But when district leaders examined what these courses truly accomplished, they realized they held kids back, keeping them from higher-level math. 

So one by one, starting in 2014, this 15,000-student school system an hour southeast of Washington D.C., began eliminating lower-level math courses. The last one to go, intermediate algebra, was pulled in 2021. 

Calvert County school leaders have observed significant gains in math in the past two decades: nearly 100% of their students successfully completed the more challenging Algebra II in 2025 compared to just 67% in 2006. 

The advancement was even more pronounced among Black students: 99% did the same last year compared to 51% 20 years ago. Kids with disabilities also saw dramatic improvements as 94% completed the course in 2025 compared to 20% in 2006.  

Joe Sutton, Calvert County schools’ supervisor of secondary mathematics and the force behind the elimination of these lower-level classes, said the move was overdue. 

“We couldn’t find any evidence these courses were increasing students’ subsequent grades, their graduation rates or their state test passing scores,” he said. “After two or three, we started to recognize this is a pattern: Erring on the side of caution ended up underpreparing our students — particularly those from historically underserved groups.”

The decision meant more students were exposed to higher-level math. 

Ninety-nine percent of seniors completed courses in 2025 that were recognized by the University System of Maryland as rigorous for 12th graders, up from 40% in 2006. This included honors precalculus, advanced mathematics, and Advanced Placement Statistics, a college-level-course. Once again, gains were further pronounced among historically marginalized groups: A full 98% of Black students did the same compared to 22% in 2006. Ninety-four percent of students with disabilities achieved that outcome in 2025 compared to 0% 19 years earlier.

Though it wasn’t a direct replacement, statistics and advanced mathematics have largely taken the place of business math, Algebra III and academic precalculus, Sutton said. 

The elimination of remedial or intermediate courses meant students and their teachers had to reach a higher standard. Professional development helped educators meet the academic needs of every child, including those who might struggle mightily with the material, Sutton said. And the district invited kids to lunchtime and after-school tutoring as needed.

Just as important: Staff had to abandon the earlier practices that underestimated kids’ potential, he said, and stymied their ability. They had to take a close and critical look at access.

It wasn’t an easy shift. Sutton spent years battling teachers and counselors who thought he was taking the district in the wrong direction by doing away with the more basic courses.

“I had to spend some of my social capital in order to get to where we are because it did make things harder for teachers — especially upfront,” Sutton said, knowing he would be adding more students to their classes who couldn’t instantly graph a line or solve a multi-step equation. “But just by virtue of being in that course, they’re going to grow more and we’re going to do more good for our community.”

Sutton, who founded one of the courses he later removed, intermediate algebra, admitted he didn’t do the best job of selling his approach initially. 

“In the first few years, there was just concern, a lack of faith in what we were doing,” he said. “For a while, any time a high school teacher saw me walking in the hallway, the one thing they wanted to talk about is, ‘We really shouldn’t have gotten rid of that course.’”

Andrew Brantlinger, associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy, and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, knew Sutton faced a tough challenge and commended him for sticking with it. 

“The call to eliminate these kinds of classes is not new,” Brantlinger said, “but that a district leader would do it — I don’t know how often that really happens.”

He said schools around the country have been de-tracking classes since the ’80s, as working-class students were attending college at higher rates and needed access to more advanced mathematics than earlier generations had been given.

Brantlinger notes that the influential has been a major player in the movement to remove such courses, which he calls “low track” or “terminal.” 

A 2024 of below grade-level 9th graders found those enrolled in mixed-level Algebra I classes — led by properly trained teachers — did substantially better on 11th-grade math tests compared to peers placed into a remedial course.

Such measures, researchers discovered, increased attendance plus the likelihood of the student staying in the district all four years — and completing college-ready math while there. Also, they note, there was no evidence of a negative effect on higher-performing kids in the mixed group.

On the local level, Sutton said, it meant a change in how Calvert County kids advanced through the subject from year to year.  

