A recently added carveout to a math interventions bill would exempt some Ohio schools from teaching the science of reading curriculum — despite a statewide mandate.

Lawmakers in the Ohio House Education Committee recently approved changes to that would excuse Ohio’s classical schools from having to teach the science of reading, which is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

“This legislature and the governor placed a major emphasis 
 on science of reading to great effect, and now is not the time to start carving out loopholes for certain schools,” said Devin Babcock, senior legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action.

Ohio school districts were required to starting with the 2024-25 school year after the law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget.

The budget gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials and $18 million for literacy coaches.

“We’ve held the line as a state for the last few years, as have all the other states that have made this move,” Babcock said.

“If you’re a public school taking public money, then let’s do the best thing for kids and use the science of reading that we’ve adopted here as a state.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

that follow the K-12 curriculum of Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.

Some tenets of include teaching Latin and a close reading of Western classics, among other things, according to Hillsdale College.

Ohio S.B. 19 — which passed in November — originated as an academic intervention bill to help students who score below proficient on state assessment tests.

The bill would allow a public school student who scored below proficient in a state assessment test in math or English language arts to receive academic intervention services at no cost.

The Ohio Education Association testified in opposition to the bill in March,

“The bill is well-intentioned, but the details matter,” OEA President Jeff Wensing said in his testimony. “These tests provide useful information, but classroom educators have more information about a student’s knowledge and abilities in the subject.”

The bill would require school districts or individual schools to come up with a math achievement improvement plan if 51% or less of the district or school’s students who took the third-grade math achievement assessment scored at least a proficient score on the assessment.

Under the bill, schools would be required to develop math improvement and monitoring plans for each student that qualifies for math intervention services within 60 days after getting the student’s third-grade assessment math results.

A math improvement and monitoring plan would identify the student’s “specific math deficiencies,” describe the additional instructional services they will receive, offer a chance for their parent or guardian to be involved, outline a monitoring process and offer high-dosage tutoring at least three days a week.

“From the experience of Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans (RIMPs), I can tell you that this is an onerous task that will often fall on classroom teachers,” Wensing said in his testimony. “Educators’ time is in too short supply to add more paperwork, administrative tasks and exercises in compliance.”

Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, introduced the bill, which has had five hearings in the Ohio House Education Committee.

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 . Sign up for their .

Students attending Compton Unified School District and Modesto City Schools are improving in reading faster than students in demographically similar districts amid what a team of researchers has identified as a national “reading recession.” District leaders and researchers credit years of sustained academic reforms and data-driven intervention systems.

“We’re feeling really comfortable with what we’ve built for literacy development. Now we’re like, ‘Okay, now what can we learn from that experience to make gains in mathematics as well?’ ” said Vanessa Buitrago, Modesto City superintendent.

The findings come from the , a database released Wednesday by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth that compares reading and math test scores across more than 5,000 school districts in 38 states, including more than 500 districts in California.

Researchers said the project is intended to make “local recovery efforts — both successful and unsuccessful — more visible,” highlighting both successful and struggling districts. To allow comparisons across states, the team aligned state test scores with results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a nationwide exam given every two years.

The nationwide reading recession began around 2013, according to researchers, and worsened in many school districts following the pandemic. But some districts, including Modesto City Schools and Compton Unified School District in California, have bucked the trend and were among the “districts on the rise” identified by the Education Scorecard team.

Both districts implemented reforms before the pandemic and, importantly, maintained them through the uncertainty of school closures in the peak pandemic years. They also both rely on data from internal assessments to identify struggling students and provide targeted support quickly.

“I don’t see us as a district, so to speak, recovering from the pandemic,” said Darin Brawley, 13-year superintendent of Compton Unified. “I see us as a district that really used that moment to strengthen and build stronger systems to create stronger instruction, to create stronger accountability, and ultimately, to produce better outcomes for the students that we serve.”

The Education Scorecard team found that 33% of California students attended districts where math scores exceeded 2019 levels — up two percentage points from . The share of students in districts surpassing pre-pandemic reading levels also rose, from about 18% to 22%.

“I think you’ll see in that list of districts on the rise, a lot of districts that don’t normally get mentioned in this national discussion of who’s making a difference, but we’re trying to put a spotlight on local leaders that are making a difference,” said Stanford professor Sean Reardon, who helped create the Education Scorecard.

Data-driven collaboration

Modesto City did not have a professional development department until Sara Noguchi, superintendent from 2018 to 2025, joined the district.

Today, principals, assistant principals and intervention specialists from every Modesto City elementary school meet quarterly for 90 minutes to two hours to review and evaluate student performance data, said Vanessa Buitrago, current superintendent.

Schools facing similar challenges — such as chronic absences or high rates of special education assessments — are paired together to share strategies for improvement. During Graduation Rate Intervention Team meetings, school teams develop specific action steps that they revisit at the next quarterly check-in.

“We need to create those strategic pairings so that they can learn from each other,” said Buitrago.

The GRIT meetings also include discussions about classroom walk-throughs and what professional development teachers may need based on what school leaders observe in the classroom.

Teachers also meet weekly in their Professional Learning Communities to identify students who need additional support and collaborate on intervention strategies.

“In my experience, there are two things that are really sacred to teachers: the classroom space, in other words what they teach and how they teach, and grading,” Buitrago said. “I would say that this is probably the most challenging part of our work, 
 finding that balance between culture and all this other technical work that is very data driven.”

Some of that work has included a revamp of reading instruction during the pandemic, and of math a couple of years earlier. The district created a new department to help students who are still learning English. Schools also ramped up teacher training, paying educators $5,000 to complete an extensive “science of reading” program called LETRS, or Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. Teachers can opt in to meeting with math coaches who can provide feedback on their teaching, or they can request a substitute so they can observe other math teachers’ classrooms.

“I really think it comes down to creating the conditions for the teacher to be successful,” said Noguchi, the former Modesto City superintendent. “It’s really about building a relationship with that third grade teacher, fifth grade teacher, what have you, because everyone has different needs.”

While initially establishing the systems now in place, Noguchi said districtwide buy-in was critical. This meant consulting with leaders across the district, including those reluctant to change.

“If you bring them in on the forefront and really listen to their issues and those concerns, that will help counterbalance others within the system,” said Noguchi. “It worked and we got complete buy-in.”

The latest Education Scorecard data shows that Modesto’s test scores grew enough to represent an extra 18 weeks of learning in math and 13 weeks in reading. Nevertheless, the district still has a way to go: Overall scores remain far below grade level.

‘Sustained focus and aligned instruction’ are critical

According to the Education Scorecard, reading and math scores in Compton Unified District have increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic — with the only setback being a slight decline in math scores between 2019 and 2022.

Compton Unified is one of 108 districts identified by researchers as improving faster in both reading and math than demographically similar districts.

The district’s strategies for improvement include data meetings every four to six weeks, where groups of principals review student performance and discuss interventions. Like Modesto City Schools, Compton Unified expects principals to closely track which students are receiving additional instructional support and whether that intervention is effective.

“Our belief is pretty simple: the earlier you identify learning gaps, the faster you can intervene,” said Brawley, district superintendent.

Other ways Compton Unified seeks to identify and intervene on academic gaps, he said, include:

• Weekly quizzes where students answer seven questions each in English language arts and math.
• In-class, small group tutoring for students who are not reaching the district’s threshold of 71% or above on internal assessments.
• A “heavy, districtwide focus” on the standards and vocabulary students are likely to encounter in the CAASPP (California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress), the state’s annual assessment.
• Teams consisting of Brawley, directors and principals who do walkthroughs of school sites throughout the year

“We believe that students must be able to explain their thinking, justify their responses, communicate their reasoning and engage in analytical discourse, and if they don’t have the academic language that is necessary for that, then that creates a bigger problem,” said Brawley.

Some district teachers have raised over whether the district might be emphasizing too much test prep with the internal assessment calendar teachers are expected to follow.

“We basically believe that assessment should not be viewed as an event,” Brawley said. “It should be embedded within the instructional cycle.”

EdSource’s data visualization specialist, Yuxuan Xie, contributed to this report. Sharon Lurye and Jocelyn Gecker of The Associated Press, Lily Altavena of Chalkbeat and Ruth Serven Smith of AL.com also contributed to this report.

Testing experts at the Education Department had been laid off and the board in charge of the program . But now, expansion is coming in the form of additional results that could give the public more information about how students in their states are performing.

The National Assessment Governing Board approved a new testing schedule Friday that allows for state-level results in 12th grade math and reading, eighth and 12th grade civics and eighth grade science. 

The vote was 16 to 3.

NAGB, which sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has long aspired to add more granular results, said Executive Director Lesley Muldoon.

“That’s what helps drive actual policy action at the state level,” she said. 

The would take effect in 2028 for eighth grade civics and 12th grade math and reading. The eighth grade science test would be administered in 2029 and 12th graders would take a civics exam in 2032. Participation is optional, but NAGB wants to know states’ intentions by this summer.

The governing board isn’t alone in wanting NAEP to be more useful to state policymakers. In its on the future of the American workforce, the Bipartisan Policy Center, led by former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, called for more state-level data in the same three areas and a shorter, six-month timeline between the assessment and the release of the results.

Some observers say the board’s vote underscores the importance of NAEP.

“This suggests an acknowledgment that standardized testing, and comparable data across states, still matters,” said Dale Chu, an education consultant who frequently writes about assessment. 

At the same time, in its fiscal year 2027 budget, the administration is requesting less for the program than Congress has appropriated in recent years, $137 million compared with $193 million.

Muldoon told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that if Congress maintains $193 million for the program, no additional money would be needed to expand testing at the state level. But if all 50 states want to participate, they might need more resources. 

‘We got busy’

The response from states, she said, has been positive, but she doesn’t expect all to sign up. 

Board Member Julia Rafal-Baer, who voted against the plan, said while she agreed with the science and civics schedule, she’s concerned about whether enough states would participate in the 12^th grade assessments. The announcement, she said, would also come in the midst of a “charged environment.” 

“You can see it bubbling up now — public trust around testing, technology, AI, screens and student data,” she said during the meeting. “In this room, we understand all the differences. Parents right now do not understand the differences.”  

Others noted that with 39 governors’ races this year, those who show interest now might be out of office by the time they have to formally commit. But Board Member Ron Reynolds, formerly head of a California private school organization, said the elections shouldn’t affect the board’s decision.

“I think we would cross a dangerous line if we began to anticipate what the political environment might be at a specific time and then make decisions in advance that might foreclose an opportunity to assess and report,” he said.

States would need to identify a sample ranging from 1,200 to 2,000 students in each of the categories for which they want new results. 

Tennessee Rep. Mark White, a Republican and current NAGB chair, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that his state is among those that would likely “jump on the opportunity” to see how the state’s students are performing in science, civics and in their senior year.

“Tennessee realized that our K-12 standards were not adequate in 2011 when we compared our performance to NAEP data,” he said. “We got busy.”

