Opinion: UCSD report a reflection of California’s K-12 education crisis

Recently, UC San Diego posted an internal report outlining the challenges it faces in undergraduate admissions. While motivated by concern for the well-being and success of our students, the report — which we co-authored with other colleagues — highlights a troubling trend: a rising number of first-year students arrive underprepared, particularly in mathematics, despite strong transcripts and seemingly solid credentials.

Rigorous placement tests show that these students are unable to meet high school and, in some cases, middle or elementary school math standards. All these students fulfilled the University of California’s math requirement and most completed additional courses — one in five even passing calculus. Yet many struggled with basic concepts such as adding fractions or solving simple equations.

UC San Diego stands downstream from California’s K-12 education system. Our admissions process acts as a sensor registering previous educational experience. What we are detecting today suggests that math instruction in many California high schools — and middle schools — is in serious trouble.

We all know that COVID-19 profoundly disrupted instruction. Yet the impact was far from uniform. Schools with more resources were better able to mitigate learning losses, while under-resourced schools experienced deeper setbacks and are recovering more slowly.

The shortage of qualified math teachers in California is a more long-standing concern. It has been difficult to attract and retain highly skilled teachers due to the heavy demand for individuals with strong quantitative skills in the labor market. As a result, many schools must depend on teachers with unrelated degrees to teach advanced math courses. This, again, disproportionately affects schools with fewer resources.

Too often, problems with math instruction result in misleading signals for admissions officers. At UC San Diego, we found that an “A” in math no longer means the same thing everywhere. Students with identical grades often perform very differently on our placement tests, and math grades keep rising even when skills do not.

In many cases, it is difficult to determine whether a class actually covered the material implied by its title. For instance, courses labeled “statistics” can vary dramatically, from those introducing basic numerical literacy to those offering much more complex concepts.

Another complicating factor is the elimination of standardized testing, which serves two distinct purposes: It is a tool of assessment and an instrument of selection. Yet debates have fixated mostly on the second — who gets into college — while neglecting the first — how we measure learning itself.

In 2020, the Regents of the University of California — acting against the recommendation of an Academic Senate task force — voted to discontinue the use of SAT and ACT scores in admissions. While applications surged, the overall social composition of UC students changed little.

Meanwhile, the loss of standardized benchmarks made it more difficult for admissions officers to distinguish between students whose grades reflect real mastery and those whose transcripts overstate their preparedness.

UC San Diego has a mandate to serve students of all backgrounds across California. In an era characterized by a widening economic divide, we take pride in advancing social mobility for many students.

Two out of five of our undergraduates are the first in their families to earn a college degree, and we still graduate 73% of students within four years, and nearly 90% within six years — without them incurring significant debt.

We achieve this while remaining a world-class university, ranked in the top 10 for innovation and cited research and a home to top-tier arts programs.

This unique and hard-won balance is more difficult to sustain when the university, lacking standardized benchmarks, must educate students who have not mastered the K–12 curriculum. Yet better testing is no substitute for better learning. Math teaches young minds not just to calculate but to reason and think logically, abstractly and precisely.

Fixing K-12 math education in California will not be simple. It requires a hard look at how we prepare teachers, beginning with the way math is introduced in elementary school. No matter what, strengthening collaboration between California’s public universities and K-12 system makes sense.

One example of such collaboration is the nationally recognized Math and Science Education doctoral program jointly developed by UC San Diego and San Diego State University. Another example is the Mathematics Diagnostics Testing Project. At UC San Diego, other examples of K-12 collaborations include CREATE, the San Diego Math Project, SanDERA and many others.

We need to deepen and expand these partnerships between K–12 and higher education now more than ever if we hope to rebuild a solid foundation for California’s future.

Rona-Tas is a professor of sociology and vice chair of Academic Senate at UC San Diego. Betts is a professor of economics at UC San Diego. Holst is a distinguished professor and chair of mathematics at UC San Diego.