A panel of economists says that schools in Ohio aren’t producing workers that match employers’ needs.

The state’s labor force has declined by 91,000 between 2000 and 2020, the survey said. During that period, the state’s education system has changed markedly.

Since Republican John Kasich became governor in 2011, Ohio has diverted billions from traditional public schools. Ranked in K-12 education the year before Kasich took office, Ohio schools by 2023.

Ohio also created such as the , which collapsed in 2018. The state couldn’t verify the politically connected school’s claims of student enrollment, much less whether kids were learning anything.

The state also is now spending in taxpayer money on private schools, while the state’s traditional public schools last year saw their .

In the midst of these radical changes to the Ohio’s education system, it still is not adequately preparing students to join the workforce, economists surveyed by Scioto Analysis said.

Eighteen were asked whether they agreed that “Misalignment between Ohio’s education and workforce training systems and employer skill demands is limiting statewide job growth.” Eleven agreed, three disagreed and four were uncertain or had no opinion.

In the comment section of the survey, David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati said that Ohioans tend not to have gone very far in school. He added that even when they train for certain jobs, their training and the jobs available to them often don’t match.

“Ohio has pretty low educational attainment compared to other states, and even 40% of Ohio workers trained for manufacturing jobs tend not to get manufacturing jobs within a year, consistent with a mismatch of skills and demand for skills,” Brasington wrote.

Educational attainment — or how far people go in school — can be important to employers in several ways. Some need students to go far enough to attain a basic education and possibly vocational training. Others need workers who have been to college.

U.S. News and World Report puts Ohio at in its rankings of educational attainment — well into the bottom half of states.

Bill Lafayette, an economist with Regionomics, said schools and employers need to work closely to address the problem.

“Based on my work with educational institutions, linkages between these institutions and business need to be enhanced,” he wrote. “It has always been important for graduates to leave school with the work-ready skills (communication, responsibility, integrity, leadership, teamwork, etc.) that can spell the difference between success and failure in a career. But now with the pace of technological change, schools need to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of business, and graduates need to recognize that they must keep their skills current or run the risk of irrelevance.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to revamp the way the state’s schools teach math.

Hochul announced the plan in her annual State of the State address on Tuesday, along with several child care and education initiatives she has previewed over the past week. The governor’s broader agenda includes funding a ; expanding pre-K and child care vouchers statewide; growing a ; bolstering the state’s teacher training pipeline; and building on free community college for adults who want to train for high-demand careers.

The governor’s office released few details about the plan to overhaul math, but in its outlining Hochul’s priorities for the year, state officials compared it to existing efforts to revamp literacy instruction. The governor has worked with teachers and school districts to adopt evidence-based “science of reading” practices that focus on phonics and explicit reading instruction, state officials wrote.

Similarly, Hochul said in her Tuesday speech that it is time to get “back to basics” in math. “My hope is for New York students to be the most academically prepared in the country,” Hochul said.

To that end, she will introduce legislation to require the State Education Department to provide school districts with best practices for teaching math and guidance on selecting math curriculums that align with state standards.

The state will also require the State University of New York and the City University of New York to offer extra training in evidence-based math instruction to teachers, especially in New York’s districts with the lowest math performance.

“With these proposals, New York parents can rest assured that there is no better place for their children to learn and thrive than here in our state,” Hochul said.

New York City is already several years into an experiment in mandating and standardizing school curriculums in the name of evidence-based teaching practices. Well before the state rolled out its curriculum recommendations, former Mayor Eric Adams introduced a teaching overhaul called NYC Reads, which required elementary schools to use one of three city-approved reading programs.

At the same time, under a math reform called NYC Solves, the city required high schools, and later some middle schools, to adopt a standardized curriculum for algebra.

Some educators and experts contended that it didn’t make sense to introduce a math overhaul in high school, and lacked the vocabulary or tools to follow what was being taught.

New York City’s new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, seems to agree.

Math reform should start with elementary schools, he “If we don’t do math well,” Samuels added, students won’t “be ready for the jobs that exist, much less the jobs that don’t.”