In 2013, the state was the in the nation, and this week as a top performer in post-pandemic academic recovery.

AngĂ©lica Infante Green, Rhode Island’s education commissioner, wants her state to participate in all of the assessments, but is particularly enthusiastic about state-level civics . The state passed in 2021 requiring students to demonstrate proficiency in civics to graduate.

“It’s important, based on where we are as a country,” she said. “If our students don’t know how the government works and how our democracy works, that poses a challenge.”

Chu said he wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Morath, state chief in Texas, or Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner also take “a keen interest,” but predicted that “in many other places the reaction would amount to little more than a shrug.”

Former Florida Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. after the 2024 fourth and eighth grade results were released. The state saw a sharp decline in reading scores, which he attributed to a sample of schools that he said was not representative of the state overall and included two of the lowest-performing schools. He also blamed the shift that year on the switch to a digital test on school district devices. 

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether the state might participate. 

‘Powerful source of information’

Chu and others, however, question whether state-level data on 12th graders would be that useful. 

“Low student motivation has long been a cloud hanging over 12th grade,” he said. “I’m not sure bringing those results to the state level adds much unless that issue is addressed.”

Muldoon disagreed that motivation is a challenge, but said that getting a large enough national sample of 12th graders can be. Seniors, she said, are sometimes off campus for internships or college trips. 

Some states, like Nevada, require students to take the ACT for graduation. But Jhone Ebert, superintendent of the Clark County School District, and former state chief, said a college entrance exam might not be the best way to measure the skills of students planning to go straight into the workforce. NAEP, she said, would offer a fuller view of students’ skills.

“Not everybody’s going to college,” said Ebert, also on the board. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be successful participants in our society.”

National results from 2024’s 12th graders were discouraging. Twenty-two percent tested at the proficient level in math, a 2 percentage point decline since 2019. In reading, 35% were proficient, also a drop. As with fourth and eighth graders in recent years, the percentage of high school seniors scoring at the below basic level increased. But those results don’t tell states anything about their specific strengths and weaknesses. 

State-level data could be a “really powerful source of information,” Muldoon said. “There is no other nationally representative assessment of high school students’ achievement.” 

‘Blue and red states’

The same is true for civics. The last NAEP civics test was in 2022, and just in eighth grade. Average scores on the 300-point scale fell by two points, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test, which measures students’ knowledge of government, the founding documents and politics. 

Twelfth grade results in civics haven’t been available since 2010. The 2032 civics test in 12th grade will also be an updated version. Patrick Kelly, chair of NAGB’s assessment development committee, told the members Friday that while the “bones are good,” the design of the civics assessment is old.

The last time the test was updated, “our president of the United States was playing ,” he said. 

Shawn Healy, chief policy and advocacy officer at iCivics, a nonprofit that provides civics lesson plans and online games, called the state-level results and the update “a big win for our field.”

The results, he said, will offer insight into the success of civics education policies at the state level, such as requiring a dedicated course or completion of student projects, or offering diplomas that recognize achievements. This year, he’s tracked 240 civics education bills in 40 states.

“That speaks to the interest in this issue across blue and red states,” he said.

In science, 2029 won’t be the first time state results will be available. Most states voluntarily . But now, under a new design, the questions will more closely match what states expect eighth graders to know in science, said Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM learning at the Museum of Science in Boston and a NAGB member. Large school systems,  those in the Trial Urban District Assessment group, would also be able to opt in to that science exam. Currently, only national data is available for those subjects and grades.

“At a time when science and engineering are having such a profound impact on our lives, it’s important to understand how our students are doing,” she said. “Education leaders continue to see value in expanding opportunities for state-level reporting beyond reading and math.” 

In statehouses, school board meetings and academic journals, a familiar debate has resurfaced: Should math be taught through clear, repeatable algorithmic steps or with a focus on why the numbers behave the way they do?

This fight has flared up repeatedly for more than a century, with the tide turning back and forth through the years. Today, with and still haunting the nation’s classrooms, many in education are hoping that a resolution can herald a science of reading-type breakthrough that brings clarity and results.

Why does neither side ever win the math wars? Perhaps it’s because they’ve been fighting on the wrong battlefield.

The math wars focus on how to teach — the specific methods used to deliver a lesson. But to make serious improvements to math education, it is necessary to stop obsessing over the “how” and start focusing on the “when.”

In nearly every American math classroom, what students learn depends largely on their birthday. Ten-year-olds in fifth grade study decimals; the following year, they move on to percentages. The underlying assumption is that all students move in lockstep, mastering each year’s content on a rigid, chronological schedule.

This approach can work fine so long as students stay on track. But if they fall behind for whatever reason, the results can be devastating. That’s because math is, as Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker , “ruthlessly cumulative.” Each new skill builds on previous learning. There are no shortcuts. If students haven’t mastered , like multiplication, they will struggle with higher-level concepts like exponents. And once students have holes in their understanding, the traditional school structure — one teacher, 30 same-aged students, one lesson — makes it nearly impossible to catch up.

This isn’t a failure of teachers, or instructional materials. It is a failure in the design of the math classroom itself. It’s one reason why in every state, are lower in eighth grade than they are in the fourth — a trend that does not hold true in . As the content becomes more advanced and the prerequisites more demanding, those holes in the foundation eventually cave in.

To see why the “how” matters less than the “when,” consider an eighth-grade teacher introducing the Pythagorean theorem, the familiar formula for calculating the lengths of the sides of a right triangle.

One camp leans more toward a conceptual approach to teaching math: Students should consider the relationship between squares and right triangles, visualize why the relationship holds true and explore geometric proofs.

The other camp takes a more procedural approach. The teacher walks through the steps for solving a problem using the Pythagorean theorem, students practice, and the goal is that they can consistently find a missing side of a triangle on their own.

Both sides believe their approach is superior. But both sides are ignoring the most important question: Are the students ready for the lesson at all?

The Pythagorean theorem, like other math skills, builds on knowledge acquired over multiple years. Two of the most important prerequisite skills are classifying triangles and using exponents. Using more than a decade of student data from our work with schools across the country, our organization, , has found that if students know those two skills, they have a 72% chance of mastering the Pythagorean theorem. If they don’t, the likelihood is just 32%.

In other words, both sides in the math wars assume students are prepared for grade-level content. In reality, if eighth graders enter the year with unfinished learning that prevents them from accessing that eighth-grade content, the debate is moot.

In , a study my organization published with TNTP, researchers found that students are far more likely to succeed in algebra when grade-level instruction is paired with targeted support that addresses key lessons from prior grades. By implementing that approach, schools can more efficiently use instructional time — and, ultimately, better prepare students for grade-level content. This requires rethinking how schools organize math instruction in three key ways:

1. Map the progression of skills 

Math is less a checklist of grade-level standards than a web of interconnected skills. Teachers need a clear, shared understanding of how math skills build on one another across grades. Without that map, it’s impossible to know which unfinished learning actually matters for upcoming content and which gap is less urgent.

2. Use a diagnostic assessment to pinpoint where students are on that map

With that progression in place, diagnostic tools can identify the specific skills students are missing and how they connect to what they’re about to learn. That is far more useful for teachers than broad labels like “proficient” or “below grade level.”

3. Deliver intervention that connects unfinished learning to grade-level work

Finally, schools need to make time and use the right instructional tools to help students coherently address their unfinished learning so they can access grade-level content rather than fall further behind. Approaches rooted in either procedural or conceptual understanding may play a role in that process.

The path forward isn’t choosing a side in the math wars. It’s recognizing that the real obstacle to progress is an instructional system that ties learning to a calendar instead of what a student is academically ready to learn. 

Until policymakers and systems leaders rethink the “when,” the debate over the “how” is just academic — and the math wars will never end.

But the most important question wasn’t how we got there, it was why it hadn’t happened sooner.

Like many districts, we weren’t lacking a curriculum, effort or committed teachers. What we were missing was something far less visible and far more important.

We had reached a point where math performance wasn’t where we wanted it to be. Teachers were frustrated, and our instinct was to look outward for a solution. We began searching for a new math program — something that would finally move the needle.

We approached the process thoughtfully. A committee was formed, programs were reviewed, and alignment to standards was carefully analyzed. On paper, many options looked promising. But the more we evaluated, the more uncomfortable the truth became: The issue wasn’t the program.

Across our elementary schools in Pennsylvania’s Abington Heights School District, we were hearing the same concerns. Students were progressing without a solid grasp of foundational concepts. Skills that had supposedly been mastered weren’t transferring. Teachers were reteaching content, often with the same results. It forced us to confront a difficult question: If the curriculum is aligned and the content is there, why isn’t the learning sticking?

That question led us to take a closer look at our own practices. Like many elementary schools, we had invested heavily in literacy, and our teachers felt confident in reading instruction. Math, however, was a different story.

Many teachers did not feel that same level of confidence in mathematics. That lack of confidence shaped instruction in ways we hadn’t fully recognized. Lessons often leaned toward procedures or steps to follow rather than deep conceptual understanding.

Students could sometimes arrive at the correct answer, but they struggled to explain why. And when students cannot explain their thinking, the learning rarely lasts.

We also realized we weren’t fully leveraging the data available to us. While we had assessments and performance metrics, we were not consistently analyzing student work to understand how students were thinking. Without that insight, instruction remained generalized rather than responsive to individual needs.

What changed was not just the amount of data we had, but how we used it and how we used it together. Through our professional learning program, our teams developed a shared approach to analyzing student work, identifying patterns in thinking and using that insight to guide instruction.

In practice, this meant teachers coming together with student work by sorting responses, discussing strategies and identifying where understanding broke down. These conversations made student thinking visible in a way we hadn’t experienced before.

Data conversations became a regular part of our collaboration, not an isolated event tied to testing windows. Teachers met to examine student strategies, anticipate misconceptions and align next instructional moves. 

Instead of continuing the search for a new program, we made a different decision — one that required more commitment but ultimately led to more meaningful change. We chose to invest in our teachers.

We implemented across our elementary schools, focusing on building teachers’ conceptual understanding of mathematics and how that understanding develops over time. From the outset, this was not a passive experience. Teachers were actively engaged in solving problems, analyzing strategies and grappling with concepts themselves.

That experience was, at times, uncomfortable and that was precisely why it worked. Teachers began to experience math as a process of reasoning and sense-making rather than simply applying procedures. That shift deepened their understanding and created a new level of empathy for student learning.

As teacher understanding grew, instruction began to evolve. Educators became more intentional about the questions they asked and more attentive to student thinking. They created space for multiple approaches and encouraged students to explain their reasoning. Over time, that shift led to something just as important as instructional change: increased teacher confidence.

That created a shift in student mindset. Math is no longer viewed as a set of rules to follow, but as something to explore. We now have students who ask for more math time — something that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago.

This transformation has also reshaped how our teachers work together. Teachers regularly examine student work, identify patterns in thinking and determine next instructional steps. Conversations are grounded in evidence and a shared understanding of how students learn mathematics.

We have moved away from asking, “Where are we in the program?” and toward asking, “Where are our students in their understanding?”

