Let’s Be Honest About the Math Gap in Texas

Earlier this month we released a new analysis highlighting the “Graduation Gap.” It turns out that many states have enormous gaps between the percentage of students who score proficient in high school math versus those who are able to earn a diploma.

These gaps reflect an unfortunate trend across the country. Most noticeably, kids are enrolling in higher education who lack sufficient math skills.

So why aren’t we celebrating a state like Texas, which has a much smaller gap? Mainly because we don’t believe them.

Texas, for example, reports that four out of five students pass the state’s end-of-course Algebra exam. That lines up favorably with its 91% graduation rate.

And yet, Texas’ 8^th grade math scores come in lower than 32 states and the District of Columbia on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Less than a quarter of Texas’ 8^th graders scored Proficient or above on the national test.

The table below compares Texas with its neighboring states. Texas does have higher 8^th grade NAEP scores for its region and slightly more of its students reach the “Proficient” benchmark on the national test. But now look at how the two columns compare to each other. Arkansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma all have rates that are similar to each other. Louisiana is a bit of an outlier, but Texas has a huge disconnect between its 8^th grade and high school results.

Virginia is another state with this issue. Just 28% of its 8^th graders met the NAEP benchmark in the same year that it reported 81% of its 9^th graders passed its 9^th grade end-of-course Algebra exam. Virginia’s students are either making an extraordinary leap in mathematics skills between 8^th and 9^th grade, or the state is not clearly communicating to its students how their mathematical skills truly stack up.

Zooming out, the states with some of the largest “graduation gaps” also tend to be the ones that use a math assessment that’s aligned to an external standard. For example, the ACT or SAT exams are linked to success in college. As a result, the states that use those exams as their high school assessment all report math proficiency rates around 20-40%, depending on the state and the specific benchmark used. States using the Smarter Balanced exam also tend to have lower math proficiency raters, because its cut scores are also aligned to college success.

Ultimately, the “graduation gap” project is meant to highlight this disconnect. But states also shouldn’t just “fix the glitch” and lower their standards so that their math proficiency rates line up with their graduation rates. When they do that, they are merely lying to students about what they need to know and be able to do to be successful in higher education or other life pursuits. Instead, they need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to boost students’ math performance early, and they should also be more honest about what a diploma truly signifies.