These kids can score, but not on the Common Core.
Most students at Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School — the basketball-powerhouse alma mater of hoops legends Stephon Marbury, Lance Stephenson and Sebastian Telfair — flunked the new, more rigorous ninth-grade Common Core Algebra Regents exam administered last month, sources said.
Only 24 percent of the students passed the algebra exam, Lincoln insiders told The Post.
It was the first year that students were required to pass the Common Core-aligned algebra exam.
Lincoln kids did much better on math tests that didn’t require passage of Common Core.
By comparison, 56 percent of kids at the Coney Island school passed 10th-grade geometry and 72 percent passed 11th-grade trigonometry.
As part of the Common Core phase-in, 10th-graders had the option of taking both the Common Core geometry exam and the old Regents geometry exam, and recorded the higher score from either test as the official result.
Trigonometry has yet to be aligned to the new Common Core standards.
Still, the algebra results are humble pie for a school that boasts a list of illustrious alumni that also includes singers Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, playwright Arthur Miller, actor Louis Gossett Jr., former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman and Judge Jack Weinstein.
But Lincoln students were not alone. Many students across the city and state struggled with the new Common Core algebra exam that required them for the first time to explain their answers in writing for nearly every question.
“I would definitely say the pass rate is under 50 percent citywide,” predicted Kara Hudon, a math coach at a handful of city high schools and head of the NYC Association of Mathematics Teachers.
She said the scores were so low — even for students who passed — that the City University of New York is considering lowering its “college ready” acceptance score for Common Core algebra from 80 to 70.
City and state education officials are currently analyzing the results.