Here’s a quiz: What should the state of New York do when its students aren’t learning algebra? Lower the grade needed to pass the class, of course.

In 2013, the Board of Regents determined that students who were passing the Algebra I exam did not actually know enough of the material to be “college and career ready.”

So in a demonstration of either courage or lunacy, they increased the passing grade to a 74.

Reality came crashing down. Since only 63% of students managed to achieve that standard this year and only slightly more than half of New York City students did, the new standard clearly wasn’t going to work. As The New York Times dryly put it, “Confronted with the consequences of higher standards, the Regents, like education officials across the country, are now rethinking them.”

What else are they going to do? New York’s kids, and American kids more generally, are doing very poorly in math. And simply raising the passing grade is not going to make them better. On the 2012 PISA international math exam, the US scored 36th, just below that educational powerhouse Slovakia. You could blame our teachers, who rarely have the kind of knowledge of math to be teaching it on the high school level. Or you could also blame the curriculum.

Mathematician Edward Burger agrees. Burger, who won the national Robert Foster Cherry Award for teaching while he was at Williams College, says, “You can play academic limbo and see how low you can go with the passing grade,” but ultimately the way we teach algebra is pretty useless. “With this curriculum, 20 minutes later” they will have forgotten the concepts. If mathematics, including algebra, were taught as a way to think about problems instead of just spouting formulas, it would “teach people how to rigorously think.”

Sadly, we are a long way from a curricular overhaul. Common Core takes the same approach to algebra as most other math curricula.

You can’t simply raise standards arbitrarily because, as former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn puts it, “It’s politically unacceptable to deny a large percentage of kids their diplomas (or year to year promotion) on the basis of weak test scores.”

If the Regents decided next week that half of the kids who took the algebra Regents test in New York City were simply not going to get a high-school diploma, regardless of whether they completed the rest of their coursework, attended school, etc., there would be rioting in the streets. (Well, maybe not the students, but a lot of parents.)

On the other hand, as Finn notes, “It’s fraudulent to tell them that they’re ‘on track for college and career’ when they have weak scores.”

In some way this is what most states already do. The kids matriculating from our publicly financed high schools to our publicly financed state colleges end up taking untold numbers of remedial courses. In other words, one state institution is saying they’ve learned what they needed to in high school and another institution is saying they’re still not ready for college.

There was, of course, one possible solution to this. States could offer a two-tiered system of evaluating students and conferring diplomas. New York actually had that system until 2012, when it decided only to offer one kind of diploma, for which everyone would have to pass Regents exams. Again, the initiative is admirable on some level — wouldn’t it be nice if we held all kids to the same standard and that in New York anyway, we could agree on the meaning of a high school diploma.

But this is not in the cards. And, as Jay Greene, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas notes, “There are different levels of knowing. We might want a higher one for the Regents and accept a lower one for a regular diploma.”

Moreover, we might want to acknowledge that not everyone wants to go to college or needs to. Says Greene, “The logic of having different types of diplomas…is to differentiate the types of skills people should have to master. I’m confident that anyone planning to go to college should have a command of algebra. But I’m open to the possibility that there could be a different diploma that did not require the same level of algebra ability.”

Indeed, there has to be. Now what are the chances the Regents will admit that?