“Course placement recommendations were based entirely on what students had accomplished in the past,” he said. “And now we’re at a point where course recommendations are based on what a student wants to accomplish in their future. It’s a really big paradigm shift, and it was really concerning for a lot of stakeholders.”

Sutton said the school district counsels kids about their academic and professional goals each February. It’s at that point that they determine what type of courses they’ll need to succeed. 

Algebra I is now the “lowest” level class offered at the high school. And if kids need support, Sutton said, the district offers a semester- or year-long Algebra Lab course they can take concurrently with Algebra I to get extra practice.

Casie Reynolds, a math teacher who joined the school district in 2005, once taught a small intermediate algebra course composed mostly of Black students who were classified as special education and had an Individualized Education Program or had a learning difficulty that required some type of accommodation. It was not representative of the overall population and didn’t push kids to their fullest potential, Reynolds said. Students from those same groups were placed in Algebra II or some other, rigorous course, in the ensuing years. 

“Students were never given the opportunity to achieve in more rigorous math classes because they couldn’t get there due to teachers’ and counselors’ mindsets and beliefs,” she said. “I view it as a self-fulfilling prophecy: believe they can or can’t, and they will or they won’t.  It’s hard to say they couldn’t do the math before because they were never invited to.”

David Kung, executive director of , who lauded the change in Calvert County, said too many students are shunted into dead-end courses. 

“Districts — like many people — have bought into the myth that success in math is primarily about natural ability,” Kung said. “If that’s your belief and you see someone struggling (you think) they just don’t belong in that class.”

Sutton said the switch has pulled kids off a predictable path of pre-algebra, Algebra 1A, Algebra 1B and geometry, the minimal level courses they needed to graduate. Now, that  student might take Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II and statistics. 

“So, they’re still not making it to calculus,” he said. “But that experience is so much more postsecondary preparation than what they had been doing when we had all these options to steer them around rigor, out of best intentions.”

But the upbeat mood belies the more serious reason that brings many of them here: They’re missing too much school. A short distance from southern California’s famous theme parks, the bright blue stucco building has become an extension of the Buena Park School District’s response to soaring absenteeism. The club is a place to make friends and for many, offers the only stability they’ve had during the pandemic.

“We are serving a need that the school hasn’t been able to fill,” said Luz Valenzuela-Trout, director of operations.

The district’s partnership with the club is an example of the extensive steps many educators nationally are taking to track down students missing school and reverse unprecedented levels of disengagement. But those efforts are rubbing up against the sheer scope of the problem. Chronic absenteeism has hit 40% in, New York City and Los Angeles, and is reaching dangerously high numbers in many districts in between.

“The pandemic radically changed norms about going to school,” said Emily Bailard, CEO of , a company that partners with school districts to improve attendance.

It has compounded issues that have always contributed to absenteeism, from lack of food at home to bullying in school, she said. Many teens began working or added more hours at their jobs to help out their families. Now educators “have to be able to address four or five things instead of one or two.”

Elsie Briseño Simonovski, the Buena Park district’s director of student and community services, sometimes scours apartment complexes with granola bars in her pockets to round up children who might otherwise not make it to class. She escorts families to gas stations to fill up their cars — courtesy of a state grant that covers fuel costs if parents show they’re taking their kids to school.

Yvette Cantu, the district’s chief academic officer, said even high-achieving students have racked up more absences than usual during the pandemic. Such students often thrive on positive feedback from adults, she said, something they missed during closures and quarantine.

‘For no reason’ 

In some districts, chronic absenteeism far exceeds the 10% a year that typically defines the problem. In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office showing that over a million teachers — nearly half — had at least one student during the 2020-21 school year that never showed up for class. 

Some educators say they haven’t seen any improvement since then.

Jenevieve Jackson, a digital photography and video teacher in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, has some students who have only been in class twice the entire year. Others have racked up over 80 absences. 

“Many of the absences are for no reason. The students who were not that excited about school in the first place are even less motivated,” Jackson said. The district hired “intervention teachers” to help struggling students, she said, but “they’re often used to cover the massive teacher and sub shortage and to proctor exams.”

