(NewsNation) — With a simple policy change, the state of Texas is expecting to boost the number of minority students who are taking advanced math classes in middle school.

For many years, schools in Texas used a range of subjective criteria for deciding which students would be taking advanced math courses, like algebra, in middle school. Students’ families could opt-in to those courses, or schools could have teachers recommend certain students.

Over time, educators and education policy researchers noticed that relying on these subjective measures was leading to many kids who they believed could succeed in these advanced courses never taking them.

“What we started to find whenever we looked at the research and some of the data is that we had kids who were highly qualified to be in those courses but for whatever reason were not being enrolled in those courses,” said Derek McDaniel, who serves as director of curriculum and instruction at Hays Consolidated Independent School District. “Teachers may not have recommended them; parents may not have known to sign up for them. The kid may have said this sounds like more work; this sounds like harder work. I don’t want to do it.”

Some education policy specialists worried these practices introduced bias into the system. Minority kids, for instance, could be seen as less capable by educators or internalize social expectations they couldn’t succeed in a more difficult class.

In 2023, Texas passed a law that instead shifts the system to using a standardized test to place students in their middle school math courses.

“It sets a requirement that doesn’t include implicit bias. It doesn’t include a person to make the decision,” said Jennifer Saenz, who serves as the senior director of communications and policy at the Texas-based education policy group E3 Alliance.

Instead, school districts automatically enroll students who score in the top 40% of the math section of the state’s standardized test, STAAR, into advanced math courses. The law also allows school districts to use an alternative objective measure like a student’s fifth-grade course ranking.

While students are automatically opted into these advanced courses, they still can request an opt-out.

The idea is that the test provides a more objective measure of a student’s abilities and can identify student potential more effectively than a teacher, student or parent who may be relying on more subjective ratings of a student’s talents.

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While the Texas law was just passed this year, some districts around the state have been using the opt-out system for years.

In 2019, the Dallas school system adopted the opt-out policy that the rest of the state just endorsed. It went from 20% of 8th graders enrolled in Algebra 1 in 2018 to closer to 60% enrolled in that course today.

Today, 43% of Black students in the Dallas school system are in honors math upon entering middle school and almost 60% of Hispanic students are in the same spot. In 2018, around 17% of Black students and a third of Hispanics took that advanced math course.

At the Hays school district, just south of Austin, officials saw an increase of 26% of sixth graders taking advanced math in 2018 to 42% three years later. (The district does not report racial or ethnic breakdowns of its data.)

McDaniel said the pandemic and related school instability have made it difficult to exactly measure students’ performance after the policy change as they started the new system right around the time COVID-19 emerged.

But he noted that they’ve seen an increase in scores on standardized tests over the past year, and they haven’t noticed any particular drop in performance from the new students entering advanced math courses.

“We have not seen an increase in failure rate. We have not seen an increase in dropout,” he said. “We’ve seen those students stay in there, and they’re still achieving and learning on state assessments.”

Saenz conceded that it’s too early to determine the long-term impact of bringing many more kids into advanced math. It will take years to track how it impacts these students’ performance in high school and beyond.

But she noted that a range of other states have moved to the opt-out policy of some form — Texas is joining Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, North Carolina and Washington. She believes Texas moving to this step will help prepare more students for college and the workforce.

“If we want our students to be successful, they have to take advanced math courses to prepare them for workforce attainment,” she said.