Samuels also argued for a balancing a “back-to-basics” approach to math that emphasizes memorization and math facts with a focus on creative problem-solving. Conceptual understanding is important, Samuels said, but parents “look back at me and say, ‘My kid is in fourth grade and doesn’t know the times tables.’”

“We think of [times tables] as an old thing, but we absolutely need to incorporate it so that our parents can believe in what we do again,” Samuels said.

The jury remains out on whether New York City’s curriculum mandates have improved performance. The Adams administration they said were evidence of positive results, but education experts say it’s too soon to draw conclusions.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The San Francisco Unified School District announced that it is rolling out a new math curriculum for grades K-8 this school year.

According to a statement from the district, the newly adopted materials focus on three key areas: solving math problems accurately; understanding the “why” behind the math; and learning how to apply math in everyday life.

San Francisco Unified has set a goal of increasing the percentage of eighth grade students meeting grade-level expectations from 42% in 2022 to 65% by 2027. This new curriculum was piloted last year by 84 middle school teachers and 160 elementary teachers. Early results were promising, the district said.

“San Francisco’s public schools are focused on helping every student build confidence and competence in math to be set up for lifelong success,” Superintendent Maria Su said in the statement.

SFUSD’s math curriculum had received heavy criticism and was even the subject of a ballot measure last year. Voters supported an effort to teach algebra in eighth grade. Previously, the district pushed algebra to ninth grade in  into different math paths at the middle school level.

“I taught him most everything up until kindergarten,” Lee said. “And then he surpassed me.” 

Managing Xavier’s outsized ability proved challenging. His mother, a teacher and performer, was constantly chasing down new opportunities for him in what felt like a job of its own, one that came with numerous out-of-pocket expenses. 

Lee paid a math tutor $70 a week to work with him for just 45 minutes and was constantly buying books and other materials to support him. One coding program alone cost $900. It was terrific, she said, but unaffordable in the long term. 

It wasn’t until summer 2023 that she learned about a brand new nonprofit created to support high-achieving young math students with more than $100,000 in educational assistance over 10 years. Xavier was recommended to by an he attended in Ohio. 

Soon, he and his mom were bombarded with help. 

“Now I have a partner,” Lee said of the organization. “They are begging us to tell them what he is interested in so that they can follow up. They make things so much easier.”

Born in June 2023 and funded by more than $16 million in grants from foundations focused on mathematics and supporting underserved youth, National Math Stars already paid for her son’s $299 3D printer and sundry items through , a math tutoring service that offers online classes, books and other learning tools.  

The program began with 12 children from around the country and added another 61 from Texas last fall. All were between the ages of 7 and 11. 

It will soon expand to the Midwest: It plans to bring on another 100 students later this year — half from the Lone Star State and the remainder from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It intends to grow incoming classes to 200-plus children, as long as funding allows for the duration of their decade-long commitment.  

It finds participants by asking select schools — it’s in communication with more than 1,500 of them — to identify students in the second and third grade who score in the top 2% or 3% of their class on standardized math exams. Parents can also apply on their child’s behalf: and will close June 15.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz, National Math Stars’ founder, wants to identify and help mathematically gifted students when they are young, before factors like race and socioeconomics wear away at their opportunity and achievement. 

“If we look for top performers in second grade, we’re going to have a more diverse and representative group … than if we first look for them in eighth grade or in high school, when there has been more time for the people with more resources to get ahead — and the people with fewer resources to fall behind,” she said. 

Walder-Biesanz knows what it’s like to be unchallenged at school. She skipped three grades — she entered college at 15 and graduated four years later — but was another three years ahead in what was her favorite subject: She took algebra in sixth grade at age 9 and calculus in 10th grade when she was 12. 

She earned her bachelor’s from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, her master’s in European Literature at the University of Cambridge and her MBA from Stanford. Walder-Biesanz previously worked as a product manager at Microsoft and Yahoo and later as a management consultant at Bain.

