advanced students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Loveless says, pointing toward research that has concluded that Black and Hispanic fourth graders in a large urban district saw reading and math performance bumps from tracking.

Turning Down the Volume

But for advocates, the work continues.

Many of the districts that work with Iwasaki, of Concentric Math, are investigating how they might alter their approach. It’s now more common for them to pilot algebra for all eighth graders — a response, Iwasaki says, to criticisms that delaying algebra until ninth grade holds back students by not providing a pathway to calculus.

Loveless, the former Brookings researcher, considers the push for all students to take algebra in the eighth grade — an alternative approach that San Francisco has also tried and which is under consideration in schools near Boston, Massachusetts — unwise, because it can force students to perform in a class for which they are unprepared.

Those critical of San Francisco’s detracking attempt argue that the district put too much emphasis on public relations to the point that it misrepresented the research. But for Iwasaki, the opposite was true: They lost the PR battle by not focusing on getting enough community buy-in, and opening the space for critics to single out negative-looking data points. Instead, they should have found a way to elevate the voices of the students who would have been positively impacted by the work, Iwasaki says. The district was also reluctant to respond to criticism, which meant that in the absence of answers to detractors, the critics won by default, he says.

For some, the brawl pushed the work out of the public spotlight.

In the last couple of years, Nguyen says he’s felt “muzzled,” because his superiors would not allow him to speak openly about the foray into detracking for fear he would contradict the district’s unwind of the experiment.

Nguyen also commented that the district’s seven-person math team never got a chance to make its case to the superintendent about the harm tracking causes. He said he believes that these positions were eliminated due to their involvement with the detracking attempt. “The superintendent and the math department could have found ways to delay or offer solutions that could appease enough parents. He was not an ally and instead did the bidding of the Board of Education, most of whom sided with the small group of parents who pushed for tracking,” Nguyen wrote in a note to EdSurge.

These days, Nguyen works in San Mateo, a nearby suburb, as a curriculum and instruction services coordinator.

Meanwhile, San Francisco Unified argues that its emphasis on equity remains steadfast.

“We are currently engaged in the first year of a two-year pilot of several different approaches to teaching Algebra 1 in eighth grade in our middle and K-8 schools,” a spokesperson for San Francisco Unified wrote in response to a request for comment from EdSurge.

“We will continue to monitor student progress and the effectiveness of these courses. Our value of equity and ensuring that all students not only have access to, but are successful in, higher level math courses continue to guide our work,” the spokesperson wrote.

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