Two years ago, leaders at Center City Public Charter School’s Congress Heights campus in D.C. decided to offer more advanced math classes to some of their oldest students.

The choice was complicated, and some educators wondered whether the kids would be ready.

To prepare for the possible change, Principal Niya White and her team visited high schools, both nearby and farther away, to see how algebra was being taught.

In some classrooms, White would see former students sleeping in the back. They were bored or had already finished their work.

For White, that made the choice clear — in order to set students up for success, they needed to expand their offerings so kids felt challenged and engaged by the time they reached high school.

“I’m born and raised here,” White said. “I was given the option of whether to leave Southeast D.C., leave D.C., go off to do things and come back. There are a lot of folks and a lot of students or a lot of families that don’t ever get that option. They’ve got to have it.”

Now, the Southeast D.C. campus is offering pre-algebra to seventh graders and algebra to eighth graders. In the 2024-25 school year, 70% of eighth graders at the school either met or exceeded expectations on the citywide standardized math test.

Education news outlet The 74 first reported that’s a stronger mark than the 64% of eighth graders who met or exceeded expectations in Ward 3. Only one-fourth of all D.C. students did the same.

Jessi Mericola, who teaches seventh and eighth grade math, was one of the educators who considered whether students were ready to make such a significant leap.

Initially, half of the rising eighth graders did an accelerated seventh grade curriculum, and then attended summer school to finish the curriculum so they could take algebra in eighth grade.

This year, for the first time, all of seventh grade is being accelerated so next year, “all of our students will be doing algebra,” Mericola said.

“We found that if we tell them they’re ready for it, they believe you, and they want to meet that expectation,” Mericola said.

Each class has about 20 students, with the largest in the school at 26, she said. Classes are divided into sections. There’s an individual review on a recently learned concept, a small group review on something from earlier in the year and then a full group lesson.

Mericola co-teaches with a colleague, and even if a student is struggling to grasp an idea, “we come back and reteach things from before that maybe you missed it the first time, but you catch it the second time; and if you miss it the second time, you catch it the third time.”

It’s an approach, White said, comes from avoiding the assumption that “we can’t move a child forward because of something or one of the things they haven’t mastered yet.”

Eighth grader Kennedy Morse said math was a struggle before she got to the Congress Heights campus, but now, it’s become one of her strongest subjects.

She’s gained confidence from tutoring help and being able to ask questions without judgment.

“It was really shocking for me to be on a higher level,” Morse said. “It was hard. It was hard at first.”

Leonard White had a similar experience.

“I’m actually glad that they can believe in me to do the harder work in these classes,” White said.

While getting access to more advanced math classes at a younger age could help students take more rigorous courses in high school and college, Principal White said with any change, the focus is helping “show them all the possibilities and help them make the choice for themselves, versus it being forced upon them.”

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