The results followed and they were significant. Within a few years, math proficiency rose from roughly 70% to over 85% across key grade levels, alongside strong gains in student growth. Just as important as the numbers is what we now see in classrooms every day: instruction focused on understanding and students actively engaged in meaningful mathematical thinking.

This experience has reinforced a belief that feels more important than ever: programs do not change outcomes, people do. When we invest in teacher knowledge and give educators the tools and confidence to truly understand their content, everything else begins to align.

Of course, this kind of change requires ongoing commitment. We continue to train new teachers and prioritize collaboration to sustain the work.

If there is one lesson we would share with other district leaders, it is this: Before searching for a better program, take a closer look at how your system supports teaching and learning. You may find, as we did, that the most powerful solution isn’t something new; it’s a deeper investment in how teachers understand and teach mathematics.

Students across New York were unable to log in to the digital platform for the state’s grades 3-8 math exam Wednesday morning, raising fresh questions about the transition to computer-based assessments.

The New York State Education Department told schools they could pause or delay the math tests, officials confirmed.

The issue affected schools across the state, including some in New York City where schools were expected to administer the exams sometime between April 28 and May 8.

“More than 116,000 students tested without error this morning, with thousands more expected to complete testing later today,” state Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare wrote in a statement. “Since the testing window opened, more than two million exams have been successfully submitted.”

Officials declined to provide specific numbers of affected students. But O’Hare said it was a “limited number.”

Upon learning of the problem, O’Hare added, “NYSED immediately contacted our vendor, NWEA, to expeditiously address the issue.”

State officials said schools can administer the exams at a later point during the window, which runs through May 15.

The city’s messaging to caregivers struck a somewhat different tone. A letter principals were encouraged to distribute said “many” students were unable to complete the test and “we are pausing the administration of the Math exam and will reschedule once we receive the assurances we need that no additional disruptions will occur.”

A message to principals encouraged them to postpone state testing scheduled for Thursday.

New York’s multi-year transition to computer-based tests has been by . This year’s problems come amid a against the proliferation of technology in schools, including the amount of time students spend on screens.

After , the state fully transitioned from paper-and-pencil tests to computer-based tests this spring. The grades 3-8 English language arts exams have already been administered.

Some principals began receiving notifications Wednesday morning from the city’s Education Department about the login problems with Nextera, the state’s testing platform.

“We are receiving a high volume of escalations about students having trouble logging into Nextera,” city officials wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat. “It is happening statewide.” The message said schools could continue testing if students had already logged in, but should cancel testing for the day if students continued to have problems.

Officials at NWEA, the state’s testing vendor, said they “have directed all available internal resources” to fixing the problem and hope to have the system running by Thursday.

“The cause of this has not yet been identified, which means the fix is also pending,” Simona Beattie, a company spokesperson, said in a statement.

At one Brooklyn elementary school, students were unable to log in to start their exams for more than an hour but were eventually able to log in and complete the tests, according to the principal who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I’m sure there are going to be parents who feel like it’s not going to be the best picture of their child’s performance because of the way it happened today,” the principal said. More broadly, the school leader wishes the state would keep paper and pencil tests, especially for younger students who have to “learn a whole other set of skills” to take them digitally.

At another Brooklyn school, a teacher proctoring the exam for a group of sixth graders with disabilities said that one of the seven students was able to log on. The rest spent two hours trying before the school allowed them to take a break and play basketball in the gym.

“They were frustrated but understood there was nothing we could do,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity since she was not authorized to speak. “They were so patient.”

After their gym break, the students were able to log on and take the test, the teacher said, but she questioned the validity of the results.

“Your purpose is to test them, it’s not to test them after two hours of testing their patience,” she said.

City teachers union President Michael Mulgrew blasted the state Education Department in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Once again, students and educators were left scrambling because the state failed in its responsibility to hold its vendors and consultants accountable,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .Ìę

Having access to Algebra 1 in eighth grade can often make or break a student’s path to , which in turn, is often a gateway to selective colleges as well as science and engineering careers.

But many eighth graders can’t take Algebra 1 — regardless of how well they did on their seventh grade state math test. And when New York City parents are exploring middle school options for their fifth graders, they might not realize the consequences a school’s math offerings might have for their students’ education trajectory.

Across New York state, more than 1 in 4 schools don’t offer Algebra 1 to eighth graders, , a group convened by EdTrust-New York. Schools that disproportionately enroll Black, Latino, and low-income students tend to have less access to Algebra 1 in middle school.

“When we have qualified kids that are denied that opportunity, and it impacts them in high school and beyond 
 it is such a critical inflection point,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at EdTrust-New York, an advocacy group focused on improving outcomes for students of color.

Smink hopes to raise awareness about the importance of Algebra 1 for eighth graders so parents can advocate for it.

“If there’s no demand, then schools aren’t going to respond to it,” he said. “They’re going to offer the easier, simpler option, which is just tracking kids to the standard eighth grade class, which is going to avoid kids struggling, it’s going to get potentially better test scores.”

While 58% of New York’s seventh graders scored proficient (a 3 or 4) on their 2023-24 state math exams, in the following school year — 2024-25 — just 37% of eighth graders enrolled in Algebra 1, representing a gap of 20,000 proficient students, the report said. More than half were estimated to be from low-income families, and nearly half were students of color.

In New York City alone, there were 8,000 more students proficient on seventh grade state exams than enrolled in eighth grade Algebra 1, according to the researchers.

The state’s gaps were starkest for Black and Asian American students: while 38% of Black students and 75% of Asian American seventh graders were proficient, 13% of Black and 14% Asian American eighth graders the following year enrolled in Algebra 1, the study found.

Drilling down into the data,, reveals vastly uneven access across New York City’s 32 local districts.

The top three districts with more proficient seventh graders than eighth graders in Algebra 1: Queens’ District 24, Brooklyn’s District 20, and Staten Island. Each had gaps of more than 1,400 students, researchers said.

In five districts, fewer than half of their schools offered Algebra 1 for eighth graders: Manhattan Districts 4 and 6, Brooklyn’s District 13, and Bronx Districts 7 and 12.

Eight districts appeared to be outliers, with either more than or an equal share of eighth graders taking Algebra 1 last year compared to the percentage of seventh graders who scored proficient on their state math tests the year before: Manhattan’s District 3; Bronx’s District 11, Brooklyn Districts 15, 19, 23, and 32; and Queens Districts 27, 28, and 30.

Equity gaps in proficiency remain, however, and three of those districts — 19, 23, and 32 in Brooklyn, which overwhelmingly serve Black, Latino, and low-income students — had fewer than half of their students who were proficient.

The report recommends the state adopt an automatic enrollment, or opt-out policy, for all eighth graders who score proficient on seventh grade state tests. They want an $8.5 million investment to help 15 high-needs districts expand Algebra 1 access as well as fund tutoring, staffing, and public data tracking enrollment and completion by race and income.

The report comes at a time when Gov. Kathy Hochul, , called for an overhaul of math instruction, getting “back to the basics,” New York City’s schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, a former math teacher, has also argued for a emphasizing memorization of math facts along with a focus on creative problem-solving.

Samuels

Under former Mayor Eric Adams, the city required nearly all high schools to use a single math curriculum from Illustrative Math for Algebra 1 — Education Department officials are also .

“We are working to strengthen early math instruction, expand equitable pathways to Algebra 1 by eighth grade, and ensure every student has access to rigorous, high-quality curriculum,” Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said in a statement.

Several states and cities have focused more attention on eighth grade access to Algebra 1, , which has offered the class online and has covered educators’ training costs to get credentials to teach algebra.

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

The group also calls for a massive study of existing research to help identify best practices, noting the last such effort was undertaken 20 years ago. 

°äžé±Ê·Ąâ€™s , released today, tracks the traditional teacher-centered approach and the reform movement, which calls for student-led learning. 

The research organization does not choose a side, but it does note that recent efforts to retool math education often call for a mix of the two. It also pays particular attention to the “science of math,” which gained traction in the early 2020s and argues that math instruction should be guided by empirical research and cognitive science while relying more on orderly, explicit classroom instruction.

Mathematics has been a major educational concern for years with renewed attention after the pandemic. American students have , a trend that only worsened after COVID shutdowns.

“This is a national priority that needs to be answered,” said Alexander Kurz, a senior fellow at CRPE and the report’s author. â€œIn the absence of consensus, the guide urges educators to evaluate competing claims as they arrive at their schools and to anchor decisions in a clear-eyed look at what’s actually happening in their classrooms.”

The report comes as more than a dozen states have passed legislation aimed at improving math education, in some ways following the state-driven initiatives that were built around the science of reading.

Some, like New York, are calling for of the way math is taught — with little explanation of what might change — while others have already chosen a pathway forward. 

California approved a revised math framework three years ago and in November 2025 adopted 64 programs at the K-8 level to help students reach those goals. 

recently adopted new math standards for the first time in 15 years while is in the process of revamping its K-12 efforts to ensure more coherence across grades. 

last fall and to gauge how they want to boost student proficiency. 

As state-level plans unfold, individual cities are taking their own steps to strengthen student performance, meeting with mixed success. 

New York City’s efforts have proved cumbersome, with the new administration . Boston is trying its own approach with while are using traditional and non-traditional means — including math field trips —Ìęto improve student engagement.Ìę

CRPE urges educators looking for new ideas to consider related studies critically, noting they often do not encompass a wide student group. As a result, their recommendations might not work in all cases. 

“We should always approach these studies with a healthy skepticism,” said Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, who helped craft some of the CRPE report’s recommendations. “Something that might work with a particular group of students in a particular context may not work in another situation.” 

Some groups, among them, have fallen even further behind their peers in math in recent years. 

An cites that on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students widened significantly after 2017. Higher-scoring kids started to rebound after the pandemic in 2024, but those in the 10th and 25th percentiles suffered steep and lasting losses.Ìę

CRPE points out that the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, composed of 24 expert members who reviewed more than 16,000 research publications and policy reports, marked the last nationwide effort to improve student performance in the subject as detailed in its

“Addressing core Math Wars debates, the NMAP deemed the conflict between conceptual understanding and procedural fluency ‘misguided’, concluding that the two are mutually supportive,” the report found. “The panel also explicitly stated that high-quality research does not support exclusive reliance on either ‘teacher-directed’ or ‘student-centered’ instruction.”

CRPE argues now is the time for an updated look at this high-stakes question. 

“A new national mathematics advisory effort could revisit the earlier panel’s questions while incorporating nearly two decades of new developments in mathematics education, special education, cognitive psychology, developmental science, and the learning sciences,” the report states. 

“Its aim should not be to declare winners and losers in the Math Wars, but to produce clearer, more transparent guidance on what is known, what remains open to further inquiry, and where practitioners can implement confidently.”

But when district leaders examined what these courses truly accomplished, they realized they held kids back, keeping them from higher-level math. 