While her family was well resourced, her local schools’ math curriculum wasn’t challenging enough: She had to seek outside sources to supplement what it lacked. 

She knows not all children have that chance, which is why she is focused on widening opportunity for all mathematically gifted kids. 

While future classes will skew younger, the pilot included older students like Xavier to amass a group quickly and to serve as a vanguard: These children will reach middle, high school and college ahead of their peers, allowing National Math Stars time to further refine its offerings. 

Xavier, 11 and who enjoys coding, said he loves math because, “It can describe almost anything if you use it right.” 

The sixth grader said he’s currently trying to build a , an for generating a sequence of numbers whose properties approximate ones. They’re often used in programming, simulations and electronic games. 

He’s also interested in pentomino tilings — think of the shapes used in the game Tetris, which have four squares and add a fifth. 

“I just think it’s cool,” he said. 

And, through National Math Stars, he was able to talk to the creators of , which offers a free suite of math tools — including what Xavier calls a “super awesome” graphing calculator — to help users represent their ideas mathematically.

After being asked to speak to National Math Stars students at large, Desmos recognized some of them were already quite familiar with its offerings. Those students were invited to meet with the company’s product team and give their advice on what it could improve upon. 

Xavier said he was elated to speak to people so well respected by the mathematics community. 

Another participant, Haripriya Patel, 9 and in the third grade, attends school online. Her mother said she breezes through her core curriculum, electives and homework in just three to four hours each day.

A part of National Math Stars for about five months, she particularly enjoyed the welcome weekend in Houston, where she and other students made mathematical origami and completed logic puzzles and math-based games. 

Haripriya, who aspires to be a marine biologist, said she loves algebraic equations, geometry and number theory. 

“I like problem solving,” said Haripriya, who lives in Katy, Texas. “I enjoy the process, the opportunity.”

Johan Banegas, 8 and from Dallas, was thrilled to be accepted to the program because “not a lot of people can do it.” 

He said school doesn’t always provide the rigor he needs and that he’s already skipped second grade. 

“To be honest,” he said bashfully during a recent interview, “it’s still so easy in fourth grade.”

National Math Stars has paid for, among other items, Johan’s premium subscription to , which mails him technology packs meant for teens and adults.

Walder-Biesanz recognizes that participating families are asked to make a major commitment to the program. Their children must be enrolled in advanced math courses outside of school, regularly check in with their adviser, attend weekly math mentoring sessions and STEM-related summer programs each year.

“Obviously, we fully fund that, including travel and all the associated costs, but they do have to make the time for it and make it a priority,” she said. 

Johan, who wants to be an engineer, said he is determined to stick with it through high school. 

“They pay for a lot of stuff and they also let us learn more than usual so we can keep on being advanced in math,” he said.

Walder-Biesanz said her organization learned much from its pilot year, including how children value in-person interaction, how participating students didn’t need tutoring in advanced math — they were gifted enough to handle it on their own — and how families from lower socio-economic levels were more hesitant to ask for money to support their students’ academic ambitions. 

“We initially had a kind of free-form funding approach where we said, ‘Hey, you know, if it’s STEM related and you ask for it, we’ll probably say yes,” to telling families they had a certain budget and that “we want you to use the whole thing.”

Walder-Biesanz said her organization asks early on in the admissions process about family income and first-generation immigrant status, looking for indicators that the opportunity might be particularly valuable. 

“We take that strongly into consideration as we try to put student’s scores into context,” she said. “I’m more impressed with an ESL student from a low-income family who scores 99th percentile on our admissions exam than with a super well-resourced student who scores 99.9th percentile.”

Melodie Baker, executive director of , a nonprofit that uses research data and storytelling to shape and advance policies, said timely, early identification is crucial for cultivating and developing mathematical talent.

“Continuous support during formative years, especially for students who face economic stressors, can mitigate typical distractions — needing to work to help support family — and allow students to remain engaged,” she said. “Like the saying goes, while talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.”

Walder-Biesanz said not all highly gifted children are well served by their local public schools and that it’s tragic to lose out on their abilities.

