The district’s recent amendment to math acceleration requirements is unfair and limiting to students, and it should be repealed.
According to Assistant Principal Sean Anglon during a board meeting on August 26, 2025, the district has appended a performance task section to the placement test already required to accelerate through Math Jam, a free six-week program offered by SJCC that can take the place of a year-long math class.
Despite its recency, the negative impact of this change in policy has already made itself clear. According to Anglon, fewer students accelerated in math in the 2025-2026 school year than in the previous school year.
Anglon stated that the new performance task was implemented to remedy concerns raised before the COVID-19 pandemic, when some math teachers at MHS observed that students who accelerated into their math class tended to have lower grades than those who did not accelerate.
However, the implications of optional programs like Math Jam have always been clear: students are responsible for judging their own math skill and deciding if they are ready to accelerate.
If a student has already demonstrated skill and dedication by attending six weeks of summer math instruction and passing the required placement test, it should not be the school’s responsibility to determine whether the student is prepared for a course that the student themselves chooses to take.
To many students, accelerating in math is one of the best ways to demonstrate academic rigor to future colleges, as well as ensure that they are being adequately challenged in their high school math classes. With the new performance task making the already-challenging Math Jam curriculum even harder, even students whose math skills exceed their current math level at MHS could find themselves stuck in a math class that is neither challenging nor rigorous, and therefore does not benefit them academically nor look good on a high school transcript.
Furthermore, making it harder for students to accelerate in math brings up questions about fairness. It is unjust that students in one year were allowed to accelerate more easily than students in the following year due to a recent change in criteria.
The new performance task could also jeopardize students’ already-limited freedoms in terms of course options and scheduling. For a student on the “default” path — Math I through Math III — who plans to take advanced math classes, such as Honors Precalculus, AP Calculus AB, or AP Calculus BC, making it harder to access higher-level math classes could disrupt four-year plans and cause student dissatisfaction with MHS scheduling.
Though the district initially created the performance task to support students through the acceleration process and better ensure readiness for higher-level math, the policy change is unfair to current MHS students in comparison to previous generations, who had looser requirements to fulfill in order to accelerate. Moreover, it can trap students in math classes that do not fulfill their educational needs, and further limit students’ scheduling options.