So one by one, starting in 2014, this 15,000-student school system an hour southeast of Washington D.C., began eliminating lower-level math courses. The last one to go, intermediate algebra, was pulled in 2021. 

Calvert County school leaders have observed significant gains in math in the past two decades: nearly 100% of their students successfully completed the more challenging Algebra II in 2025 compared to just 67% in 2006.Ìę

The advancement was even more pronounced among Black students: 99% did the same last year compared to 51% 20 years ago. Kids with disabilities also saw dramatic improvements as 94% completed the course in 2025 compared to 20% in 2006.  

Joe Sutton, Calvert County schools’ supervisor of secondary mathematics and the force behind the elimination of these lower-level classes, said the move was overdue. 

“We couldn’t find any evidence these courses were increasing students’ subsequent grades, their graduation rates or their state test passing scores,” he said. “After two or three, we started to recognize this is a pattern: Erring on the side of caution ended up underpreparing our students — particularly those from historically underserved groups.”

The decision meant more students were exposed to higher-level math. 

Ninety-nine percent of seniors completed courses in 2025 that were recognized by the University System of Maryland as rigorous for 12th graders, up from 40% in 2006. This included honors precalculus, advanced mathematics, and Advanced Placement Statistics, a college-level-course. Once again, gains were further pronounced among historically marginalized groups: A full 98% of Black students did the same compared to 22% in 2006. Ninety-four percent of students with disabilities achieved that outcome in 2025 compared to 0% 19 years earlier.

Though it wasn’t a direct replacement, statistics and advanced mathematics have largely taken the place of business math, Algebra III and academic precalculus, Sutton said. 

The elimination of remedial or intermediate courses meant students and their teachers had to reach a higher standard. Professional development helped educators meet the academic needs of every child, including those who might struggle mightily with the material, Sutton said. And the district invited kids to lunchtime and after-school tutoring as needed.

Just as important: Staff had to abandon the earlier practices that underestimated kids’ potential, he said, and stymied their ability. They had to take a close and critical look at access.

It wasn’t an easy shift. Sutton spent years battling teachers and counselors who thought he was taking the district in the wrong direction by doing away with the more basic courses.

“I had to spend some of my social capital in order to get to where we are because it did make things harder for teachers — especially upfront,” Sutton said, knowing he would be adding more students to their classes who couldn’t instantly graph a line or solve a multi-step equation. “But just by virtue of being in that course, they’re going to grow more and we’re going to do more good for our community.”

Sutton, who founded one of the courses he later removed, intermediate algebra, admitted he didn’t do the best job of selling his approach initially. 

“In the first few years, there was just concern, a lack of faith in what we were doing,” he said. “For a while, any time a high school teacher saw me walking in the hallway, the one thing they wanted to talk about is, ‘We really shouldn’t have gotten rid of that course.’”

Andrew Brantlinger, associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy, and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, knew Sutton faced a tough challenge and commended him for sticking with it. 

“The call to eliminate these kinds of classes is not new,” Brantlinger said, “but that a district leader would do it — I don’t know how often that really happens.”

He said schools around the country have been de-tracking classes since the ’80s, as working-class students were attending college at higher rates and needed access to more advanced mathematics than earlier generations had been given.

Brantlinger notes that the influential has been a major player in the movement to remove such courses, which he calls “low track” or “terminal.” 

A 2024 of below grade-level 9th graders found those enrolled in mixed-level Algebra I classes — led by properly trained teachers — did substantially better on 11th-grade math tests compared to peers placed into a remedial course.

Such measures, researchers discovered, increased attendance plus the likelihood of the student staying in the district all four years — and completing college-ready math while there. Also, they note, there was no evidence of a negative effect on higher-performing kids in the mixed group.

On the local level, Sutton said, it meant a change in how Calvert County kids advanced through the subject from year to year.  

“Course placement recommendations were based entirely on what students had accomplished in the past,” he said. “And now we’re at a point where course recommendations are based on what a student wants to accomplish in their future. It’s a really big paradigm shift, and it was really concerning for a lot of stakeholders.”

Sutton said the school district counsels kids about their academic and professional goals each February. It’s at that point that they determine what type of courses they’ll need to succeed. 

Algebra I is now the “lowest” level class offered at the high school. And if kids need support, Sutton said, the district offers a semester- or year-long Algebra Lab course they can take concurrently with Algebra I to get extra practice.

Casie Reynolds, a math teacher who joined the school district in 2005, once taught a small intermediate algebra course composed mostly of Black students who were classified as special education and had an Individualized Education Program or had a learning difficulty that required some type of accommodation. It was not representative of the overall population and didn’t push kids to their fullest potential, Reynolds said. Students from those same groups were placed in Algebra II or some other, rigorous course, in the ensuing years. 

“Students were never given the opportunity to achieve in more rigorous math classes because they couldn’t get there due to teachers’ and counselors’ mindsets and beliefs,” she said. “I view it as a self-fulfilling prophecy: believe they can or can’t, and they will or they won’t.  It’s hard to say they couldn’t do the math before because they were never invited to.”

David Kung, executive director of , who lauded the change in Calvert County, said too many students are shunted into dead-end courses. 

“Districts — like many people — have bought into the myth that success in math is primarily about natural ability,” Kung said. “If that’s your belief and you see someone struggling (you think) they just don’t belong in that class.”

Sutton said the switch has pulled kids off a predictable path of pre-algebra, Algebra 1A, Algebra 1B and geometry, the minimal level courses they needed to graduate. Now, that  student might take Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II and statistics. 

“So, they’re still not making it to calculus,” he said. “But that experience is so much more postsecondary preparation than what they had been doing when we had all these options to steer them around rigor, out of best intentions.”

But before you crack open the champagne, you should know that only a small fraction of those students can do high school-level math. Those graduates may struggle if they try to go to college, qualify for military service or pursue other technical training. 

How big is this problem? And how does it vary across the country? In a recent project for , I set out to quantify the disparity between a state’s high school graduation and math proficiency rates. We dubbed this the .

Because states define high school math proficiency differently, the precise gaps are not perfectly comparable across states. But in many places, the disparities are shockingly large. In California, for example, 86% of high school students are graduating within four years, yet just 30% of 11^th graders pass the state math test. Florida reports a 90% graduation rate while 44% of students reached only level 3 out of 5 on end-of-course exams in algebra and geometry. The state warns that students performing at this level “may need additional support for the next grade/course.”

These are not isolated examples. Across the country, the percentage of high schoolers who earn diplomas far exceeds the percentage who can demonstrate mastery in math, often by 30, 40 or even 50 percentage points.

We focused on math for a few reasons. One is that the gaps tend to be larger in math than they are in reading. For example, 51% of Minnesota’s 10^th graders were proficient in reading, compared with 35% in math.

Two, as the collaborative’s director Jim Cowen in a recent Forbes piece, these types of gaps suggest that students are leaving high school unprepared for college coursework, workforce training or apprenticeships that require foundational math skills. At a macro level, lower math skills are likely to lead to lower earnings growth. 

Our analysis also found that states that use some externally validated exams, like the SAT or ACT, tended to have lower math proficiency rates than states that created their own tests. In Nevada, for instance, just 21% of students met ACT’s college-ready benchmark in math, and in New Hampshire, only 31% of 11^th graders met the SAT benchmark  in math.

In contrast, states with their own exams, like New Jersey (59%), Ohio (59%), Iowa (67%) and especially Texas (78%) and Virginia (81%), all reported much higher proficiency rates. Given that students in these states are not doing much better on nationally comparable exams among eighth graders, it’s likely that these reflect lower standards rather than any real superiority in math performance. 

The gaps were also larger for certain subgroups. For example, in Indiana, 25% of students overall met the SAT’s benchmark in math, but the rates were even lower for low-income students (12%), those with disabilities (5%) and English learners (3%).

What can be done about these problems? The answer can’t be to simply lower graduation rates until they match the proficiency levels, or to discard diplomas entirely, even if their signaling value has been degraded over time. For example, analyzed rising graduation rates through 2018 and concluded that the gains were likely the result of students actually learning academic or other social skills. Similarly, it would also be a mistake for states to lower the bar for math proficiency any further than they already have by getting rid of consequences for low performance or by reducing or grading standards.

A better place to start would be to pay more attention to children who struggle with math early in their schooling. If students have trouble with addition and multiplication, they’re likely going to have difficulty with fractions, too. And if they struggle with fractions, they’re likely to have problems in algebra.

Indeed, math proficiency as students advance up the grades. It’s not that they know less, but they fall further and further behind. That demands more urgency and attention to basic skills well before kids get to high school.  

But once students do reach the high school level, states need to strike a better balance in how they use their math exams. In 2002, more than half of all states to earn a diploma. But that led to a watering-down of standards and the creation of workaround pathways. All but six states have rolled those mandates back. 

An alternative model comes from states like Georgia, Virginia, and North and South Carolina, which administer end-of-course exams in algebra, English, science and social studies. The tests are directly aligned to content that students were taught over the course of the school year, and the results count for 10% to 20% of a student’s final course grade. Using tests in this way may be a better approach to making students care about how much they learn without preventing them from earning a diploma.

Most importantly, states need to be honest about what a high school diploma actually means. It should signal that a graduate is ready for what comes next — college, career training, military service or the workforce.

When states continue awarding diplomas while large shares of students remain far below grade level in math, that signal weakens. Families assume a high school diploma reflects readiness. Employers and colleges often do too. But the Graduation Gap data show that assumption is shaky.

In other words, state leaders need to strike a better balance between attainment measures like graduation rates and achievement measures like math scores. To do that, states need to pay more attention to gaps in foundational skills , measure learning more honestly and ensure that the diplomas students receive actually means what the public believes it means.

A new analysis from NWEA, an assessment company, suggests that these children are experiencing learning disruptions even now. 

While kindergarten achievement levels in math and reading largely held steady during and since the pandemic, by first and second grade, students are performing below pre-pandemic averages, according to an of NWEA’s Map Growth assessment data from spring 2017 to spring 2025. In math, at least, first and second graders have shown slow, incremental progress. Gaps in reading achievement, however, seem stubbornly stalled. 

The performance dips in first and second grade are similar to those seen in older grades, said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA, who co-led the research. 

“The general pattern of stagnation and lack of recovery in reading is very similar in first and second grade as grades three to eight,” Kuhfeld said, adding that a slow recovery in math is also observed in the later grades. “It’s very parallel across, basically, all the grades except for kindergarten.”

So what’s happening to students as they matriculate from kindergarten to first grade to cause a performance drop?

“That’s the big mystery of the results,” Kuhfeld said.

She was willing to speculate about the cause, leaning on anecdotal evidence from kindergarten teachers and elementary school leaders. 

Chronic absenteeism rates in kindergarten, which are often higher than in any other grade before high school, may mean some students aren’t getting adequate instructional time, Kuhfeld offered, ultimately standing in the way of them grasping the foundational reading and math skills typically acquired in kindergarten.

And many kindergarten teachers have reported that students are showing up with more nascent social and emotional skills than their peers in prior years. They have less experience with important life skills such as sharing, cooperating and self-regulating. 

