'I don't need algebra, because I'm not going to college': There was a time not so long ago when children in middle schools were assigned to 'tracks' according to what 'everybody knew' each child would 'need'. (This tracking was why middle schools were invented in the first place.) Educational 'experts' presumed to 'know' what the various children 'needed', based on culturally-based (but unjustified) presumptions. The educators then locked children into 'appropriate' tracks, thereby locking many children out of college before they'd even begun high school.

It might have been assumed, for instance, that Shaniqwa would be pregnant by the time she was fourteen, Jamal would be in prison, Jos� would grow up to be a pool-boy, and Maria would be a maid. So these students would have been assigned to something like 'consumer math': low-level math that was presumed to be 'useful' for 'that sort'. Blonde, blue-eyed Tiffany might have been expected to marry well after a short and trivial 'career', so she'd have been assigned to bookkeeping. Only Eustace James Whittington III would have had any chance of attending college, so only he would have been steered into the algebra class.