Every weekend, more than 200 New York City students head to public school classrooms to prepare for the State’s Integrated Algebra Regents exam. But unlike the ninth and tenth-graders who are preparing for the rigorous June exam, these students haven’t even started high school.
Students at eight public middle schools are participating in the Department of Education’s Middle School Regents Initiative, a program that provides eighth-graders in some of the City’s highest-needs middle schools with the opportunity to learn advanced algebra and take the Regents exam before beginning high school. The program is part of the Department’s Campaign for Middle School Success, a comprehensive effort launched by the DOE last year to improve academic achievement in the City’s middle schools—both among students who have fallen behind and among more advanced students who require accelerated learning.
“We know that how students perform in middle school is a strong predictor of whether they’ll graduate from high school and move on to college,” said Dr. Sabrina Hope King, the Department’s Chief Academic Officer for Teaching and Learning. “As a department we’ve focused a lot of attention on making sure that middle school students have extra support and continued opportunities to excel. This objective is at the core of the Regents Initiative.”
The Middle School Regents Initiative functions through a partnership between teachers at participating middle schools and their counterparts at three City high schools—Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn, and Grover Cleveland High School in Queens. Middle and high school educators work together from December through June to develop lessons that feature advanced concepts that are adjusted to accommodate the learning habits of middle school students.
Participating in the program is a big commitment for students: New York State requires that students have 120 hours of classroom preparation before taking the exam. That means each eighth-grader must attend six hours of after-school classes each week, as well as participating in tutoring sessions every Saturday. The weekday lessons take place at students’ middle schools. On Saturday, the students and their math teachers travel to their partner high schools for sessions with high school math teachers.
Students at IS 349 in Bushwick, one of the participating middle schools, say the hard work is worth it.
“At the beginning, none of us really wanted to do this,” said Roseley Disla, an eighth-grader at IS 349. “But now we just want to see how much further we can go.”
Roseley’s diligence has already started to pay off for her; earlier this month she was admitted to Brooklyn Tech, one of New York’s top selective high schools.
Another eighth-grader, Russell Brown, says he’s “confident each of [the 36 participating students at IS 349] will pass the June exam.”
IS 349 Principal Roy Parris says the program is helping students.
“For many of them, this didn’t seem possible before,” he noted. “But now they’re starting to see that, with work, they can perform academically at the highest levels. They’re growing up intellectually. This confidence is the most valuable part of what’s happening here.”