“Teachers are spending more time having to teach how to behave in a kindergarten classroom — that would normally be the purview of preschool teachers,” Kuhfeld said. “This time spent on behavioral management and behavioral regulation, cumulatively, could be affecting achievement.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Fort Worth, Texas, where students’ MAP Growth assessment results generally align with what NWEA has found nationally, principal Andrea Johnson said both factors could be at play. 

“We’re seeing kids who, if they don’t reach immediate success, we see them dysregulate,” said Johnson, whose school serves students in pre-K through first grade. “They struggle.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Texas, kindergarten and first grade performance in math and reading on NWEA’s Map Growth assessment generally mirror national trends. (Courtesy of Andrea Johnson)

She believes that may be a latent impact of the pandemic on these younger students. Many of them had extra time at home with parents and caregivers, when early care and education programs were closed. 

“They’re used to someone being close and someone solving their problems for them,” Johnson said. “We talk a lot about productive struggle. You’ve gotta let them do it. Give them that mentality, where they’ve gotta connect to that struggle.”

She has definitely seen high rates of absenteeism among students in pre-K and kindergarten, she added. 

“I think they think, ‘pre-K and kinder, they don’t really matter that much,’” Johnson said, adding that she often finds herself trying to communicate to families how crucial those years are for future learning and development.

Most measures of post-pandemic recovery have examined the impacts on students in later grades, making NWEA’s analysis a rare snapshot of students in grades K-2. 

Curriculum Associates, a curriculum and assessment provider, has also evaluated math and reading performance among students in the early grades, finding some similarities and key differences from NWEA’s results. 

NWEA’s Map Growth assessment and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Inform assessment are both widely used in U.S. schools, reaching a combined 19 million K-8 students. Both measure student achievement in math and reading, but they differ in approach.

Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, pointed out that these two assessments have distinct designs and methodologies — and that they are administered to different samples — which may account for variations in findings.

“From the big picture, we’re seeing the same thing,” Huff said. “Students today who were not in school — some were babies — when the pandemic hit are not performing at the same level as their pre-pandemic peers in either reading or math.”

But in a published in July 2025, Curriculum Associates actually found that students in kindergarten are seeing achievement level drops in both math and reading, and that declining math performance in the early grades is “more drastic” than in reading. 

At a high level, she said, both sets of findings send a similar message, which is that America’s children are not seeing the type of recovery needed to reach pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

“It opens up the question of what is happening,” Huff said. “We can no longer, in my opinion, say that that disrupted learning in 2020 and 2021 is the sole or primary cause of what we’re seeing. There is a larger, systemic issue — or issues — that are impacting this.”

Mississippi fourth graders’ average math scores on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress were higher than their peers in at least 18 other states and in 20 other states in reading — a dramatic rise from the state’s standing a decade ago.

Experts say the big gains in fourth grade reading were in large part due to the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a state law that raised literacy standards and established a reading “gate,” a test that third graders have to pass to advance to fourth grade. The legislation focused on reading, but math scores started rising around the same time. 

However, despite the state’s national standing, the proficiency rates are middling. Just 38% of fourth-graders were proficient in math in 2024, and 32% in reading. 

By middle school, those rates falter even further: 22% of Mississippi eighth graders  on the 2024 math national assessment. It’s an improvement from 9% in 2000, but still lower than the national average. In reading, 23% of Mississippi eighth graders scored at or above NAEP Proficient in 2024, which is slightly lower than pre-pandemic averages. That average is also lower than in .

This year, state leaders are trying to prevent that drop-off and sharpen their focus on math.

 would expand the state’s existing literacy act into higher grades and establish a math framework that would involve interventions similar to those that contributed to the state’s celebrated gains in reading. That framework would be Mississippi’s first statewide math initiative. (The bill’s original language, which was entirely replaced by the House Education Committee, would have required computer science courses for high schools.)

A portion of the bill dubbed the “Mississippi Math Act” would establish Moving Mathematics in Mississippi (M3), a framework that would require supports such as math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, screeners and targeted interventions and establishing a cut-off score on the state’s fifth-grade math assessment to ensure students are ready to take algebra classes.

“I think our reading success is something people talk about because it’s been a national topic of conversation across the country,” said Grace Breazeale, a K-12 researcher at policy advocacy organization Mississippi First. “It’s not that math has necessarily been cast to the side over the past two decades — we have seen improvement — but there’s still a lot of room for improvement as well.”

The math push, in particular, is in line with the Mississippi Department of Education’s shift toward economic development and workforce fortification. The department has recently reworked the standards by which schools are rated with a new focus on career and technical education. The state Board of Education approved the new accountability standards in November. 

Lawmakers say focusing on math will boost the state’s economy and pave the way for higher employment rates. 

“We’ve got to change the culture in our schools,” said Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford. She authored a Math Act bill in her chamber, but the House killed it. “Instead of kids saying, ‘I’m bad at math,’ they should be saying, ‘I can do this.’ When we change that, we’re going to change the jobs our kids are able to go into and the careers they choose.”

Adapting the Alabama model for math gains

Boyd remembers what it was like to look down at a sheet of math problems, wrought with frustration. Decades later, Boyd said, that feeling returned when her daughter came home with math homework and asked her to help.

“ I don’t want a child to feel that way,” she said. “I don’t want any parent to feel that way.”

That’s why Boyd has championed the math act in her chamber. 

The bill was drafted with direction from the Mississippi Department of Education and with an eye toward other states that have implemented similar acts. Alabama, in particular, was a model, Boyd said. 

Alabama established a math act in 2022 aimed at improving K-5 math proficiency through intensive student interventions and teacher training, among other things. Subsequently, Alabama  where average fourth grade math NAEP scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019. There was no significant change in average NAEP scores for Mississippi fourth graders.

Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, has been watching Alabama’s progress closely. 

“They were one of the first to make that commitment and stick to it, and you’ve seen that incremental change,” she said. “Slow and steady wins the race. That is because they thought about what the students needed and what the teachers needed.”

Mississippi Education Department officials say the act’s framework, Moving Mathematics in Mississippi, would build on work the department is already doing, and similarly to the 2013 literacy act, it’s centered around collecting data, identifying struggling students and coaching teachers.

The math efforts would be concentrated in grades 2-6, said Wendy Clemons, the agency’s chief academic officer. 

“Really focusing on those grades, we feel, will make a difference,” she said. “Obviously our state made a very focused, laser-like investment in K-3 literacy. My belief is that much of our tremendous success has to do with that commitment.”

The department already deploys coaches to the most vulnerable districts and schools and hosts a statewide math conference for educators, but teachers say they want and need more support, Clemons said. 

“We worked with the department really closely on this,” said House Education Committee Vice Chairman Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg. “They’ve been implementing math coaches in districts throughout the state since 2023. We got a lot of data from them about where that’s worked, and we felt like the best thing we could do is expand on what they’re already doing.”

The act won’t establish a “gate” but it would put more focus on the fifth grade state math assessment. If students perform poorly on the test, parents would be notified, and an individualized plan would include specific steps to help that child improve their math proficiency. 

And there’s more to come. Lawmakers, including Boyd, say they’d like to see even more added to the bill, like more support for parents and more math training for education students.

On the right track for improving math instruction

Experts say there are some essential components to successfully teach math.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Knighten’s organization, identifies  that should be part of math education for teachers and students: conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive disposition.

And the Mississippi Department of Education’s standards, which establish a roadmap for K-12 mathematics education, are based on the council’s standards. The agency allows districts to choose their own curriculum from seven selected “high-quality instructional materials.”

There are also four cornerstones to math education in Mississippi, Clemons said. It needs to be cohesive, on grade level, data-driven and include standards-aligned lessons. 

During Mississippi’s literacy push, lawmakers had the same goal of establishing consistency across districts. 

“We picked this one way that science said works, and we went with it,” Boyd said of literacy instruction. “Training and everything was done with literacy coaches to really make sure we were teaching in one way. So when children moved from district to district, there was a consistency.”

A big part of the math bill would be deploying more coaches to districts across the state to underscore the importance of the standards and applying them uniformly. 

“We haven’t had the investment in mathematics as we have in literacy,” Clemons said. “We just haven’t been able to say, ‘This is what’s gonna make the difference. This will provide a lot more capacity, both at the state level and in the district levels, to provide that support to teachers and to students.’”

Knighten said Mississippi officials are on the right track.

“Math has always been a stepchild, for want of a better explanation. You hear people say they want to focus on math and reading, but when you look at the numbers, we spend more on literacy 
 so I’m excited to hear about what your state is doing.”

Changing the culture around math

If state leaders want to see math gains, David Rock, dean of education at the University of Mississippi, recommends starting at the college level.

“Everyone seemed to come together on literacy and did the training for pre-service teachers, and the results are there,” he said. “I want to see the same focus and passion on the math side.”

After the 2013 literacy act, college education students were required to take more literacy education classes to graduate. The same needs to happen for math, Boyd said, to combat a culture of fear around math among students and teachers. 

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: Students who aren’t confident in math don’t want to teach it. Fewer well-trained math teachers means fewer students who have a robust math education. 

“I realize there are people who have math anxiety,” Rock said. “To overcome that, we need to provide more training and opportunity to our pre-service teachers.”

In addition to ramping up math training for teachers, some lawmakers are also interested in enshrining specific math standards in state law, establishing a math “gate” and promoting a single curriculum for math instead of letting districts choose one.

“What I’ve heard from my body is they want more than what we’ve just put in the act,” Boyd said. “It’s a work in progress.”

It’s important to get the bill right, she said — not only for the success of the state’s education system, but Mississippi as a whole. 

“There are so many jobs that are just not available to somebody if they don’t have a solid math background,” Boyd said. “We’ve got to increase these math scores because it opens up a world of opportunity.”

But that short-term focus on the averages loses sight of what’s happening at the tails — the top performers and the weakest — and how things have evolved over longer periods of time. 

To zoom out, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s art and technology director, to build the time-lapse tools below. 

The first one shows you the evolution of 12th grade math scores. This particular test was first administered in 2005 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the 2024 scores came out in September, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ wrote about the declines overall and for the lowest-performing students.

The reading scores for 12^th graders are even more depressing. They haven’t gotten as much attention as the math scores, perhaps because the averages scores haven’t followed as dramatic of an up-and-down rollercoaster as the math scores have followed.

These graphs show the scores of 12^th graders in math and reading, but it’s likely that other grades and subjects would show similar patterns. It’s not just that average scores have declined across a wide range of tests, grades and subjects; we also have a lot more low-performing students than we did in the past. 

While the data presented here are at the national level, any state, district or school leader could see how things are changing in their community. At the classroom or school level, increased variability in student performance makes it harder for teachers to personalize their instruction and for school leaders to design systemwide supports. To get things back on track, policymakers should pay special attention to how their lowest-performing students are faring.

Each has implemented at least one of five strategies to boost student participation and success in the subject, according to in its recent report. 

