Part one

In one grade, in one year, we missed 23,474 students

In 2009 the NC Association of School Administrators asked SAS to look at how math placement lined up with math achievement in every district in the state. SAS used EVAAS, the value-added system North Carolina had already bought, which gives every 7th grader a probability of succeeding in 8th grade Algebra.

That is one grade level, in one school year. Not a backlog, not a decade of accumulated cases. Forty-two thousand seventh graders were predicted to succeed in Algebra, and fewer than half of them were allowed to take it.