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.
Exactly. I have worked in education for over 30 years. I work in a city high school. The school is 99% black, with a few hispanic and white kids. The average student walking in my door reads at the mid 4th grade level and can do math at the early 4th grade level. They take algebra, geometry and algebra II. Everything is so watered down, they pass classes and get grades, but they understand nothing. Everything is done on TI calculators and the students have no quantitative understanding. Most of them will walk out the door with 8th grade math skills at best. And then people wonder why these students can’t pass college algebra?
None of these students ever mastered basic math (+, -, X, /) and most cannot do fractions or use decimals. It is extraordinarily hard to do algebra when you can’t do 45 / 9.
As a society, now we move to dumb down college for the sake of equity.