Some, through these efforts, have reduced the need for remediation at the college level. This is particularly relevant for low-income students and those of color, who are more likely to be placed in these noncredit courses, which can derail their college trajectories. 

Concern over the issue has risen in recent years thanks to COVID: More than 900 students at the needed catch-up math classes in the fall of 2025 compared to just 32 five years earlier. And their lack of understanding wasn’t confined to high school: they were missing material they should have mastered in middle and Other universities reported similar problems.  

“Too often we spend a lot of energy discussing the challenges and constraints related to education or redesigning math,” said Shakiyya Bland, Just Equations’ director of educational partnerships. “This report highlights states that are doing the work, showing what’s possible — and showing results.” 

The report recognized efforts in other regions, too. The Virginia Community College System, for example, saw the need for remedial math plummet from 40% of incoming students to 4% between 2014 and 2021 after it changed how it judged college math readiness and how it teaches students who need additional help, Bland said. 

“Instead of a single placement test that pushed huge numbers into noncredit remedial tracks, colleges started using multiple measures like high school GPA and math coursework, expanding access for more students to go straight into college‑level math with added support,” she said. “That shift, from assuming students weren’t ready to assuming they could succeed with the right help, is what drove the big drop in ‘remedial’ placements.”

Just Equations cited five strategies states can implement to align mathematics from high school to college, including course co-design, where secondary and post-secondary instructors unite to craft high school math sequences.  

The organization said, too, universities should have transparent expectations for incoming freshmen so these students know what is expected of them for various college majors. 

Just Equations also touts the value of senior year transition or readiness courses for high school students: These classes, the organization observes, help ensure students can handle the challenge of college-level work. 

States might also offer dual enrollment courses which allow high school students to earn college credit, saving them time and money, Just Equations concluded. They can also work to ensure public universities recognize new high school mathematics offerings so students are properly credited for those classes. 

Georgia redesigned its math pathway through a partnership with K-12 and higher education math teachers to make sure new high school courses aligned with college entry requirements. The state also added several new courses for high school seniors, including Advanced Placement Statistics and Mathematics of Industry and Government. 

California had given students conflicting guidance about how many years of high school math they needed: State law demanded two while school districts often required three and some colleges recommended four. State universities are now more transparent about what is needed for college success in general and in specific majors.

Just Equations notes Tennessee’s efforts date back 18 years when its high school students were first required to complete four years of math, including Algebra II. The state’s mathematics offerings have been reworked numerous times since then and statistics has emerged as a valuable course for many.

Out West, Utah’s dual-enrollment program made college-level classes more accessible and affordable. The state also expanded the range of math pathways for high school students beyond college algebra, a course that relies heavily on algebraic procedures where students often struggle with the material and finding its relevancy.

Students may now opt for quantitative reasoning, focusing on practical numeracy skills such as personal finance and statistical reasoning or introductory statistics, geared toward life sciences, business and social sciences.

Mike Spencer, secondary mathematics specialist for the state board of education, said the change has been helpful to many students who might otherwise be kept out of college by their inability to pass a course that often had no bearing on their major or career aspiration. 

But, he said, students were reluctant to make the switch. 

“When it was first released, we saw a majority of our students were still taking college algebra, partly because of tradition,” Spencer said. “So, we made a significant effort to help inform students, families and counselors to understand why you would go into each of these.”

Just Equations noted, too, Utah’s university professors help craft high school syllabuses, screen high school teachers to teach college-level courses, and “verify grading consistency using common assessments.” It credits these and other changes for a massive increase in the rate of high school seniors completing four years of math, from 28% in 2012 to 87% in 2020. 

Bland of Just Equations said states should routinely bring together K–12, higher education, and workforce leaders to find the best math pathways for students. And, she said, they should invest in sustained professional development and K–16 longitudinal data to track students into the workforce to learn which math experiences best supported their success. 

Five years ago, Oregon adopted new mathematics standards intended to be “more modern and equitable,” moving away from the three-course sequence of Algebra I, geometry and Algebra II to a required two-year core curriculum focused on algebra, geometry and data/statistics. 

Students can now choose a course of study for a required third year — including mathematical modeling, data science and quantitative reasoning — and an optional fourth year. 

The changes required colleges to revisit their stated requirements. The University of Oregon, for example, mandated Algebra II for all incoming students, but now requires three or more years of high school math, which “could be satisfied by any math course with a primary focus on concepts in algebra, calculus, data science, discreet mathematics, geometry, mathematical analysis, probability or statistics.” 

In addition to the five core states at the heart of the study, Just Equations also lauded North Carolina’s automatic enrollment policy, adopted in 2018, which places students who score high on state assessments into advanced mathematics courses for the following year, eliminating subjective recommendations. More than 95% of the state’s eighth-grade students who scored at the highest level were placed in advanced math courses in 2022–23, up from 87% in 2017–18, before the policy was enacted. 

While these states have made noteworthy progress, critics note problems remain. 

A lack of longitudinal data in Tennessee makes it difficult to understand the impact of the changes that have taken shape there, state officials say. 

“One of the goals that I have over the next year or so is to better track the entire arc of the student journey,” said Juliette Biondi, who directs the state’s Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support program, as documented in the report. “I want to understand how they do in their college math classes. Do they struggle? Does it influence graduation rates?”

Utah, too, can also improve: Rural areas find it hard to recruit and retain qualified teachers for college-level courses, leading them to rely on virtual instruction.

And Jo Boaler, the Stanford professor who helped California reshape its math program, said she regularly observes ineffective teaching practices that undermine K-12 learning.

“All I can see is that we have not built conceptual understanding or number sense well by the end of school,” Boaler told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “When I visit classrooms, I still see students going through uninspiring textbook math. Maybe there has been some improvement but I have not heard about it or seen it yet.”

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

For decades, educators have searched for better ways to answer a question students ask — sometimes aloud, sometimes silently — every day: Why does this matter? this summer found nearly half of U.S. middle and high schoolers reported losing interest in math about half or more of the time during class, and three-quarters said they lose interest at least sometimes.

Teachers are echoing a similar sentiment — three-fourths of educators surveyed in the most recent cited lack of student motivation as a leading challenge for the 2025-26 school year, with half of those respondents saying it is the top challenge students face. In math classrooms, where young people often feel anxious and struggle to understand how the material connects to everyday situations, motivating students is especially difficult.

As a former math teacher and administrator, I know there is certainly no lack of rigor or standards. The real difficulty is in helping students see how mathematical thinking shows up beyond worksheets and tests.

Events that students already pay attention to can help make math feel real. The Winter Olympics, for example, offer ready-made ways to connect math instruction to real-world problem solving, without adding new curriculum or instructional time.

Already top of mind for many students, the Olympics are filled with mathematics hiding in plain sight. The most obvious example is the stopwatch. Who wins gold, silver or bronze is frequently determined by hundredths of a second, making mathematical precision more than an abstract idea. Students analyzing race times can explore decimals, rounding and margins of error while seeing firsthand why accuracy matters when outcomes are this close. Suddenly, numbers start to carry true weight.

Ratios and proportions also emerge naturally in the Olympics. Torch relay data, for example, can teach students to compare distances covered by different runners for each leg, calculate average pace times and compare how they change day to day. These kinds of problems let students practice proportional reasoning and see how math can be used to coordinate complex events.

Data analysis becomes equally meaningful when students examine medal counts, scoring systems or competitors’ performance trends over time. Moving beyond reading charts to interpreting them helps students build the kind of data literacy that is increasingly essential for landing high-paying jobs across many segments of the workforce.

Speed, acceleration and force are no longer abstract ideas when students analyze downhill skiing or bobsledding. Comparing angles of descent or calculating velocity connects formulas to movement that students can see and replay. Math moves from a set of memorization procedures to a way of understanding the physical world.

What makes these approaches powerful is their accessibility. Teachers do not need to overhaul their curriculum to make math relevant. Strong instructional materials, thoughtful task design and real-world examples that students already know about are enough — and they provide the kind of instruction that reflects what research and classroom experience consistently show. 

Students learn math best when they can , explore it and connect it to something meaningful or recognizable in their everyday lives. Problems that invite different approaches to solving problems, such as drawing models or explaining reasoning out loud, help students build confidence — particularly those who have learned to fear being wrong. Relevance supports rigor by encouraging deep thinking and a personal investment in finding answers.

The Olympics will eventually fade from the headlines, but the bigger lesson is in recognizing that the world offers constant, mathematically rich moments waiting to be used. 

At a time when schools are under intense pressure to raise achievement and prepare students for a rapidly changing economy, relevance is not optional. students. It plays a direct role in whether students stay engaged and persist through challenging material. When young people can see how math connects to the world around them, they are more likely to participate, take risks and build confidence. When they cannot, math can feel abstract and disconnected, leading students to disengage and view it as a burden rather than a useful skill.

Grounding math in real-world problem solving means looking beyond textbooks to places where students might naturally encounter math in the world outside of the classroom — like the Winter Olympics. When educators consistently make those connections, math changes from something students endure to something they can use. That shift is essential to improving both engagement and outcomes.

But new I led found that difficulties with advanced topics often stem from earlier gaps in understanding. Because mathematics is cumulative, students who struggle with algebra, for example, may be facing with fractions, number sense or other skills typically developed in earlier grades. When these deficiencies go unaddressed, they persist and create bigger problems down the road. 

These deficiencies are shaped by instructional choices made in classrooms every day. Chief among them is the ongoing debate over whether students are being equipped with a genuine understanding or merely trained to follow steps. 

In reality, requires both. Students must know how to carry out procedures, but also need to understand why they apply to specific problems. Like a chef, mastering math is not just about following a recipe or executing techniques correctly; it is about understanding how elements work together so that, when faced with something new, students know how to reason through the problem and build on previous knowledge.

And this imbalance often begins . For example, in early elementary grades, the pressure to focus on rote memorization of addition facts and subtraction “tricks” can occur at the expense of number sense. When memorization is prioritized over understanding the quantities involved, we set the stage for the conceptual disconnect that becomes a crisis in later grades.

In many traditional math curricula, procedural knowledge . Students memorize steps and by middle school, that can become their entire conception of math. When students understand the steps through conceptual knowledge, they can explain and justify their work. In a classroom, this may look like a student understanding that the area of a triangle is half that of a rectangle because they can visually decompose the shapes, rather than simply reciting the formula A=12bh. This can help them make connections and understand the “why” behind the process. even points to conceptual understanding improving procedural knowledge more than vice versa.

The focus on procedural knowledge could be driven in part by the need for schools to meet goals for standardized test scores. Standardized testing rewards correct answers more than understanding, which may reinforce the imbalance of conceptual and procedural learning. Many reduce teacher performance to student test scores, despite these scores failing to capture a complete picture of student learning. Under this pressure, many teachers may feel compelled to “,” prioritizing procedural accuracy to ensure their students can answer the basic multiple-choice questions that dominate these exams.

