The Long Beach Unified School District may soon modify its graduation requirements, mandating three — rather than four — years of math and adding a semester each of personal finance and ethnic studies.
New state laws mandate that districts require personal finance and ethnic studies. LBUSD officials say they’re relaxing the math requirement to allow students more flexibility while still meeting standards for entry to the University of California and Cal State University systems. If adopted, the math requirements will start with the class of 2027.
Lowering math requirements is a shift for LBUSD, which had been increasing them for years. Starting with the class of 2018, the district upped the math requirement from two years (the state standard) to three (in line with the state university system’s A-G requirements). For the graduating class of 2019, the district bumped the requirement again, requiring four years of math, the current standard.
That increase was spurred in part because Long Beach City College “felt that having students complete four years would help with the transition into college-level math,” said Brian Moskovitz, the district’s chief academic officer. Since the changes, the proportion of LBUSD seniors ready for college increased 20 percentage points, EdSource previously reported.
At a school board meeting Wednesday, board member Juan Benitez added that the change was motivated by the observation that students who didn’t take a fourth year of math, often students of color, were overtracked to remedial math courses after high school. Requiring a fourth year of math was an attempt to alleviate that disparity, he said.
But the current policy, which has left LBUSD as “the only district to require more than the A-G minimum of 30 credits” among large and surrounding school systems in the state, hasn’t benefitted everyone. Each year, a quarter of LBUSD seniors meet the state requirement of two years of math yet do not fulfill the district’s requirement of four years. As a result, each June, the board of trustees must approve a waiver allowing those 1,100 to 1,200 seniors to graduate, Moskovitz said.
The proposed policy change, if adopted, means the board will only have to review graduation waivers for students who have completed two years of math; the students with three years of math would already satisfy the district’s requirements.
Moskovitz said these changes will not limit students’ access to math classes. “Most of our graduating seniors will continue to take the fourth year of math because that makes them competitive for post-secondary options,” he said. Students can also take other courses, such as computer science, to satisfy the A-G requirements. But students would also have more opportunities to take classes that are more aligned with their career aspirations, Superintendent Jill Baker said at the meeting. The total number of credits required for graduation would not change.
High school counselors are now in the process of gathering data on course demand for the next school year, and schools could see a shift in the number of students requesting a fourth year of math, Moskovitz said. Whether this will affect staffing remains to be seen, he said.
Lori Schaff, a math teacher at Poly High School, said the four-year requirement has meant many students are in math classes they don’t want to be in. And because the district has a history of allowing students to graduate without passing all four years, many students are not motivated to succeed, “and cause trouble every single day,” she said.
In interviews, parents expressed indifference or enthusiasm about the changes to math. LBUSD already emphasizes math, said Kisha Champion, a parent of a student at Renaissance High School. “Instead of shoving four years down students’ throats,” the district should focus on cementing mathematical concepts before students move to the next level, she said.
Yet the addition of ethnic studies and personal finance for the classes of 2030 and 2031, respectively, elicited excitement from parents, who called these requirements “overdue.”
“My generation would have been better positioned if we had learned about taxes, credit and interest and not had to stumble through those mistakes in our early 20s,” said Laurel Cadiz, whose children are students at Millikan High School and Prisk Elementary.
Ethnic studies courses are already available to LBUSD students through dual-enrollment classes at LBCC and Cal State Long Beach, and as an elective offered by the district, Moskovitz said. Moving forward, students will be able to satisfy the ethnic studies requirement through those paths, as well as through the district’s U.S. history course, which will fill the requirement with minor adjustments.
The school board is expected to vote on the changes at its next meeting on Feb. 18.