“As a country and as a world, we face a lot of big challenges,” she said. “We are going to need people with really strong STEM skills, really strong analytical ability, really strong problem solving and collaboration skills to tackle the world’s problems and to stay competitive as a country.”

That’s one of the top-line findings from a from the Urban Institute, which sought to understand whether devoting resources to children’s health and social development yields greater benefits than devoting resources to their cognitive development; the study also looks at what aspects of a child’s cognitive development play relatively larger roles in their adult outcomes. 

Researchers found that math scores have a significant predictive impact on earnings into adulthood. That finding holds true for children of all races and ethnicities – including for Hispanic children who consistently experience the largest gains – and for girls, who tend to see a higher earnings boost than boys. 

“Math scores seem to matter a good bit,” says Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits at the Urban Institute and one of the lead authors of the policy paper. “Everything matters a little, but cognitive skills seem to matter a lot.”

The findings, which replicate a longstanding correlation between math and adult success, come as school districts across the country consider ways to provide more effective math instruction, especially in the early elementary years, and build a stronger connection in the K-12 setting to local workforce needs.

Specifically, the analysis shows that improving math scores by 0.5 standard deviation for children up to age 12 is associated with larger increases on earnings by age 30 than other equivalent improvements. 

The impact also increases as children get older. For example, a half standard deviation increase in preschool math scores raises earnings by 2.5 percent, while a half standard deviation increase in middle childhood raises earnings by 3.5 percent. A 3.5 percent increase corresponds to about $1,200 a year in additional earnings for the average adult. Notably, girls see a greater increase in adulthood earnings from an improvement in math scores than boys – more than three-quarters of a percentage point at every life stage.

The same cannot be said for the earnings impact of improving reading scores, which actually diminishes as students get older, falling from 0.9 percent (about $300) to 0.5 percent (less than $200) from ages 5 to 11. Meanwhile, the impact of health and social relationships are consistent but modest as children get older. “It’s not an enormous impact, but it’s an impact,” Acs says. “Would you pass up a 3 percent raise?”

“It consistently shows that things you do early in life do ripple through,” he continued. “And even when you might not see a clear causal pathway,” he says, “it’s a good framework for understanding how early life stuff matters.”

The analysis bolsters previous research touting a correlation between math and earnings later in life and gives policymakers much to think over as they choose among interventions aimed at benefiting children in the short or long term, as well as when might be the most effective moment to unleash those targeted interventions. 

“It is useful to see what are the curricular options and where you can intervene in kids’ lives early on if you want to have a long term impact,” Acs says. “And it does show that improvements in childhood and elementary school do matter and carry on into earnings.”

For example, Acs says, it may be worth making bigger investments in math in later grades given that improvements in middle school have a more significant impact on earnings than in preschool. And for school leaders looking to make a dent in the earnings gap between men and women, it’s important to know that increasing math scores in childhood consistently raises the adult earnings of girls by a greater percentage than those of boys – even if in absolute dollar terms, increasing math scores raises boys’ earnings, too. 

In the wake of the recent “science of reading” overhaul that shifted how educators teach students to read, policymakers are increasingly setting their gaze on math pedagogy. improved slowly between 1990 and 2013 and then plateaued, only to fall sharply during the pandemic. On average, students lost in math between 2019 and 2022. The most vulnerable students fell even further behind, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities. 

Recovery has been stubborn and slow. Students recorded the largest drop ever in math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year, to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

“We always talk about this amazing predictive power of early mathematics,” says DeAnn Huinker, professor of math instruction at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and director of the Center for Math and Science Education Research. “And I think we’ve taken math identity and agency away from kids, and just squashed the love that you find in 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds when they’re exploring numbers. Kids just really get turned off of mathematics, so I think we’re fighting that right now.”

Education policy experts, lawmakers and business leaders agree that the nation needs to drive improvements in K-12 math to remain competitive in an increasingly technical global economy. On the most recent internationally benchmarked , known as the PISA, Americans scored lower than students from 36 other countries. And Defense Department officials are concerned about Americans’ contempt for math, warning that it has serious implications for national security, including .

