Hope Reed was seeing stark disparities a decade ago at her high school in the suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina.
Nearly half the school’s students were white, but the freshman remedial math classes were made up of almost all students of color. Reed, then chair of the math department at Blythewood High School, intervened with an experiment.
She taught a ninth-grade remedial class and used the regular Algebra 1 curriculum with nearly 50 students. They were honors students, and they were going to do honors work, she recalled telling them.
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