CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Ask parent Janina Matuszeski what she has valued most about her twins’ experience in the Cambridge Public Schools to this point, and she is quick to cite the diversity and teacher quality.
If there is one area in which the schools have performed less well in serving her children, who just completed eighth grade, it has been math.
“Both my kids have been bored in math for many years,” said Matuszeski, a consultant and former lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “They’ll learn a concept in a day or a day and a half, and then the class will cover it for another two weeks.”
So Matuszeski and her husband were thrilled when Cambridge announced that it would place all eighth graders in Algebra I. Before the change, which went into effect this past fall, Cambridge middle schools did not offer Algebra I, though parents of advanced students who could afford it frequently enrolled their children in algebra classes outside of school, giving their own kids a boost but widening the educational gaps between poor and middle-class students.
In certain school districts and corners of higher education, few issues have stirred more passionate debate in recent years than how fast middle and high schoolers should be allowed to progress in math — and, specifically, when they should be able to take algebra. Completing Algebra I in eighth grade puts students on a path to take Calculus by senior year, which many see as an unspoken requirement for getting into a selective college and a prerequisite for certain careers in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
But since not all kids may be ready for Algebra I in middle school, giving some students that opportunity often leads to tracking, or separating kids by perceived academic ability. Critics say that can harm students placed in the lower track and worsen socioeconomic and racial divides in education.
Many districts have responded to those concerns by eliminating algebra in eighth grade altogether. Most notably, San Francisco did so in 2014, generating backlash from parents that recently led the city to reverse itself. Cambridge, by contrast, is trying to satisfy the demands of parents who want their children to be able to move faster in math without sacrificing its ideal of mixed-level, racially integrated classes. If it succeeds, it will suggest that, with sufficient resources and will, other districts can also offer advanced coursework in middle school without introducing tracking.
To be sure, to some experts, this experiment looks a little like the triumph of hope over experience: Other districts and at least two states have tried offering Algebra I to all or most eighth graders, and studies of those efforts have found negative results for less well-prepared students.
Already, there have been bumps: In interviews, several middle school math educators in Cambridge said that this year’s rollout felt rushed and poorly planned. More broadly, early signs suggest that Cambridge will have to raise math achievement significantly in earlier grades if it wants all eighth graders to be prepared to succeed in algebra. More than 60 percent of rising ninth graders will retake Algebra I again next year because they did not do well enough in it this year, according to data the district shared last week with the school board.
Cambridge administrators said in an email that they held several conversations with teachers to monitor the rollout. “The work of identifying the best possible academic trajectory for all students is never finished,” the superintendent, David Murphy, said in a statement.
Thurston Domina, an associate dean for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Education who has studied the results of California’s algebra-for-all policies, said the question of when students should take the class is “a really hard problem.” “There are only so many options, and none of them are satisfying.”
Related: One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well
When the Cambridge school system — an economically and racially diverse district of about 7,000 students — created standalone middle schools in 2012, those schools did not offer algebra. But two years later — partly in response to parent demand for algebra and partly in response to teachers who said they were struggling to teach the wide range of levels in math classes — the district introduced two tracks for seventh and eighth graders, a “grade-level” track, which did not include algebra, and an “accelerated” track, which did.
Students were assigned to the tracks based on tests and teacher recommendations, but parents could also advocate for their children to be placed in the upper track. In part as a result, racial and socioeconomic divides in accelerated math classes were stark: In the 2015-16 school year, for example, among seventh graders, only about 33 percent of Hispanic students, 25 percent of Black students and 26 percent of economically disadvantaged students were in accelerated math, according to a district presentation; the shares for white, Asian and wealthier disadvantaged students were 70, 56 and 69 percent, respectively.
A backlash quickly grew among principals, teachers and a small number of parents. Some educators felt that concentrating all the high-needs students, and those who disliked math, into certain classes held those students back. Indeed, data from state tests showed that students in the accelerated track learned more than those in the grade-level track, a common trend in studies of tracking. Meanwhile, because of the middle schools’ scheduling constraints, students in the two tracks weren’t separated just for math, but often for other classes as well.
Educators and parents also worried that being placed in the lower track undermined students’ self-confidence.
“No matter what I said to her, she read it as, ‘Because I’m dumb,’” recalled a mother whose daughter was put in the grade-level track and who did not want to be identified talking about her daughter’s experience. “And she probably would still now.”
In 2019, the district ended the tracks, with the intention that all students would get the accelerated curriculum. But the pandemic derailed that effort, and instead the middle schools reverted to the grade-level curriculum. Over the next few years, parents of advanced students grew increasingly frustrated, especially when the district announced in early 2023 that it would no longer allow students who’d taken Algebra I classes outside of school to automatically skip the course at the high school.
Algebra became an issue in elections that year for school board: A tech entrepreneur and mother of three, Elizabeth Hudson, whose flyers proclaimed “MISSING: Advanced Math in Cambridge Public Schools” over a picture of a sad little boy holding an algebra textbook, won election by a landslide. Shortly before the election, the district announced that it would accelerate the middle school curriculum so that all students were prepared to take Algebra I in eighth grade in the 2025-26 school year. But Cambridge then appeared to drag its feet until January 2025, when, under pressure from parents not to miss the deadline, it instructed all seventh grade math teachers to change their pacing midyear in order to cram some of the eighth grade material into seventh grade.
