Examining the Effects of Gender, Poverty, Attendance, and Ethnicity on Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry Performance in a Public High School

Over the last few decades school accountability for student performance has become an issue at the forefront of education. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and various regulations by individual states have set standards for student performance at both the district and individual public and charter school levels, and certain consequences apply if the performance of students in an institution is deemed unsatisfactory. Conversely, rewards come to districts or schools that perform especially well or make a certain degree of improvement over their earlier results. Albeit with certain conditions, the federal government makes additional education money available to the states under NCLB.;While testing is nothing new in American public education, the concept of district/school accountability for performance is at least relatively so. In New York City, where New York State Regents Examinations (NYSRE) have been a measure of student performance for many years, scores on these tests are low, often preventing students from receiving course credit, which in turn results in failure to graduate on schedule. In addition, rates of graduation from public high schools are low. The city and state have kept data on student performance broken out by a number of factors including socioeconomic status, ethnicity, attendance, and gender which point to an achievement gap among different groups. This study investigates a series of those factors associated with the mastery of high school Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry. This study concerns itself specifically with the effect that gender, socioeconomic status, attendance, and ethnicity may have on student achievement in a mathematics course and on standardized tests, specifically the NYSRE, an annual rite of passage for students in grades 9 through 11.;This research considered and ran tests on data gathered from a single large New York City high school. In this study, a 12 two-way (between-groups) univariate analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted to assess whether there were differences in students' mathematics achievement scores by gender, ethnicity, attendance, and family socio-economic status (SES). In addition, three Pearson correlation analyses were conducted to determine whether there was a correlation among Integrated Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II/Trigonometry unit examination scores and Regents scores. Nine Pearson correlation analyses were conducted to determine whether there was a correlation between Regents scores and mathematics achievement unit examination scores. A correlation was run between each mathematics achievement score with the Regents score from each subject. Six two-way (between-groups) ANOVA were also conducted to assess whether there were difference in students' mathematics achievement among Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females. Data were gathered, merged, and transferred into a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 19.0 (IBM, 2010) for analysis.;The findings indicate that attendance and family SES have a meaningful relationship to mathematics achievement in the New York City public high school which was the subject of this investigation. On the other hand, gender and ethnicity showed no relationship to students' mathematics achievement. As an implication of this research, school policies must focus more on the achievement gap of students from low-SES families and must encourage students to maintain good attendance. Students should have access to different forms of academic interventions that go beyond after-school or Saturday tutoring; academic intervention services; community counseling or mediation; or peer intervention or peer counseling through which students learn basic mathematics skills from each other to achieve college readiness.