Looking ahead, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the number of jobs in so-called “math occupations” is set to increase by 29% by 2031, or by roughly 30,000 jobs per year – a faster clip than for other occupations. 

Though the debate over how to correct course is ongoing, experts say that the way schools are currently teaching math doesn’t work very well; further complicating the problem is the fact that many teachers who seek out positions in early elementary grades – the important foundational math years – do so because they don’t like math. Teachers should move away from procedural learning that involves rote memorization, Huinker and others say, and focus instead on conceptual understanding, which helps students recognize underlying math relationships, and developing a positive math identity.

“The number one goal is to really get at this deeper understanding of mathematics,” she says. “We want kids to make sense of the mathematical ideas that they’re exploring and learning about. So not rote learning, not memorizing, not worksheets. We do a lot that still is perhaps bad practice in early mathematics.”

Huinker says she hopes research like that from the Urban Institute’s analysis crystalizes for policymakers and school leaders the importance of getting math instruction right – especially in the early years.

“One thing that’s starting to really be more acknowledged is the importance of early mathematics and its predictive power for the long term,” she says. “There’s so much emphasis on reading and literacy, which is super important, but it kind of always overshadows mathematics. The crux of all of this early childhood, elementary and middle math is ensuring that kids feel empowered with agency to make sense of mathematics, to question, to explore, to really think of themselves as confident in that.” 

A model for math tutoring employing nearly 1,000 college and graduate students has taken root across Maryland, converting some into lifelong educators and providing middle schoolers with diverse mentors.

Now in its first full academic year, the is bringing hundreds of students from Morgan State, Johns Hopkins, Towson, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Salisbury into the lives of middle schoolers in Wicomico, Baltimore City and County public schools.

“When you have 35 to 40 kids in a class and a lot of them need extra help, you as a teacher, you can’t get to everybody every day,” said Matt Barrow, Baltimore City Schools’ director of differentiated learning. 

Schools across the country are finding ways to offerings to help get kids back on track. For Barrow, the impact has felt immediate and positive.  

“…To see joy on kids’ faces when they’re doing math – they’re middle schoolers!,” he said. “It makes me reflect back to when I was in the classroom, wishing that the kids I had at the time had that type of opportunity for support consistently, not even just in math.” 

On a fall afternoon at Dickey Hill Elementary and Middle School, one of UMBC’s ten placements, Shradha Gawad introduced her eighth graders to the scientific notation by having them think about how far the earth was from the sun – too big of a number to actually write out. 

“If small words or encouragement from me, if that makes a small change in their life and they are interested in math and able to grow with that, then that’s definitely a yes for me,” said Gawad, a master’s student in information systems. “I want to keep doing that.”

UMBC tutors began lessons by asking students how they’re feeling that day or to recap their weekends, one way they build relationships with students. If students are notably upset, tired, or not into it for whatever reason, they take small breaks to play math games.

That approach helped Rahul Sodadasi, a first year at UMBC studying cyber security, with a disengaged student. By the end of the first week, the student complimented before leaving the room, “this was really fun.” 

“It’s about knowing that person,” Sodadasi said. “I know that she is an emotional person and likes to build bonds [before] she can understand … that’s how the math got into it.” 

After an initial orientation, tutors are trained during monthly professional development sessions, on topics such as strategies for English language learners. 

They reinforce positive mistakes that show kids’ understanding of concepts, using phrases like “Not quite, but that’s great thinking and I can see why you got there,” or “what if we tried this, too?” 

Tory, a seventh grader and aspiring doctor or realtor, reflected honestly, “it’s not my favorite thing, but I still do it … [This] makes me want to do it more when I’m at home.” 

The program aims to be permanent, lasting long after pandemic relief funds end by requiring grantees to find funding sources, like local foundations, nonprofits and city governments, to state funds. 

“Through the Maryland Tutoring Corps, we are engineering an educational renaissance,” Governor Wes Moore said of the program as the first grantee districts were announced .