Schools are under pressure to reduce chronic absenteeism because most states track it for federal accountability purposes. Those rates, however, offer little information about what schools are doing to improve attendance, according to Jing Liu, an education professor at the University of Maryland. 

He thinks that needs to change. In published by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he recommended reporting attendance in a way that goes beyond chronic absenteeism. He proposed an “attendance value-added” measure that would reveal schools’ contributions to reducing absenteeism and offer “a much fairer” comparison.

Focusing on ninth graders, Liu analyzed 16 years of attendance data from a diverse, urban school district in California with 60,000 students. On average, students in the sample — he would not identify the district — missed 79 class periods each year, or roughly 11 school days. 

But when he disregarded characteristics that schools can’t control — like race, gender and poverty level — attendance rates leaped by 28 class periods, or about four days, in schools with a strong value-added result. In some schools, the average rates increased as much as eight days. 

Todd Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University who studied absenteeism and launched , said the concept “seems like an amazing idea.” Nudging parents to get their children to school and showing them how absences add up — Rogers studied — only reduces chronic absenteeism by 10% to 15%. 

“There’s no silver bullet, so the goal is to do everything you can that works,” he said.

But for the time being, schools are struggling to address the problem in front of them.

“It’s going to be really hard in the short term until behaviors and school norms stabilize,” Rogers said.

‘The heavy lift’

In the Metro Nashville Public Schools — with a 30% chronic absenteeism rate this year — Carol Lampkin, the district’s director of attendance services, said students are less likely to come to school if their teachers are absent, a problem that has intensified with staff members out because of COVID.

The issue has fueled creative approaches to reminding parents of the importance of keeping their children in school. Staff members recently gathered at a local Baptist church as part of their newest strategy — offering information on COVID vaccines, housing and transportation assistance in hopes of pinpointing the reasons children miss school.

Families whose children have at least half a dozen absences were more likely to get an invitation or a knock on the door, urging them to attend the event.

“The idea was to take the heavy lift off of the schools,” Lampkin said. “Our schools, our teachers, our principals … are dealing with so much.”

Lampkin thought grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, served while DJs spun family-friendly tunes, would be more effective at getting frequently absent students back in class than stern warnings about truancy. 

Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy organization, said she appreciates what the district is trying to do, but thinks officials could be overlooking important reasons students are absent. 

“I don’t think it has anything to do with affordable housing,” she said. She urged educators to ask themselves, “What does the school culture look like when [students] enter the building?” 

She’s worked with families whose children have been suspended multiple times this year for dress code violations, and she recently held a to draw attention to a Black student who reported being called the N-word by a paraprofessional. (A spokesman for the district said the employee has been placed on administrative leave and will “face appropriate disciplinary action” if the report is substantiated.)

“We’ve got to dig deeper. Is that child being bullied at school?” Thomas asked. “Is that child feeling like they’re not doing well?”

Liu’s research backs up Thomas’s concerns. Examining three years of survey responses from students, he found that the most likely way to improve the value-added measure was to increase their sense of safety at school.

Meanwhile, Simonovski in Buena Park developed her own method of recognizing schools for reducing absenteeism. Instead of just giving awards to those with the highest attendance — which meant a lot of repeat winners — she highlights schools showing the most improvement.

Winners get what she described as a sort of “Publishers Clearinghouse” ceremony — balloons, certificates and trays of treats. 

That tells schools, “we’re paying attention,” she said, “and we’re celebrating these checkpoints with you.”

Lead Image: Boys did their homework in the teen room at the Boys and Girls Club of Buena Park. The local school district’s partnership with the club is addressing chronic absenteeism. (Linda Jacobson)

Conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland, the analysis of over 14,000 districts nationwide shows that in 2000, the average child from a poor family went to an elementary school where almost half of the students were defined as middle class. By 2015, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.

As the nation’s population grows, the shift — especially in the West and the South —means they are less likely to experience of racially and socioeconomically mixed schools, the study notes, including higher test scores, smaller racial achievement gaps and higher college enrollment rates.

