Part six

The law was supposed to unlock the gate

House Bill 986, Session Law 2018-32, added G.S. 115C-81.36 and applied it beginning with the 2018‑19 school year. As written then, local boards shall offer advanced courses in mathematics in all grades three and higher when practicable. And when advanced courses are offered, any student scoring a level five on the test for the math course they were most recently enrolled in shall be enrolled in the advanced course next. A 7th grader scoring level five shall be enrolled in a high school math course in 8th grade. No student who qualifies this way may be removed without written parental consent.

The second half is the part people forget, and it is the part that matters most. The law does not only operate in 7th grade. Score Level 5 on high school Math 1 and you move into the Honors track. A student who missed 8th grade Algebra could earn the way in a year later. For the first time, the gate would not lock.

What the law did not do. It set the bar at the single highest score, and only that score. The students one level down, the group the 2009 research found were 55 times as likely to reach chemistry and physics if they were tracked high, got nothing from it. Both conditionals matter too: a district that does not offer an advanced course, or judges it impracticable, has no student to enroll. And every other route in, teacher recommendation, parent request, existing placement, stayed exactly as it was, unwritten and unreported.
And stop for a second on the fact that this needed a law at all. Imagine a bill requiring that the fastest runners at a school be allowed on the track team. Imagine it having to specify that a child who posts one of the fastest times shall be permitted to run, unless a parent signs a form saying otherwise. It would sound absurd. You would ask what on earth had been happening that made it necessary. That is the question to hold on to. North Carolina passed the mathematics version of that bill in 2018. It cleared the House 114 to 0, the Senate 47 to 0, and the final concurrence vote 94 to 11. Nobody in either chamber thought it was silly, because everybody in the building already knew what had been happening.

Read the guarantee carefully, though, because it is narrower than it sounds. The statute does not promise a student the advanced track. It promises that a student who scores at the highest level on the test for the course they just took shall be placed in the advanced version of the next one. So an 8th grader who takes Math 1 is guaranteed Honors Math 2 only if they score Level 5 on the Math 1 exam.

Two quite different groups sit that exam, and they have to be kept apart or the numbers mislead. Some 8th graders take Math 1, because they were accelerated. Everyone else takes it in high school, mostly in 9th grade. The state reports them separately, and in 2024‑25 they looked like this.

Take the first column seriously before moving on, because it is easy to read as good news and it is not. The state identified those 35,713 students, accelerated them, put them a year ahead in mathematics, and they passed the course. Only 9,928 of them, 28%, are guaranteed a place in Honors Math 2. The other 25,785, nearly three in four of the students the state deliberately accelerated, finish 8th grade algebra with no entitlement to the next course in the sequence. They go back to asking.

And read the two rates next to each other. Among the accelerated 8th graders, 28% renew the guarantee. Among the high school students taking Math 1 in ninth grade or later, 1.6% do, one in sixty-three.

So 87% of everyone who renews the entitlement is a student who already had it. Of the 11,378 students statewide who scored Level 5 on Math 1 in 2024‑25, 9,928 were 8th graders who had been accelerated already, and 1,450 were not. It was not always like that. In 2017‑18 the split was 45% to 55%. Of the 24,313 students who cleared Level 5 on Math 1 that year, 10,996 were counted as accelerated 8th graders and 13,317 were counted in the high school population. Most of the entitlement that year was recorded on the high school side rather than among the 8th graders who had already been let in early. That is precisely the second door the law was written to open, and it is the half that closed.

A caution about the 2017‑18 side of that split. That was the last year in which a ninth grader's Math 1 score from middle school was banked into the high school's results. DPI's rules for the year state that “the NC Math 1 EOC scores of grade 9 students who took the NC Math 1 EOC in middle school in 2016‑17 or earlier are banked to the students' current high school”. So an unknown share of those 13,317 sat the exam in middle school rather than in ninth grade, and the 45% to 55% split understates how much of the entitlement went to students who had already been accelerated. Banked scores are not reported separately, so the split cannot be recovered.

And it had not always been that narrow. In 2017‑18, the last year scored on the bar the legislature was actually looking at when it wrote this, 13,317 high school students cleared Level 5 on Math 1, about one in nine of everyone who sat it in high school. That is the group the drafters had in mind: a real cohort, in every district, big enough to fill classrooms. Back then 8th graders were 45% of all the Level 5s on that exam rather than 87%. Fourteen months after the law took effect the State Board moved the cut score. Part nine is about how that happened and what it did. Hold on to the fact that the line moved after the law was written, and that nobody adjusted the law to match.

And the students who do not clear it are entitled to nothing. That is not a turn of phrase. Of the 90,646 who sat Math 1 in high school, 89,196 have no entitlement at all, including everyone who passed at Level 4, which the state itself calls college and career ready. The statute has no opinion about those students. The school does not have to place them in Honors. It does not have to tell them Honors exists. No parent has to sign anything to keep them out, because nothing is being withheld: there was never an entitlement to withhold. They are back precisely where Part four left them, waiting on a recommendation from an adult, made on grounds nobody writes down and nobody reports. The door the law opens in 8th grade closes again in 9th, and it closes on 98% of the students who take Math 1 in high school.

Source: NC DPI School Assessment and Other Indicator Data, 2024‑25 and 2017‑18. Subject code M1SEP is the Math 1 exam taken by 8th graders; M1 is the same exam taken in high school. They are separate populations in the state files and must not be added together without saying so.

It is worth pausing on who we are talking about. How many capable adults do you know who are convinced they cannot do algebra? Most of them were told so at about age twelve, by a placement decision nobody wrote down.

The cost shows up later, in remedial classrooms. In 2024‑25, 73.2% of North Carolina 11th graders did not meet the ACT college-readiness benchmark in math, which is our own figure from the state files below. About 27% of one recent North Carolina graduating class enrolled in at least one developmental math, reading or English course at a state community college, down from a peak of 65%. And a University of California San Diego admissions review reported in November 2025 that the campus had expected roughly 1% of incoming students to need remedial math and instead placed 8.5%, a quarter of whom had a 4.0 high school math average.

Community college figure: NC Community College System data as reported by the John Locke Foundation. UC San Diego figure: Senate Administration Workgroup on Admissions, November 2025, as reported in the press. Parts ten and eleven take the North Carolina remediation numbers apart.