As a student, JUMP math curriculum creator John Mighton remembers struggling with the subject and then quickly beginning to panic as he fell behind. The fast pace of the curriculum he was taught prevented him from catching up and then his anxieties about being too slow got the best of him. 

“I would always compare myself to the kids who seemed to get things immediately,” Mighton said. “I gave up all the time. I really thought you have to be born with a gift for math to do well and I clearly don’t have it.”

Mighton said that too often, when students “decide they’re not in the talented group, their brains stop working.”

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” he said. “It becomes harder and harder for you to learn math.”

For this reason and others, Mighton built plenty of repetition and review — and an intentionally slower pace — into JUMP math when he designed the curriculum 20 years ago in Canada. It is now used by 10% of all Canadian students as a classroom resource and by about 2 million students globally, including in the United States, Spain, Chile, Bulgaria and Colombia. 

Within the U.S., JUMP provides resources to about 20,000 students annually across Louisiana, California, New York, Washington, Maryland and Michigan. In both 2022 and 2023, the program received grants from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given more than $30 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Mighton is using the $400,000 in Accelerate funds to study the impact of JUMP’s curriculum as a tutoring resource in Louisiana and Michigan.

Robin Collinsworth, an instructional coach for math and science at Choudrant Elementary School in Choudrant, Louisiana, which uses JUMP math as both its primary classroom curriculum and as a tutoring resource, said it’s “different from most curriculums” because of its focus on scaffolding.

Collinsworth said that with JUMP lessons, instructors “unravel the content one strand at a time.” 

“By the end of the lesson you weave it all back together in a logical way that makes sense to kids,” Collinsworth said.

Kristanne Grange, a third-grade teacher at R.H. McGregor P.S. in Toronto where the whole school is piloting JUMP’s math curriculum, said that with some previous math resources she’s used that were more based on open inquiry, students approached problems “without any fundamental skills” and were lost. In contrast, Grange said JUMP is “almost back to the rote ways that I used to learn where there was a fact-based repetitive style to the curriculum.”

“This program is very much based on more individual practice, more building on skills as they come,” Grange said. “It’s very much like Legos clicking together. And so the children develop a lot of confidence and have a really good foundation to lean on when they start focusing on a problem.”

Brent Davis is a professor of math education at the University of Calgary who has been collaborating with JUMP and Mighton for years. Davis said there are “typically” between 10 and 20 things a student needs to notice in order to understand a mathematical concept.

“In order to learn mathematics well, to make sense of any given concept, you have to notice a whole bunch of little things around each concept,” Davis said.

Davis said Mighton and the JUMP math team are “especially talented at identifying everything that somebody needs to notice in order to understand the concept” and that all of those things are “already built into” the JUMP math curriculum.

“I know of no other resource that does that,” Davis said. “It is incredibly well engineered.”

Mighton said the number one thing that stands out about JUMP Math is that “we have evidence.”

A study of over 1,000 elementary school students in Canada who were taught with JUMP math found those students made “significantly more progress in math learning in the second year, especially in problem-solving.” 

“JUMP math may be a valuable evidence-based addition to the teacher’s toolbox,” the study states.

, which serves low-income students on New York City’s Lower East Side, saw the biggest improvement in math scores in the city in 2014 — the same year it adopted the JUMP math curriculum, according to JUMP math. Manhattan Charter School did not respond to a request for comment. 

implemented JUMP math between 2017 and 2019. Two of those schools “achieved striking gains” on state tests, according to JUMP math. In one school, the number of students scoring proficient in math increased by 23 percentage points. The NYC Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

JUMP math’s initial grant from Accelerate, for $250,000, was used to implement “digital interactive lessons that students can use for independent, self-paced learning,” in Louisiana, Mighton said. The lessons were tested last spring with about 1,000 students. Students were given half-hour intervention periods during the school day to complete the digital lessons. 

Mighton said that the digital lessons were created by recording “master teachers” teaching from JUMP math lesson plans and then splitting the lessons into short, two-minute clips. Then, Mighton said, JUMP inserted “digital interactive questions” between the clips to assess whether students understood the material.