Declines in NAEP scores may intensify the urgency, fueling a climate where short-term gains matter more than long-term mathematical understanding. In a standardized testing-focused environment, conceptual knowledge can feel like a risk.

Addressing this imbalance does not require eliminating standardized tests, nor does it demand that every lesson become an exhaustive explanation. Instead, it requires an intentional approach to integrating conceptual knowledge into math instruction. Procedural knowledge remains essential, but it should be grounded in meaning and understanding, not memorization alone.

For this to happen, educators must be supported in teaching conceptually. Professional development that emphasizes conceptual explanations, student reasoning, and common misconceptions can bridge this gap.

Teachers also need tools that make conceptual knowledge manageable within real classroom constraints. Diagnostic assessments, formative checks and student work analysis can reveal where understanding breaks down, allowing teachers to target specific concepts not well understood. When instruction focuses on the ideas students struggle with most, conceptual knowledge can become feasible.

Tools that use diagnostic questions to identify where students’ understanding of math concepts falls short – what researchers call “” or “instructionally relevant errors” – can help educators gain insight into how students think about and approach math problems. Rather than spending valuable instructional time trying to infer misunderstandings, educators can focus on addressing them. 

A randomized controlled trial across 20 schools and 3,000 students found that students who used one such tool achieved in a single school year. The tool was developed with support from the , which assists learning engineers in the development of AI-based tools that will significantly improve middle school math learning.

Math is hard — but perhaps that is because it is often taught without meaning. Many students learn the steps to solving a problem without ever understanding why it works. Procedures alone are not enough. Memorization can only take students so far; true learning happens when knowledge can be applied. If we want students to reason, problem-solve and build their math knowledge, conceptual knowledge cannot be optional.

cites content, competencies, ways of thinking, and motivators as the cornerstones to numeracy. The findings build upon hundreds of earlier studies and will help kids enter middle school with a strong math foundation, CEO Arun Ramanathan said. 

And there is considerable consensus to the approach, he said.  

“The framework offers long-needed alignment: not how to teach, but what must be developed and how the pieces fit,” Ramanathan said in an email. 

According to its report, released Feb. 4, content is centered on the core mathematical ideas all future learning is based on while competencies refers to the skills students need to use math meaningfully. 

Ways of thinking encompasses the cognitive processes that support reasoning and problem-solving while motivators signal the beliefs and mindsets that foster engagement and persistence.

“If you asked teachers what they think numeracy is, you will get a lot of different answers,” said Gloria Lee, lead author of the report. “There is not a clear framework or scaffolding for people to communicate all of these parts. So, we are trying to fill that void.” 

The organization acknowledges the ongoing math wars, which pit explicit instruction, procedural fluency, guided practice and repetition against inquiry-based learning and conceptual understanding. It calls the dispute an unnecessary distraction. 

PowerMyLearning, which hopes their paper becomes a guide for educators and policymakers, said each of these pillars breaks down into four different categories. 

The four areas of content, for example, are integers, fractions, shapes and data while the four competencies are conceptual understanding, fact fluency, procedural fluency and application. The four ways of thinking are symbolic understanding, pattern recognition, explaining and sense-making while the motivators include math identity and persistence.

“Teachers, administrators and families must make intentional efforts to communicate that math is for everyone and everyone belongs in math,” the paper notes. “This requires explicitly promoting inclusive messages and countering negative ones, creating inclusive classroom environments, and establishing policies for support and acceleration rather than exclusivity.”

Jo Boaler, a mathematics education professor at Stanford University who co-authored California’s new math framework, reviewed PowerMyLearning’s paper and provided research for it. 

“I appreciate that the report gives a balanced perspective on number sense, highlighting the importance of reasoning, problem solving and mindset, as well as procedures,” she said. “Hopefully it helps to bridge the divides in mathematics education.”

was established in 1999 under another name and focused on technology in the classroom, including giving free hardware and software to schools in need. It later shifted to the “triangle of learning relationships” among students, teachers and families before zeroing in on early math. Though the organization aims to improve education for all, it has a focus on multilingual learners and children from historically underserved communities.

CEO Ramanathan told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ in an interview last week that despite ongoing disputes about how math should be taught, there is actually an enormous amount of agreement around what students need to succeed. 

“When you look at the areas folks are disagreeing about — conceptual understanding, fact fluency and procedural fluency — we put them all in one area, as competencies,” he said. 

Students, he said, can’t spend all of their time repeating certain skills. 

“They also have to be able to dig deeply into the reasons why certain elements of mathematics result in a correct answer,” he said. “For folks to be focusing on one element of that versus all of them together, when you see them all in one place, you don’t see them as (being) in conflict but in alignment.” 

There is no need to favor one element of learning over another, the report notes.

“In fact, the evidence is clear that fluency with facts and procedures helps students with conceptual understanding and vice versa. Numeracy requires fluency with facts and procedures as well as conceptual understanding and the ability to apply these mathematical capabilities to situations in the real world.”

The group says its findings further the and integrate more than 200 studies across math learning science, developmental psychology, and mathematics education.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation and the Joseph Drown Foundation provide financial support to PowerMyLearning and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

For the first time in its 17-year history, every eighth grader inside Center City Public Charter School’s Congress Heights campus completed Algebra I last school year. And a full 70% scored proficient on statewide assessments in 2024-25.

Just 25% of all D.C. students and 64% of those in wealthy Ward 3 scored the same. Ward 8 as a whole lagged dramatically, with just 15% of children meeting or exceeding the math proficiency benchmark.

The Congress Heights school serves 251 students pre-K through 8: 98% are Black and 60% receive government assistance for food and/or housing. 

Principal Niya White came on board in 2012, when the school was slated to be closed by the because of a poor school culture and student performance, she said. 

“This is one of those turnaround stories no one ever expected to come to fruition,” White said. “By just the demographics, not too many people expect our students to be able to win and show up in the ways that they do.”

The victory comes after years of reassessing how and when math standards would be taught, White said, and making sure the students were prepared.

“We extended the school year last summer for four weeks to get students ready,” White said. “We finished the accelerated learning by merging their seventh- and eighth-grade standards to make sure they completed all course work prior to starting Algebra I to guarantee we weren’t moving forward with any gaps.”

Eighth-grade access to Algebra I is critical because it sets students up for higher-level math in 12th grade. This is particularly helpful for those who seek to study STEM in college, hoping to land a job in a high-paying field. 

The Congress Heights campus has tracked these eighth graders’ scores as they moved through elementary and into the higher grades. In 2019-20, third graders there scored in the 68th percentile on the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, math exam, a computer-adaptive assessment designed to measure students’ growth over time. 

These children did not take the test as fourth graders because of the COVID closures, but their fifth-grade scores — they reached only the 49th percentile — reveal what was lost. 

This group has made steady improvements in the years since: they reached the 60th percentile in math in 2022-23 and the 85th in 2023-24 and 2024-25.  

The Congress Heights school is one of six in the , which serves 1,440 children in total. 

Jessi Mericola, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade math, spanning everything from interest rates to algebra, credited several factors for the school’s success, including her prior knowledge of students’ ability in addition to relatively small class sizes — a maximum of 25 children.

The Congress Heights campus also uses a co-teaching model for math, which Mericola said allows her and her co-teacher to better serve all students’ needs. 

Oftentimes, she said, one educator stands at the classroom whiteboard to impart lessons while the other identifies and helps struggling students in small groups or individually. 

The setup, Mericola said, allows the adults in the room to spot-tutor kids who have trouble catching on, their struggle made obvious by the quizzical looks on their faces.

“Those are the things you would notice and pick up on,” Mericola said. 

Kennedy Morse, 13, and in this year’s eighth-grade class, was once one of those puzzled kids. She is now thriving in a subject that used to elude her. 

“Before I came to Center City, math was something I struggled with,” she said. “I didn’t have proper guidance. Now, it’s one of my strongest subjects.”

Principal White said the school’s success hinged in part on a change in attitude about students’ ability. She and other educators recognized the profound impact COVID had on learning but didn’t want to treat these children as if they were incapable of mastering on-grade tasks. 

“If we kept saying the students aren’t going to be able to do something, then we will never be able to move them forward,” White said.

Rather than fret about what they lacked, she said, the school decided to simply teach the material, progressing students through the curriculum while also plugging in what they had missed.

“We can’t hold somebody back because they don’t have all of their multiplication facts through 25 memorized,” White said. “That is not the answer or the way.” 

Students, as evidenced by their test scores, are meeting the challenge. 

White said, too, the school gives teachers the time they need to plan lessons that permit for this. 

And, she said, the Congress Heights campus runs on data, assessing students’ knowledge throughout the school year, starting shortly after the bell rings: Math teachers frequently begin their lessons with two questions. Sometimes, it’s a measure of what students learned the day before. Other times, it’s a preview of a lesson to come. From this simple exercise, teachers learn whether they need a quick review or if they can forge ahead. 

And the data collection is not solely focused on academics. Josh Boots, founder and executive director of Empower K12, a nonprofit that supports data collection and analysis for both charter and traditional D.C. public schools, said the Congress Heights campus uses all manner of metrics to learn if what they are doing is working. 

For example, Boots said, when the school began using to shuttle kids in high-crime areas to and from campus starting in the 2024-25 school year, they didn’t simply make the program available: They checked to see if safe passage actually improved attendance. 

Money was limited for the program so not all eligible students were able to use it. But, Boots said, those who did had seven more days of school attendance last year and 12 fewer late arrivals than the students who didn’t have access to the program.Ìę

“It is critical,” Boots said of the data the school tracks. “It helps us know how students are feeling and doing on a regular basis. We can sometimes see it but the harder data confirms it — or doesn’t confirm it.”

He said, too, school leaders know they are not going to solve every problem right away. 

“But we need to be able to fail forward,” he said, quoting White. “We need to know as quickly as possible that something is — or is not — working, so we can change and improve so that every student gets the opportunities they deserve.” 

And, Principal White said, all of the math lessons are video recorded so students can go back and review their teacher’s instructions. 

“They have a play list for every lesson,” she said, adding students can also retake some in-classroom tests to improve their scores. “If they got a 60 on their first try, that 60 doesn’t stand. They can go back for the week, redo it, ask questions and use videos to see what (they) got wrong and resubmit it to make the grade higher.”

White said, too, the school addresses the math mindset at the start of the school year so students don’t begin their classes convinced they can’t succeed. 

“We make sure they know in order to be a math person you just have to be a person and manipulate math,” she said. “That really does get them out of their own way, especially if they are coming to us new. If you do math, and you’re a person, you are a math person.”

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.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

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.

As American students continue to flounder in math, Bellwether, a national nonprofit that seeks to improve opportunities and outcomes for marginalized kids, said schools seeking a turnaround must first establish a clear, shared vision of effective math instruction.

“How We Solve America’s Math Crisis: A Systemwide Approach to Evidence-Based Math Learning,” Bellwether’s done in partnership with K12 Coalition, talks about building a teacher and student “math identity” and balancing “conceptual understanding and procedural fluency while creating meaningful opportunities for real-world application.”Ìę

The plan must also ensure that learning progresses “logically and cumulatively” to deepen students’ knowledge as they move through the perennially difficult subject over time. 