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Research on districts that have successfully put low-performing students in more advanced math classes has found they have generally done so by offering extra support to students, such as a “double dose” (two periods of math) or tutoring, or extra support to teachers, in the form of professional development, coaching and extra planning time.
Cambridge implemented some extra support: The district required that every eighth grade algebra class have a second teacher in the room, like a special educator or math interventionist. And at one middle school, the Cambridge Street Upper School, it put eighth graders this year in two math classes simultaneously — Algebra I and the regular eighth grade math course. (In others, algebra teachers had to also cover the eighth grade math units that the seventh grade teachers weren’t able to get to last spring.)
In an algebra class at Cambridge Street in April, a teacher was trying hard to get all students — not just the more confident students, or what school staff refer to as “first talkers” — to participate. (The district allowed a reporter to visit the classroom on the condition that the teacher was not named.)
When only a few students raised their hands to answer her question about calculating an interest rate, she said: “You know I’m going to wait for seven. One, two, three, four … ” — she counted the number of hands up. “I’m waiting for three more people. Five … six … seven — there it is,” she said, before calling on one of the students.
While the eighth graders worked on problems, the math interventionist circulated among them, prompting students to get started if they hadn’t or checking answers.
Despite efforts like these, given the wide range of skill levels in Cambridge classrooms, many eighth graders have found their Algebra I classes difficult, even overwhelming. (Others, including Matuszeski’s twins, have found them too easy.)
Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. A few districts buck the trend
A mother of a student who just finished eighth grade at Rindge Avenue Upper School, who asked not to be named to avoid identifying her son, said she felt that the rushed pace had created unnecessary stress and frustration for him. While she had supported in theory the district’s decision to reintroduce algebra in eighth grade, she said she had expected it to make some accommodations for students like her son, who struggles in math and receives special education services. His special educators told her that they didn’t think that the accelerated curriculum was appropriate for him and students with similar challenges, she said.
“We’re being pulled along on the coattails of these gifted kids, or the families of these gifted kids,” she said, “and the school district did not figure out a way to do this so that both sets of kids, and all of the ones in between, would be well served.”
By contrast, Oxana Shevel said that her daughter, Isabella Montana, who also just completed eighth grade at Rindge Avenue, had also found the accelerated pace hard but that she’d received a lot of support, including working twice a week in a small group with a math interventionist (which she had done before the algebra rollout, as well). She was also allowed to retake tests to improve her grades. Over the course of this year, Shevel said, Isabella got more confident.
“At the beginning of the year, it was much harder,” Isabella said, adding that she wished students had had more time to catch up on some of the seventh or eighth grade material they had missed or had to race through last year.
In March, when eighth graders had to register for their classes next year at the high school, math teachers recommended, based on their scores on end-of-unit tests and other factors, whether they should go into Geometry or take Algebra I again.
For some students, being told they needed to take algebra again was a blow. An eighth grade math teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the teacher was not authorized by the district to speak, described meeting individually with every student to tell them which course the teacher was recommending for next year and said some students cried when they learned they would repeat algebra.
Others aren’t taking having to repeat the course as a sign of failure, however. The district’s high school offers two options for Algebra I — a yearlong course and a semester-long honors class that is faster paced and gives students the chance to take Calculus by their senior year as long as they “double up” on math at some point.
Isabella plans to take the honors course, something she and her mother said they would not have considered had she not been exposed to algebra in eighth grade.
“I’m glad in hindsight that they did accelerated, because she now has more options for the high school than she would have otherwise,” Shevel said.
Three educators who spoke for this article said that, while they were not against offering algebra in eighth grade, the district’s rushed and haphazard approach bothered them.
The district never said what exactly it was hoping to achieve — more students taking honors or Advanced Placement math classes at the high school? Something else? — and it had not invited teachers to reflect on how this year had gone.
“No one’s asking those questions,” said the eighth grade math teacher.
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In an interview in February, the superintendent, Murphy, also seemed uncertain if algebra-for-all was the right policy for Cambridge in the long run. Murphy, who was previously the district’s chief operating officer, became the interim superintendent in 2024 — after the adoption of the algebra plan — and the permanent superintendent last October. He appeared to express openness to reintroducing some kind of tracking in middle school math.
“At some point, we have to have a larger conversation about why is it that we are so concerned about deleveling at the K-8 level, and then all of a sudden they get to the high school and we are immediately sorting students into specific math classes with different names,” he said. “I think there’s an obvious incongruence there.”
As for Matuszeski, she said that she supported Cambridge’s policy of detracked math classes in middle school and the teachers’ focus “on getting the weakest learners up to the middle, which I think is really important.”
But she is looking forward to her twins going to high school. This spring, she and her husband encouraged them to take an online geometry class, so that they could start ninth grade in Algebra II honors, then proceed to Precalculus.
“We presented it to them as: ‘If you do this math class, you can get into math classes in high school where you can move faster and do more and possibly have more kids who are more focused in math,’” she said.
Nothing about her choices — or the district’s — was black and white, she said: “Trying to balance what’s best for the community and what’s best for every child in the community with what your child needs is hard.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about 8th grade math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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