“The study’s goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and support systems required to successfully implement a scalable tutoring model to address learning loss among students,” a JUMP math press release said. “The report shows improved overall math proficiency among participating students, whose learning progressed rapidly while using the JUMP math lesson modules over a two-month period, with a statistically significant improvement in scores across all modules.”

Tilman Sheets, a psychology and behavioral sciences professor at Louisiana Tech University, said in the release “the report findings suggest that the implementation of dedicated tutoring support and resources might contribute to reducing disparities in math skills among our most vulnerable students and may help to cultivate an interest in this critical subject.”

Collinsworth, the Choudrant Elementary School instructional coach, said that her school participated in the initial Accelerate study with digital sessions. Collinsworth said a fourth-grade class and two fifth-grade classrooms took part and all three saw gains. Collinsworth said a sixth-grade class also did the digital lessons, but said “there was a glitch in the module” so that class did not show growth.

The second Accelerate grant, for $150,000, is being used by JUMP to study both in-person and online live tutoring with JUMP resources. The study includes about 300 students in grades three through eight in both Louisiana and Michigan. In Louisiana, tutors are Louisiana Tech University students who come into schools for in-person tutoring, according to Mighton. In Michigan, tutors are mostly volunteers, he said, and some do their sessions with students online, while others tutor in-person.

Collinsworth said Choudrant Elementary is also participating in this second pilot.

“Everything is going really well and I expect to have positive results,” she said.

Dana Talley, the chief academic officer for Lincoln Parish School District in Louisiana, which includes Choudrant Elementary, said teachers who execute JUMP math lessons “the way it’s intended just really get good results.”

Talley said it is exciting to see JUMP math branch out into tutoring.

“The way JUMP is set up, the teacher in the classroom is a personal tutor for kids,” Talley said. “That’s how it’s designed. So I feel like it makes a ton of sense. They definitely have the right curriculum to move into the tutoring realm.”

Mighton said he expects tutoring to take on an even greater role in JUMP’s evolution.

“There is such a need,” he said.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

“I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it,” said the Bayview Secondary School student in Ontario, Canada.

In response, Shanzeh is developing BeBella, a postpartum app designed to help new moms to navigate their postpartum journeys. 

New mothers can track their postpartum health, such as water intake and sleep patterns, and can use artificial intelligence to create a personalized care plan.

Moms can also journal how they’re feeling.

Shanzeh said the data, with its AI component, can streamline and coordinate their health care journeys with their doctors. She added that postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis affects hundreds of millions of mothers worldwide.

“And because of that” she said, “I know that the app does have a lot of potential to impact and transform these people’s lives.”

“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you … don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, ����Ӱ�� convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim … they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told ����Ӱ�� in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

First, a bit of context. CA$30 billion, using a rough population adjustment to the American context, is in the neighborhood of the U.S. investing $240 billion. The Canadian funds are to be paid out over five years. Yes, it’s a lot of money.

Canada illustrates the concept of a national child care system that is nationally-supported, but locally-run. The federal government has been entering into what are known as “bilateral agreements” with the provinces, laying out the respective obligations. So far, eight such agreements have been signed, including in provinces with both liberal and conservative leadership (“blue states” and “red states,” if you will). In most cases, provinces are also contributing substantially to the upgraded system; for instance, British Columbia CA$2.5 billion over three years to the pot.

Each agreement shares certain principles: within a year, parent fees are to be halved on route to an average fee of CA$10 a day by 2026; large numbers of new licensed child care slots are to be created; and provincial wage grids are to be put into place to ensure adequate compensation for the workforce. If you’re following along on your child care policy bingo sheet, that’s Affordability, Access and Quality.

Take Saskatchewan as an example. The conservative-leaning and heavily rural province has a population of 1.1 million people, putting it around the size of Montana or Rhode Island. The federal government will be pouring over CA$1 billion into Saskatchewan; that CA$200 million per year is equal or more than entire (and much larger) U.S. states like Utah and Virginia currently spend on child care. In announcing the agreement, the Saskatchewan Education Minister : “The Government of Saskatchewan is committed to investing in affordable, accessible, and quality early learning and child care options that provide flexibility and choice to Saskatchewan families … We are pleased that this deal creates 28,000 new regulated spaces [more than doubling the existing supply], makes life more affordable for Saskatchewan families and enhances the wages of early childhood educators who support children across our province.”