With math scores reaching historic lows, Moore and the Maryland State Department of Education unveiled the $28 million grant program to , just a few months before tutoring was named a top by the Biden administration. The latest NAEP scores, or Nation’s Report Card, had revealed a bleak reality: about 3 in 4 .

Schools, eager to jumpstart tutoring but struggling to keep teaching vacancies filled and attendance up, have been transformed by district-university partnerships. 

Coaches, ranging from undergraduates to PhD and teacher candidates, are now supporting middle schoolers identified for added support by their year-end test scores or iReady diagnostic tests.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education extended federal pandemic relief funds’ spending deadlines of January 2025 through the next two academic years, to enable other districts to double down on this model of support. In nearby Washington, D.C., is bringing high dosage tutoring to about 6,000 more kids.

In practice, Maryland’s corps adheres to research-backed : ensuring small groups of no more than three meet during the school day, for maximum attendance and minimum disruption to transportation or family life; paying tutors; and prioritizing high need student populations. 

High dosage tutoring, when led as theirs is in at least two 45-minute sessions per week, is known to help students develop a positive attitude toward math, feelings of connection to school, and build an academic foundation for higher paying down the line. 

While Maryland doesn’t yet have results from tutoring done this fall, a report looking at randomized control trials from the last few decades showed students gained . It’s widely considered one of the most , including for the most student populations. 

According to a prior UMBC evaluation of one of the grantee programs, 85% of students felt more confident in math. One eighth grader remarked in a survey, “I could get help, and if I got it wrong, they didn’t put me down.” 

The grant has given UMBC’s pre-existing program new life. 

“Math is something that has not been as supported as say literacy over the past several years. I do think that is shifting. I see it,” said Sara Krauss, director of school partnerships with the university.  

Three years ago, UMBC’s program served 355 students across four schools. At the time, Krauss managed logistics alone, conducting interviews with hundreds of potential coaches until midnight to accommodate schedules and demand. 

, they are serving nearly double across ten sites, utilizing curricula from Saga Education and Rocket Math. Over 1,100 students applied to tutor this year. The grant has also enabled them to rely less on carpools, providing some funds for Lyfts and vans. 

As they’ve grown, they’ve streamlined other logistical puzzle pieces, like bringing fingerprinting and background check services to the university. 

“That’s what this means,” said Sanfoya Ray, Baltimore City Schools’ coordinator of academic tutoring. “Knowing that there is work to do and doing the work to get it done.” 

All images by Marianna McMurdock

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the amount of money Washington, D.C. is investing in high-impact tutoring. 

Teachers say Struggly, available for at-home or classroom use, is a game changer for K-8 students discouraged by math or having a hard time with traditional tasks because of language barriers or learning disabilities. In game-like tasks aligned with common core standards, students manipulate shapes, animals, and algebraic formulas to build foundational understanding. 

The platform’s potential reach is hard to overstate as educators urgently search for ways to address the : On average, only one in four kids are proficient in 8th grade math; the number hovering between 9-14% for Black, Native and Latino children.

In approximately 340 schools across 28 states and 21 countries, Struggly has become the go-to supplemental learning platform for some educators whose students had difficulty socializing or collaborating after missing in-person learning in early childhood during the pandemic. School sites range from gifted programs and large to smaller private schools serving students with special needs and juvenile detention centers. 

, “put the student in the driver’s seat, don’t make them reliant on any sort of literacy, but also don’t make them rely on an adult to tell them what to do,” said Tanya LaMar, CEO and cofounder, adding its unusual design was intended to “allow all students to have access to math regardless of language, socioeconomic status or any kind of diversity markers.” 

Many educators have found the platform via conferences across the U.S. At SXSW EDU, the platform won this year’s Community Choice Award for the , celebrating digital innovations helping to bridge learning gaps. 

Levels designed to become more challenging as students go on can be solved multiple ways, encouraging learners to talk to each other about their strategies and challenge common misconceptions that math is more about memorization than reason or logic. The video game-like design, with no time restrictions, also keeps students calm and engaged longer, teachers say. 

