Port St. Lucie News Ft. In the nation s latest four-year round of math tests, there was a sliver of sunshine. But the vast, surrounding dark was more the story. Despite improvement in the fourth and eighth grades, about 75 percent of those students scored below basic proficiency. If these seniors make it to a good college, remediation may well be required, reform-group experts note.
Minorities continue to lag.
Blacks were 2 percent of the top eighth-grade students, and Hispanics 3 percent, although their proportion of school population are many times those numbers. To fix what is broken is not differential calculus. You start with what a teacher does not know. It is that students scored better on these tests when their teachers majored in math. Among the steps to placing more highly qualified teachers in the classroom is dispensing with certification requirements.