Indeed, early childhood educators there will a CA$3 per-hour wage boost, and that’s just the beginning.

If this all seems like a very big deal, you’re right. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberal party made the national child care plan a tentpole policy; after the federal budget proposal was rolled out in April, a “when asked to name one proposal they could recall about the document, 50 percent named child care.” The plan is enormously popular, drawing in some surveys.

While the recent election was inconclusive — returning Trudeau and his Liberals to power but still in minority status — many Canadian have popular ideas like child care helped keep the party from slipping further in the face of backlash from Trudeau opting to call an early election (Trudeau’s main opponent, the Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, had pledged to the bilateral deals).

So what can the U.S. learn from Canada’s experience? From a political standpoint, American elected leaders and candidates should realize that investing in child care is all upside. I’m no expert on Canadian politics, but all signs point to the Conservative child care proposal of merely offering tax credits . Relatedly, this is a tale of how it matters to use the power you have while you have it (CC: certain Democratic Senators). It is easy to imagine a theoretical debate going far differently than one in which the opposition party had to promise to rip up eight existing agreements poised to deliver major benefits for families.

Advocates should also take heed that Canada’s child care triumph is the result of provincial innovation creating a proof of concept that has now gone national. Quebec started its heavily subsidized system in the late 1990s, British Columbia followed with its $10 a Day campaign in the 2010s, and now here we are. State leadership — and advocacy movement-building — is critical.

There is much more to be written about the strategies and tactics Canadian advocates and organizers have successfully used; one point I will home in on briefly is their highly effective messaging. Go back and read the quote from the Saskatchewan education minister (which echoes the nationwide talking points; I could have drawn from dozens of similar quotes). Note how seamlessly the ideas of choice, affordability, accessibility, quality and workforce are knit together. From my reading, the Canadians focus far more on the benefits than the price tag, although they can easily the system will soon pay for itself. It’s an approach that has resonated with the public.

I don’t want to take the comparisons too far. While Canada is not Finland, neither is it precisely the United States, and to be sure, Canada still has a long road ahead, including the all-important implementation phase. That said, we can look north to draw hope for our own fight. We no longer have to cast about to find a large, diverse nation with a crumbling, market-driven child care system that has opted to give families what they need and deserve: real choices.

Cities are wherepar . But urban environments can feel built to deter kids and caretaking. That spurs families to bail on cities – – contributing to climate change through increased dependence on driving and inefficient housing. Kid-hostile urban design also takes its toll on the many families who live in cities.

Although studies on how neighborhood design impacts child development are has established clear links between stress and the developing brain. Ask any caretaker and they’ll tell you—the size of their home, the transportation they can and can’t safely access, the safety of their streets, and how easy it is to use parks, child care and other amenities, can have a significant, ongoing impact on the strain experienced by parents and, by extension, their kids.

These elements make up what urban planners refer to as a neighborhood’s “built environment.” The built environment can support children and parenting, or be just another obstacle to overcome. Either sets the tone for how kids and caretakers experience a city, says Christine Serdjenian Yearwood, founder and CEO of the family transportation advocacy group . It can influence whether, say, a pregnant person gets offered a seat on a crowded subway or if that baby bump is viewed as a lifestyle choice, no more deserving of accommodation than a bag of golf clubs.

So what does a city that values kids and caretakers look like? Planners knowledgeable in child-friendly design say that walkable neighborhoods with a mix of commercial space and diverse housing lead to “ and a strong sense of community” that help families thrive. Parks and other green space is also key, the Australian planning consultant Kristin Agnello explains in her book, .

Montreal makes for an inspiring example in North America. Teeming with green space and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, it’s also a city where considering family needs feels baked into urban planning.

Family-friendliness “is a policy that Montreal has adopted,” explains Faiz Abhuani, director of Brique par Brique, an affordable housing initiative in Montreal. “In some boroughs, this is their guiding principle. It’s like a religion.”

Paid Parental Leave and Universal Child Care

As part of the French-speaking province of Quebec, Montreal families benefit from Quebec’s renowned paid parental leave and – – two initiatives that in part sprang from efforts to promote the French language’s endurance in the province by strengthening families. This attitude towards children as an investment to be nurtured permeates everything from the government’s having procedures, to with family-friendly work environments, to a pandemic prioritizing parents for the vaccine. It’s an attitude that also informs ongoing adjustments to the city’s housing policies, transportation system and green space.