After using Struggly for one month – 20 minutes, three times a week – 63% improved scores on state tests and 68% felt more engaged in their math classes, according to independent research from WestEd. Teachers have also noticed fewer outbursts and negative self talk, more confidence and less .

One district survey revealed students were more likely to agree with statements like, “if I work really hard, I can become very good at math” and to disagree with “people can’t change how good they are at math.”

Struggly was originally imagined by designer Alina Schlaier, whose daughter came home from first grade one day saying, “I hate math.” Schlaier found Stanford math expert Jo Boaler’s resources online, but knowing that it wasn’t sustainable for her to prep each lesson for her daughter, the designer reached out to Boaler with the idea of forming a company that would blend their skills. 

Boaler’s former PhD student Tanya LaMar joined the effort, bringing an educator’s lens to its creation, once a Los Angeles Unified teacher. There, she had faced compounding challenges: teaching math while teaching kids to see math beyond the narrow way they’d been taught it must look – facts, procedures to be memorized.

“Meanwhile, neuroscience research tells us that there’s no such thing as math brain … I felt like I was up against a lot trying to convince my students they could be math people, when struggling in math is seen as a sign that something’s wrong,” LaMar said. “So Struggly is about supporting students to embrace struggle as an integral part of the learning process.”

Such a shift has been transformational for educators like Gregg Bonti, a math group teacher at Mary McDowell, a quaker school in Brooklyn serving students with language-based learning disabilities.

Typically, his 4th and 5th graders arrive with some “resistance to learning and school.” At the start of the year, as soon as something felt challenging, many would shut down or push back on tasks, or start to talk to themselves disparagingly. Many also struggle with impulse control, but the games’ design has helped them “slow down” and “strategize.”

“It’s really rare and challenging for us to find websites that meet students where they’re at with their language skills,” Bonti said. Removing language from the tasks and letting them dive in has “neutralized” the playing field for his students, who come to class with a range of reading abilities. 

Since introducing Struggly in December, he’s finding students are more eager to persevere in math tasks and ask each other questions like “what if we tried this?” It’s also helped their teachers distinguish between their conceptual misunderstandings of math versus difficulties with language. 

Across the country in California’s central valley, one rural educator has been finding similar impacts. 

At Semitropic, a small school of predominantly Latino, multilingual students living in poverty, 3rd grade teacher Jennifer Fields was looking for platforms that would encourage and engage – they felt burnt out by Prodigy, but she needed something standards based. 

The first day she introduced it, one student went home and played on their own for three hours. It’s become so desired she can use it as a motivation for them to finish their other in-class work. 

Conceptually, it’s helped them grasp onto geometry concepts like manipulation and transformation easier than in traditional workbooks. They’re learning how to better communicate math concepts verbally, something she worried about seeing the difference in this group of children who had the equivalent of Zoom kindergarten. 

“That in itself has been my biggest success for the year is the fact that now they will work in cooperative groups with each other … they’re being more verbal and realizing it’s OK to talk about, ‘oh man, I didn’t get it.’ They go find that person and they immediately go to try to help them out instead of just having them just sit there, freak out, suffer and get mad,” she said.  

And because the platform is so visually and sonically engaging, teachers are finding it’s helping students learn independence and staying on-task. That has enabled Shelly Anderson, a 4th grade teacher in Salt Lake City, to be able to conduct small groups with students who need more specialized support; the others are able to work on Struggly independently, helping each other, as she provides more individualized attention. 

One student, who had a tendency to swear and give up, sometimes leaving the classroom, is now self-regulating his anger and frustration better. He no longer says he “can’t do this” or that “I’m dumb at math,” even during usual instruction.

“It’s just refreshing to have something for the kids to do where they can untether from the teacher more,” Anderson said. “They can start to get some of their own confidence and build their identity as math learners rather than just thinking, ‘well, either I have a math brain or I don’t.’ Everybody has the ability to seek out patterns, look at problems and look at logic.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation sponsored SXSW EDU’s Launch Startup competition and provides support to ����Ӱ��. 

