The Florida Council of 100 is correct to say there is a “rigor gap” harming the readiness of Florida high school students for college-level mathematics. But it’s not in Algebra 1, where they say it is. Instead, it’s in Precalculus.

Updated (Friday, September 25): Analysis now includes the course “Mathematical Analysis”, which was not included in the original version.

Florida’s leaders tend to misidentify the state’s educational problems.

For example, the Florida Council of 100 recently released a working paper titled “The Rigor Gap: Comparing Course Grades and End–of–Course Exam Results of Algebra I and 10th Grade English Students in Florida” that purports to be about readiness for postsecondary education. The paper opens with these two paragraphs:

Despite the clear message that exists today of the near necessity of a postsecondary credential to achieve economic self–sufficiency, many still fail to attain it. The most recent data show that only 39% and 65% of students who started at two–year and four–year public institutions, respectively, in 2012 completed a degree within six years of starting (Shapiro et al, 2019). While a great effort is being made by higher education institutions to improve these outcomes, portions of the problem likely lie in factors affecting students before they ever step foot on a college campus.

One factor could be that many college–going students simply are not prepared for the academic rigors of a postsecondary education. While 84% of high school students report that they want to pursue postsecondary education (YouthTruth, 2017) and 79% of parents believe their child will earn a 2– or 4–year degree (Learning Heroes, 2019), a 2017 nationwide survey found only half of 12th grade students felt that their school had helped them develop the skills and knowledge they needed for college–level classes (YouthTruth). Indicative of this perspective in Florida, 100% and 54% of 2019 Florida high school graduates took the SAT and ACT, respectively, and failed to demonstrate college readiness at the following rates: SAT English/Reading/Writing (39% of students aren’t college ready), SAT Math (66%), ACT English (44%), ACT Math (67%), and ACT Reading (55%) (ACT, 2019; CollegeBoard, 2019a). The 2019 SAT results also showed that only 33% of Florida high school graduates earned “college ready” scores in both English/Reading/Writing and Math, compared to 45% nationally (CollegeBoard, 2019b), and 2019 ACT Results showed that only 22% of Florida high school graduates met ACT’s college readiness benchmarks in all four tested subject areas, compared to the national average of 26%.

I agree with these two paragraphs, as far as they go.

One of their primary research conclusions – the “Rigor Gap” of their title in math – is that there are too many Florida high school students who earn grades of C or better in their Algebra 1 classes but do not pass the state’s Algebra 1 end of course exam. I think that is an important conclusion, too.

But if the authors of the study are really interested in postsecondary readiness, their focus on Algebra 1 is misplaced. Research on Florida’s high school graduating class of 1999 by Tyson et al. demonstrated that the high school math subjects necessary for students to be well-prepared for bachelors’ degree programs are trigonometry and precalculus. That’s not just in STEM fields – that’s for bachelors’ degree programs in all fields. The bachelor’s degree attainment rate jumped from below 20% for students who had stopped at Algebra 2 in high school to above 40% for those who had completed a precalculus course in high school. (The big jump in STEM bachelor’s degree attainment occurs when high school students take a calculus course, as can be seen in the figure below.)

There is indeed a “rigor gap” in the mathematical preparation of Florida’s students for postsecondary education, and it’s this: Florida falls far short of the national average in the rate at which its high school students take courses in subjects like precalculus in a category more broadly called “Advanced Mathematics”.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2015-16 15.1% of the nation’s high school students were taking a course in “Advanced Mathematics”, which includes “trigonometry, trigonometry/algebra, trigonometry/analytic geometry, trigonometry/math analysis, analytic geometry, math analysis, math analysis/analytic geometry, probability and statistics, and precalculus”. In Florida during the Fall of 2019, only 10.8% of the public high school students were taking such a course, according to course enrollment data posted by the Florida Department of Education.

At Florida public high schools, there were 92,810 enrollments in courses that meet the NCES definition of “Advanced Mathematics” in the Fall of 2019. A little more than half (45,989) were enrolled in “Pre-calculus Honors”. Large numbers of students were also enrolled in “Probability and Statistics with Applications” (18,277) and Advanced Placement Statistics (13,063). The remaining courses in this category enrolling more than 1,000 students were “Trigonometry Honors” (6,621), “Mathematical Analysis” (4,162), “International Baccalaureate Pre-calculus” (1,685), dual enrollment “Precalculus Algebra” (1,334) and dual enrollment “Trigonometry” (1,064). The 92,810-student total may be a bit high since some students might have been taking two of the courses in the category, like Precalculus Honors and AP Statistics (one of my children took both of those courses at the same time), and would therefore be double-counted in summing up course enrollments as I have done. That 92,810-student total is 10.8% of the number of students enrolled in Florida’s high schools in the fall of 2019, which was 855,592.

It would certainly be convenient if Florida could solve its postsecondary readiness problem in math by tweaking the grading policies of some of its Algebra 1 teachers. Alas, the state has much bigger problems in preparing its high school students for the mathematical rigors they will face in college. In particular, Florida’s culture of underperformance in high school math (“Just Read, Florida!”), enabled by state policies, undermines the desire of students and parents to push on to the challenging upper level math courses offered at the state’s high schools. The fallout from this is reflected in Florida’s poor showing in the rate at which the state graduates students with bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering fields.

The Florida Council of 100 was right to say there is a rigor gap in Florida’s high school math classrooms. They just failed the test of identifying what that rigor gap is.

Bachelor’s degree attainment rates for all fields (top) and STEM fields (bottom) for students whose highest high school math courses are those shown. Results from Tyson et al. The illustrations are taken from White and Cottle.