Housing to Fit Families

According to Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian, a key reason many young families flee cities is housing. Families need bigger homes, Toderian explained to . But because real estate developers maximize profits by building smaller units, without regulation of new development, housing designed for couples and single people dominates a city’s landscape. This is true for affordable and subsidized housing as well, with finding that in New York City, the affordable three-bedroom apartment is nearing extinction.

, Montreal now has several neighborhoods barreling toward unaffordability, and the city has long suffered a shortage of family-oriented housing stock. As a corrective, the city recently passed requiring major housing developments to set aside a percentage of units for affordable and subsidized housing as well as family housing, defined as three bedrooms or bigger.

Abhuani of Brique par Brique has concerns that the bylaw ties new housing to gentrification, and that real estate developers with no commitment to the community will be the gatekeepers for homes. But he and other advocates generally agree it demonstrates an important willingness to center families’ needs in planning.

Stroller-Friendly Public Transportation

Walking and using public transportation isn’t just good for the environment; it’s good for the family budget and health. In y, architect Nidhi Gulati makes a persuasive case for taking public transportation being good for children’s cognitive development as well, by providing brain-boosting interactions with the built environment.

But public transportation is designed with the single commuter in mind. that women using public transportation with children in Los Angeles incur “higher travel costs, elevated stress, and faced greater safety risks on transit than men.” Yearwood of UP-STAND says it’s no wonder “there’s this huge population of people that just opt out of public transportation because it’s not built with them.”

Welcoming a new child is when some families purchase vehicles for the first time, or trade in cars for gas-guzzling SUVs. Others stop venturing out with children. “We hear all the time that once people have young children they just don’t leave the area. And it most certainly has an impact on their mental health and isolation,” says Yearwood.

A leader in the global movement to make cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, Montreal’s public transportation is free. The city’s public buses are low to the ground, making for easy stroller- and small-child-boarding, and there’s a space up front with folding seats marked for both wheelchairs and strollers.

Its metro system has clear signage identifying strollers and pregnant passengers as a priority group for seating, and the entire system is undergoing a to become more accessible. Improvements, which include more elevators and clear barriers separating train tracks and platforms, will be a boon for small kids and their caretakers.

Montreal also boasts an impressive biking infrastructure that parents feel safe enough to use with kids. At the YMCA camp my kids attended this summer in a bustling neighborhood, children as young as 6 or 7 biked alongside parents for transportation.

Green Space to Grow On

Also significant: camp counselors and kids made use of not one, but four nearby parks. Research shows this kind of easy access to green space offers city dwellers a host of benefits: from mitigating the effects of extreme heat, to promoting well-being, to providing an arena where young children play while building gross- and fine-motor skills.

The greenery doesn’t stop with parks. The city makes judicious use of cement planters to slow traffic, and the city’s car-free streets, sidewalks and alleys are filled with whimsical, often nature-inspired and reminiscent of the “” of researchers Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of the University of Delaware. Montreal is also a trendsetter in “flipping asphalt into gardens, public seating or people-friendly infrastructure,” notes urbanist researcher and writer John Surico in his newsletter, Streetbeat.

That’s not to say life is perfect for Montreal families; locals have critiques. Many want to see the government-funded child care centers expanded so more children receive their quality care. A group of advocates and researchers noting fathers, too, often get overlooked in policy planning. And Abhuani of Brique par Brique says the city’s planning for families too frequently means “nuclear, white, professional families,” whereas the city has many multigenerational families under one roof, as well as families without legal status who face debilitating discrimination in the job and rental markets. These families’ have needs that will not be addressed “by green space and bike lanes,” notes Abhuani.

But there’s also a general consensus that family well-being is considered a key part of the city’s overall health. For parents enduring a global pandemic in the many North American cities where kids have felt like a policy afterthought, putting families front and center in city planning can feel radical, even revolutionary. But it shouldn’t be. As so many urban planners have noted, a city that works for small children works for just about everyone.

Photos by Kendra Hurley and Sandeep Prasada