Our local school district (my kids don't attend public school, but this was in the paper) just eliminated ALGEBRA at the middle-school level. Kids ready for higher-level math in 8th grade used to be able to take Algebra and so be ready for Geometry in 9th grade. The program has been eliminated on the thought that the new CC integrated math (with NO tracking) will have plenty of "algebra concepts." I strongly suspect that "algebra concepts" does not mean a full-on dive into, say, solving systems of inequalities, factoring polynomials, etc.