The results of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are out, and the United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills. Across the globe, math performance declined significantly.

Unfortunately, these low scores mask a more troubling fact: Our country’s math performance has been mediocre for 40 years — a failure to mathematically thrive across much of the U.S. The nation will, if the past is a predicate for the future, continue to lag behind the rest of the world in the understanding and application of math, skills that are critical for citizens and employees.

But none of this is inevitable. Consider one aspect of the recent PISA exam, which illustrates why tangible math learning is so crucial. In contrast to other tests, PISA assesses math in the context of real-world problems and situations. Students must demonstrate an ability to use mathematical reasoning to make purchasing decisions, plan routes around a city and interpret data about smartphone use. Math is grounded in practical applications, and the test itself underscores why math matters to most students and adults. These are skills that parents want schools to focus on, but PISA suggests they are not. 

The stakes are exceptionally high. As education leaders, if we turn away from these results, we become complicit in casting away a generation of children who lack the math foundation necessary to function in and contribute to society. All students can learn math; now is the time for policymakers, district leaders and curriculum developers to work together to make math more relevant, engaging and rigorous for all U.S. students.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’re investing over $1 billion working with our partners over the next 10 years to transform K-12 math classrooms. One of the key areas we’re focusing on is improving instructional materials. We believe that there are tools at our disposal — right now! — to reverse the disheartening trend made so clear in the PISA results.

Strong, research-based curriculum, for example, is one of the most important tools an educator has at her disposal. But it too often is of low quality and fails to ask students to apply math to complex, real-world problems, as PISA does. In places like California and Texas, which each will undergo a statewide process within the next two years to determine which curriculum schools can select, only 33% and 19% of teachers, respectively, report using high-quality curricula once a week. Nationally, according to the Center for Education Market Dynamics, a foundation partner, only 36% of sampled districts selected exclusively high-quality math curriculum for elementary school, and about 22% for middle school. As they said in an op-ed in ����Ӱ��, “this means roughly 7.6 million K-8 students live in districts where the math curriculum is not high-quality, not rated or not known publicly.” States and districts can adopt better curricula and aligned supplemental materials.

Math can be more relevant and motivating. A whopping 45% of teachers responding to a this year indicated that their students fail to create any real-world math assignments or projects that are valued by people outside their classroom. Math for math’s sake is important and indeed beautiful. But, at the same time, materials can and should encourage students to use math in real-world situations, such as designing a budget, planning a trip and exploring issues like income inequality. Materials should help students see that math is critical for their future employment, citizenship and broader life in a global ecosystem.

Fixing this is within our control.

In fact, it is already happening. One of our longtime partners, , provides openly licensed K-12 core curriculum and aligned professional learning that engages students with real-world problems to help them learn math. Every lesson incorporates in which students learn concepts and procedures by sharing their thinking. For example, Math Talks build fluency by encouraging students to rely on what they know about structure, patterns and other math concepts and talk out their reasoning as they solve practical problems — whether that’s identifying the nutritional value of foods or computing how many tiles are needed to cover a bathroom floor. This and other high-quality curriculum should be the norm across the country. 

Much has been made of the possibilities of artificial intelligence for students, but it has real power to help math teachers. , a leading provider of educator coaching, created IMScaffold, an AI-powered tool that math teachers can use to create grade-level prompts and tasks unique to a student’s needs. For example, if a student requires a refresher lesson on adding fractions, the teacher can ask IMScaffold to design a 15-minute lesson that is aligned with, and maintains the rigor of, the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. It appears instantly for the teacher to use in real time. In this way, AI can provide teachers insight into the right next step, tailoring the student experience and saving the educator time. 

All students can and must learn math. But stagnant and declining outcomes on PISA and other assessments emphasize the need for urgency and action from education leaders to transform the math classroom to one where students are motivated and engaged and teachers are supported. Without this transformation, their future success and the nation’s economy is in real jeopardy. Everyone has a role to play. Let’s get to work. 

Correction: The United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.