The findings, according to the researchers, also carry broad implications for academic recovery efforts in the wake of the pandemic. 

A previous analysis by The 74 showed disproportionate increases in chronic absenteeism among English learners, three-fourths of whom are Spanish-speakers. And data shows that Latino families were among those by COVID-related job loss and financial hardship, creating a larger challenge for schools serving high concentrations of Latino students.

“Deeper forces have sustained achievement disparities in recent decades, especially this worsening isolation of the poor from middle-class students,” said Bruce Fuller, a Berkeley sociology professor and lead author of the paper. “COVID-era learning loss is but a surface symptom of deeper ills that beset public education.”

“slowed desegregation efforts” in districts with large Black student populations and shifted attention toward improving schools in Black and Latino communities, the authors said. 

Now among Latinos, combined with the movement of Latino families to the suburbs, have contributed to racial isolation, they wrote.

“‘White flight’ from the public school system translates into resource flight from racially isolated schools,” said Feliza Oritz-Licon, chief policy and advocacy officer at Latinos for Education, a nonprofit focusing on teacher recruitment and education policy. She added that in racially isolated schools it becomes easy to “dismiss” Latino students as underperforming.

But not all districts have seen a decline in their white student populations. The chances that Latino children will interact with white peers at school are higher in the Midwest and Northeast. In fact, the researchers found 800 school districts where the white student population had not declined over that 15-year time period, even as the Latino student population grew. 

‘Under one school roof’

The Berkeley study builds on research by Sean Reardon at Stanford University, drew connections between racial segregation and large achievement gaps due to concentrations of Black and Latino students in high-poverty schools.

Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, said rising segregation not only affects who students sit next to in class, but also broader support for public schools. 

“All of this is troubling. We have to get better at offering the kinds of programs that will attract affluent parents,” he said, noting that International Baccalaureate programs, Advanced Placement courses and other offerings “send the signal of a high standard. That’s what Latino parents want as well.”

Fuller and his co-authors wrote that without more inter-district choice programs, which would allow entree to higher-performing schools in wealthier neighborhoods, Latino students will continue to have fewer opportunities to attend integrated schools. 

A report released last year by Bellwether Education Partners explored additional obstacles to integration created by a lack of affordable housing in districts with higher performing schools; even if low-income families want to move into such school districts, housing options are scarce.

“Civic leaders and educators must expand ways of pulling the nation’s diverse children under one school roof,” Fuller said.

In 2020, the Century Foundation, a left leaning think tank, identified initiatives underway in school districts and charter school networks to increase integration. Some of the programs were voluntary, while others resulted from desegregation orders.

‘The country’s prosperity’

But Noguera said some charter schools predominantly serve Black students or Latino students, . 

By 2060, Latinos are projected to make up over one fourth of the U.S. population, according to Census Bureau , and Latino children currently account for of public school enrollment. 

Increasing the numbers of Latino educators is one way for districts to increase achievement, researchers at the Brookings Institution wrote in last year that focused on the Clark County School District in Nevada. They cited studies showing that Latino students are more likely to be placed in gifted programs and take Advanced Placement courses when their schools have more teachers that look like them.

Recruiting more Latino educators and giving Latinos a greater role in education policy is also a priority for philanthropist McKenzie Scott, who last week donated to Latinos for Education to support the organization’s work.

Latino educators are often assigned to high-need, racially isolated schools because they reflect the cultural backgrounds of students. But turnover is high, with many leaving the profession within four years, noted Oritz-Licon of Latinos for Education.

The organization’s October featured concerns from Latino educators, such as the cost of earning a degree and requests from administrators to provide translation services without additional compensation. 

Oritz-Licon called on schools serving Latino students to use relief funds for afterschool programs, academic support and parent engagement efforts since many high-needs schools might lack those services. 

“Latino students are American students,” she said. “Their educational outcomes should matter because as a growing population, their prosperity is the country’s prosperity.”