That is sobering. Do you think any of the people in that borderline-remedial class may have been the victims of poor instruction, or do you think that they're all in the bottom 10% for native ability?
I suspect that lots of problems drive the situation described in that article.
I spent this past school year watching a risibly incompetent teacher water-down an already simplistic geometry textbook. The book eschews rigorous proofs, opting instead to list the steps and ask students to fill in the blanks. The book's problems are simplistic and mostly ask students to memorize and regurgitate. There are no A-, B-, and C-level problems: most of them are all the relatively simplistic A-type questions. Solving them requires using the exact same technique repeatedly. The books makes the problems "different" by rotating triangles or making the circle bigger. This book used all over the state of California.
Yet DS's teacher abandoned the simplistic proofs after Christmas. She also abandoned constructions around the same time and, as I reported in another thread, she skipped a lot of stuff and jumped back and forth through chapters.
My understanding is that the algebra class she taught last year had the same problems. She didn't finish that course, either.
Yet the school defends her.
I expect that many of her students will go to college and wonder why they get placed in remedial math when they got As and Bs in algebra and geometry.
Our society says that everyone should go to college, so we must have college students who really shouldn't be in college. So I'm sure there's an ability issue, too.
And I'm sure there are a plethora of other problems too.
But it's probably hard to tease out what's what by the time kids are 18 or 19. Individual teachers can probably figure some stuff in some of their students, but not everything.
