The real issue: too high a percentage of black students cannot master algebra. Students below a certain IQ will not “get it”.
That is WHY math has been required as a gatekeeper for higher education, because it weeds out people who would not make it in any really challenging intellectual field.
Very few students in K-12 are incapable of mastering basic mathematics, including Algebra I.
The problem is the K-12 schools that graduate these math-inept college freshmen: Their ineffective “teaching” methods and materials, their watered-down academic standards, and their corrupt teachers and administrators. The absence of at least one parent in the math-inept childs’s life who demands better, including from the student, is typically the final ingredient in this stew of incompetence.
Please go to #20 to see the Kansas 8th grade test given in 1895.
Don’t be thrown by the arcane measurements, [rods, bushels etc.] as they had been taught to the Kansas farm kids all along.
The rest of the test [English, geography, history, etc] is just as depressing, comparing how far standards have sunk in a century and a quarter.
It was not then so remarkable that 2 Ohio bicycle shop owners invented the airplane, tested wing profiles in a home-made wind tunnel, designed their own aluminum-block ICE engine, etc.
Their 1890s high school educations were more rigorous than college today.
In Toronto’s race-obsessed school system, their “anti-black racism” equity initiatives has led to the the merger of advanced and applied classes in math and languages to a single “for dummies” class. So now, all the bright, responsible students good marks can bell up the curve of the “racialized” students failing grades in order to improve class averages. Punishing the bright kids by forcing them to sit through boring, basic classes is the school board’s cure for racism.