I don’t want to alarm students who think taking calculus in high school is the key to a brilliant future. But leaders in math education are warning that, in many schools, that course is a mess, causing bright students to forsake, rather than embrace, their dream of a career in math and science.

This is not true for students who take Advanced Placement calculus and score at least a 3 on the 5-point exam, but they make up only a third of the 600,000 students who take high school calculus each year. The rest are in trouble, because colleges don’t know what to do with them.

Ordinary high schools across the country admire the stellar ones, many of them in the Washington area, that have top-notch AP calculus courses. They want STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs for their students, too.

“There is now an expectation that every secondary school should offer AP calculus or its equivalent, with the result that the demand for calculus teachers is outstripping the supply of those who are fully qualified,” said David M. Bressoud of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., a former president of the Mathematical Association of America. “Within our schools, there is tremendous pressure to fill these classes.”

“Too many students are being accelerated, short-changing their preparation in and knowledge of algebra, geometry, trigonometry and other pre-calculus topics. Too many students experience a secondary-school calculus course that drills on the techniques and procedure that will enable them to successfully answer standard problems but are never challenged to encounter and understand the conceptual foundations of calculus,” he said.

When Anita Kinney was student body president at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, I occasionally quoted her vivid impressions of life at the most selective high school in the United States. I did not know at the time that she was a minority. When she offered a guest column on that subject, leaving more time for my vacation this week, I said fine. She can be reached at anitaskinney@gmail.com.

By Anita Kinney

Yes, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School For Science and Technology Had a Hispanic Student Body President With a Learning Disability

If you Google “Anita Kinney,” you’ll find a prolific cancer researcher at a Utah university. That Anita Kinney is a genius. I’ve followed her career and lived in her daunting shadow for many years. She’s always ranked higher than me in search engine results — except for my brief brush with Internet celebrity in 2006, when Jay Mathews catapulted me to the top of the “Anita Kinney” rankings by quoting me on the front page of The Post.

The story was about my fellow classmates from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) who were rejected from Ivy League schools.

In more recent news, the NAACP and an advocacy group called Coalition of The Silence (COTS) filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that Fairfax County Public Schools is discriminating against black, Latino and disabled students through its admissions process for Thomas Jefferson.

The complaint doesn’t describe what it’s like to be a person of color at TJ, or to be a person with a disability there. Seeing so many negative comments surrounding this complaint — some of them penned by my former classmates — has forced me to time-travel back to my TJ years. I asked Jay to let me guest-blog about my experiences as one of TJ’s “twice-exceptional” students, a term referring to gifted children who also have special needs.

I am Hispanic and have a learning disability. I was far from being one of the star students in TJ’s class of 2006, and I endured many taunts from students who told me I had only been admitted to the school because I’d “played the race card.”

Now we know who did it. D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby has concluded his 16-month probe of cheating on the D.C. schools’ annual tests by saying that kids, not adults, made the astonishing number of wrong-to-right erasures found on answer sheets.

Never mind that testing companies, academic experts and veteran teachers say that students almost never make more than one or two wrong-to-right erasures per test. Ignore the fact that in Atlanta, where there were similar volumes of erasures on 2009 tests, state investigators with subpoena power found 178 principals and teachers had changed the answers.

DC schools chancellor Kaya Henderson (Matt McClain - The Washington Post) After Willoughby’s investigators visited only one school, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, he endorsed their conclusion that since the adults at that school seemed innocent of changing answers, none of the adults at dozens of other schools with massive erasures could be guilty either. The investigation is over, in part because Willoughby, allegedly immune to influence from interested parties, let D.C. school chancellor Kaya Henderson persuade him that schools she thought were great should not be examined.

I had hoped Willoughby’s report would be thorough and independent, since that is what people in such jobs are supposed to be. This thin, biased 14-page document fails egregiously on both counts.

The D.C. schools continue to be one of the worst places to learn and hardest places to teach in America, but its leaders are making sensible, if slow, changes in the right direction. The latest smart adjustments are in teacher evaluation.

Many teachers I admire have trouble with the rating system known as IMPACT. They don’t like the unpredictability of the evaluations by classroom assessors called Master Educators. They don’t like the statistical weirdness that can distort the student test score gains that affect their ratings. They think some of the activities on which they are graded don’t make sense.

But I don’t hear anyone arguing that we should return to the days when more than 90 percent of D.C. teachers received satisfactory evaluations while the achievement levels of D.C. students were among the nation’s worst. The low test scores were not all the teachers’ fault, but no sane observer of city schools would say that more than 90 percent of instructors were doing fine.

Under the D.C. system’s mix of classroom visits and student-test-score gain assessments in the most recent school year, only 68 percent of teachers were rated effective or higher. That is a change for the better. The District has become one of the few school systems in which teachers who are not doing their jobs can be quickly removed. Now it needs to work on making sure it is helping teachers improve and dismissing only those who should be dismissed.

I have spent three decades studying why some schools produce more learning and better teacher morale than others. The best schools almost all share one advantage — a smart and energetic principal who has the power to hire teachers, assess them and pay or fire them accordingly. The schools work as teams, trading tips every day. They have bad years, like all schools do, but know how to identify and fix their problems.

I didn’t expect much from the D.C. Inspector General’s investigation of cheating on the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests over the past few years, so I was not surprised that the IG report, released Wednesday, said it found no evidence “of criminal activity or widespread cheating.”

The 14-page report said the investigators conducted a significant number of interviews at only one school, the Noyes Education Campus, and found lax test security that created an atmosphere “where cheating . . .. could have occurred.” But the investigators said they decided that having found so little at Noyes, there was “an insufficient basis to warrant” an investigation of other schools with unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets.

Many D.C. educators have convinced me that the wrong-to-right erasures at many schools, averaging more than 10 per child in some classes, could not be the work of the test takers. Students almost never correct their answers on such tests, since they have no effect on their grades. The answers had to have been changed, several teachers said, by school officials after the tests were handed in, since those officials would benefit from high scores.

The IG report, however, never mentioned the improbability of students making so many erasures and cited, instead, teacher statements that their students were asked to be especially careful and must have made the changes themselves. The report said, in explaining why investigators did not expand their probe, that “it is logical to conclude that once the erasure issue came to light, any improper practices that may have occurred in the past would diminish.”

Some Noyes teachers said copies of the exams were handed out to them before the test was administered in order to help students prepare, a violation of test security rules. One Noyes teacher said she silently pointed to wrong answers on some students’ test sheets until they changed wrong answers to right, but not in numbers that would explain the large number of erasures at the school. The report indicated that all Noyes personnel denied changing answers after tests were handed in.

The investigators made note of D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s defense of another elementary school with as many erasures as Noyes — J.O. Wilson. The report said Henderson defended Wilson as a great school where any visitor can see “quality, engagement and rigor.”

The investigation made no attempt to interview students at Noyes and ask them if they remembered making any erasures on test sheets full of indications of answers being changed.

I will have more on this in Monday’s column. I think the truth of what happened in these tests will come out some day, but not because of the three inadequate investigations financed with D.C. tax dollars.