The number of people who say something along the lines of "You shouldn't be able to move up without an understanding above ~60% of the grade level math." is seriously scaring me. The ability to move up past the broken system is important. Needing more assumes Math is being taught and not "math".
How can you "move past" not understanding mathematical concepts when they're essential to everything that follows?
I mean that's the whole point of math - to provide an explanation in which every step is necessary, and understood to be necessary.
If there's one class that should be Pass / Fail, this is it, and the bar for passing should be set VERY high. I agree that this would create problems, but those would fall squarely on the schools, who - as many others have mentioned - teach "math", not math.
It would be fine if they were moving past the broken system to something better, this is sadly not the case. It really took someone telling me "Your doing great in all your other subjects but with this score in maths you wont get a diplom" to realise that I should probably go and learn the basics. As soon as the basics made sense , maths was fun and enjoyable (even without calculator).