“These steps may seem familiar, and that’s because they are widely accepted best practices for developing and sustaining strong instructional design,” the report reads. “However, to be effective, they must be consistently applied over time and throughout the system.”

And that’s where schools have fallen short, Bellwether’s researchers note, despite evidence supporting the approach. 

“Data demonstrate that when high-quality materials, intentional instructional practices, and strong teacher support are combined, students’ math proficiency can improve significantly — even in schools starting with very low baseline scores.”

Anson Jackson, senior partner at Bellwether, sat down with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Jo Napolitano to describe what schools need to do to get on track. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is effective math instruction? 

There’s a couple of layers to that. At the baseline, it is leaders, teachers and essential office personnel all understanding what good math instruction looks like. And they are not just focused on outcomes, but on the practices they want to see in math classrooms, the mindsets in math classrooms. There’s a shared understanding of what they believe math instruction looks like. That then determines how they build their professional development, how they build their training and how they build their assessments. It’s almost like a philosophy on math instruction. Without that philosophy, it’s like whack-a-mole. 

After they reach this consensus, what then? 

You then align on what those systems and structures look like to support that vision for mathematics. If you are focused on hands-on activities, then you want to have systems to train staff on how to develop strong activities to facilitate hands-on learning. If you believe kids need to show the work and do the math, you need to build in systems that allow kids to show the work and do the math on a regular basis. So that’s the idea: build a philosophy, build a vision, and then build a structure to support that vision throughout the district.

What if you don’t implement a shared vision? 

When you don’t have that, success is random. Teacher development is random. You’re always changing what is in front of kids or in front of teachers. When there’s no real shared vision, then the next leader who comes in changes the vision. And, without that shared vision, when you go from grade to grade, students don’t have the coherence of learning, which they need for success in math.

How can schools identify — and adopt — high-quality instructional materials, especially when time and money are tight? 

The first thing they need to do is understand the science behind mathematics and math learning. High-quality materials are backed by science and evidence of learning. Secondly, there must be coherence across grade levels — and in grade levels. The curriculum must be aligned. But before I get to the curriculum, I want to understand the key things that we know by science and evidence happen for kids to learn math at a high, high level. That could involve professional development, training, school visits, observations, doing some light research and analysis of what math looks like and coming to these conclusions as a collective — from the superintendent to chief academic officers, principals and teachers.

From there, I would then have them do a gap analysis of what they know works. They should ask, “What in our curriculum is missing or lacking from what we know should be there?” From that gap analysis, hopefully they’ll determine, “Oh, guess what? Light bulb moment: We are missing the mark on the curriculum or the materials.”

After that, they go through an adoption process where they take a look at what’s out there, and make some choices. But it needs to be a shared learning experience and not just that a team is told to adopt something because experts said it’s good. They should really understand why it’s good and what in the curriculum makes it high quality.

Is there a shortcut for cash-strapped schools with little time to do this? 

The short answer is yes: There’s lots of resources out there, including lists of high-quality instructional materials that are already vetted and backed by science. You can also use Google or ChatGPT to find them. However, this is where implementation can fail, without a deep understanding of the curriculum and why it works. A lot of folks, when things get hard, they put it away, right? 

So, I would say, yes, expert A can tell you the best resource for mathematics teaching and give you a set of resources. And that’s great. But unless they understand the true reasoning behind it and how it connects to learning, teacher practice, and systems, a lot of times it becomes another resource that’s on the shelf in two years.

How do you get teachers to support your approach? 

It’s about trying to get them engaged early on in the process, not telling them what to do, but having them learn what to do. I would not try to beat them down, but have them understand what’s working already and what’s missing. 

The second piece is that I would want to use a coaching model, side-by-side training and support for teachers — and not use it in a negative way. A lot of times we’ll shift to, “You’re not doing this, you’re a bad teacher,” when it’s actually more about a learning continuum, as in, “We’re going to focus on this in year one, year two and year three.”

What’s at stake if we don’t improve kids’ math scores?

The data shows a lot of the careers that are high paying usually have math as a core foundation. And the other piece is we know there’s an equity gap in this country when it comes to those who do math well and those who don’t — which leads to career choices, right? We want to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether who sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

Holidays bring celebration, rest and, for many families, long stretches of indoor time. For some, this means on kitchen tables. Games provide opportunities for learning mathematics actively.

This year’s list of stories takes us to Chicago, where several public schools sit mostly empty due to under enrollment; to Baltimore, where students are navigating a complicated transit system to get to school, often causing them to miss their first period class; and to Austin, where tweens attend “cotillion” classes that teach them how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. They also tell the stories of a beloved child care worker detained by ICE, a teen who tragically fell in love with a chatbot and Black-owned barbershops that have made it their mission to get boys in their communities to fall in love with reading. And there’s more


The selections come from large national publications, as well as local news and nonprofit newsrooms. Below, in no particular order, are 19 stories our team admired most this year. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these important stories written and produced by talented education journalists in newsrooms across the country.

By , Chalkbeat, and , ProPublica

The need to close underenrolled schools has become an important storyline this year, but few areas are dealing with as many nearly-empty buildings as Chicago Public Schools. ProPublica’s Jennifer Smith Richards and Chalkbeat’s Mila Koumpilova completed an in-depth analysis of underutilized schools in the country’s fourth-largest district and found that three in 10 buildings sit half-empty. And many come with a steep per-student price tag — the highest being $93,000. Richards and Koumpilova carefully explained Chicago’s history of school closures and the tense fight between district officials, families and the teachers union about next steps. They tune into what matters most: How tiny schools — some with enrollments in the double digits — impact student opportunities and educational experience. Some students seem to thrive in a tight-knit community, but the overarching lack of resources causes challenges for everyone. “You try to have a homecoming, but there’s no football team,” said a former principal of Hirsch High School, which has 100 students in a building that can fit 1,000. “There’s nothing to come home to.”

 

By The 19th 

As immigration enforcement activities have escalated over the past year, the early care and education workforce has been on edge. Immigrants represent more than 20% of the child care workforce nationwide. Chabeli Carrazana’s story for The 19th about Nicolle Orozco Forero — an immigrant child care provider who takes care of children with disabilities and was taken into ICE custody with her family — sheds light on the immense impact her detention and eventual deportation had on her community. Carrazana traces Orozco Forero’s journey: from fleeing Colombia two years earlier with her husband and sons, to searching for answers to her son’s unexplained illness to working toward her dream of opening her own child care program. Carrazana also illustrates how Orozco Forero’s rare expertise in supporting children with disabilities filled a critical gap in a field already strained by staffing shortages and limited specialized care. This story stays with you, especially the deep ripple effect of Orozco Forero’s deportation on the families and community she served.

Visuals by Eli Durst; Text by Dina Gachman, The New York Times

In Austin, tweens are attending “cotillion” classes where they learn how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. These aren’t essential life skills but surreptitiously the founders of the Southwest Austin Cotillion hope to teach the kids social skills and build their confidence. The strict no-electronics policy ensures the kids embrace the awkwardness of it all. It’s inspiring to see these kids put on a brave face and give way to the odd social mores – at least for a few hours. The fly on the wall black-and-white photography and spare text of this article did an excellent job illustrating the story. Kudos to producers Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick for creating an interactive experience that feels like an old Life magazine article reinvented for the web. Here, the future of storytelling borrows from the past and utilizes the latest technology where it works.

By Iowa Public Radio

Following the pandemic, school districts ramped up the use of the four-day school week to address a teacher absenteeism crisis and recruit staff at a time of severe shortages. Nicole Grundmeier with Iowa Public Radio’s Midwest Newsroom took a deep look at the trend with her August feature on how the policies have affected students. With data, research and personal stories, she captured the tough choices districts face as they weigh the benefits and drawbacks of giving staff and kids a longer weekend. Jayce Moody, who used to wander out of class and throw things in frustration, could better manage his behavior with a shorter school week. “He no longer has to miss school for therapy and other appointments,” she wrote. “Jayce jumped several levels in reading.” But other families, she wrote, depend on schools for child care or food pantries to stretch meals until Monday. Grundmeier’s reporting offered a thoughtful examination of what happens before and after school boards vote on such a pivotal change to the schedule and how opting in favor of a reduced school week might not accomplish what they’d hoped it would. 

By and , The Baltimore Banner

Every day, hundreds of Baltimore middle and high schoolers are missing when the first-period bell rings — the result of a public transit system that makes it virtually impossible for as many as 25,000 students to get to class on time. Without a yellow bus system beyond elementary school, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner found, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on long, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous journeys that frequently get them to class late, or not at all. They stand in drenching rain, endure sexual harassment from strangers and witness violent fights on buses on commutes that can take 40 minutes each way on a good day — and often last twice as long. As the district doesn’t collect data on how students get to school, The Banner modeled their trips based on where they live and the school they attend. It then tracked the location of every Maryland Transit Administration bus every five seconds, 20 hours a day, and mapped those commutes using innovative, interactive graphics. The result: a poignant portrait of young people whose futures are being put at risk by the simple lack of a safe, dependable ride to school.

By , The Associated Press

Housing insecurity can be incredibly disruptive to a family’s life, especially when it comes to children’s education. To highlight this challenge, Associated Press reporter Bianca VĂĄzquez Toness followed an Atlanta mother as she navigated the process of finding an apartment in the right school district, keeping her son on track academically and making enough money to keep the family afloat. There’s something about how Toness opened this story that felt brilliantly relatable and illustrated how issues, like housing insecurity, can happen to anyone. Toness does a good job humanizing these vulnerable circumstances and giving a glimpse into how hard parents work and fight to make sure their children are set up for success. You can tell Toness not only earned the trust of the family she highlighted, and told their story with the utmost amount of dignity, but she also was incredibly well-informed and resourced on how complex eviction is and can be. 

By, The New York Times Magazine

Florida attorney and mother of three, Megan Garcia, has become perhaps the best-known face in the fast-emerging legal and regulatory battle over AI chatbots. After her 14-year-old son died by suicide after forming an intensely romantic and sexually explicit relationship with a Character.AI bot, Garcia sued the tech creators for wrongful death, participated in multiple interviews and testified before the U.S. Senate about the need for stronger guardrails. By giving writer Jesse Baron access to her son’s conversations with the bot that personified Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, Garcia enabled a masterful Baron to produce a gripping and illuminating account of how a lonely and often-despairing young teen can fall in love with a robot, losing the line between reality and fantasy and slipping further away from the physical world and its human relationships. It’s a harrowing descent. The Garcia case will likely be among the first to establish legal precedent around the juggernaut that is AI. Days after Barron’s story ran, Character.AI announced that it was banning those under 18 from using its chatbots. All of that comes too late for Sewell Setzer III, who truly believed that by dying he would be going home to Westeros and his one true love.

By Alvin Chang, The Pudding 

How much do children’s environment and experiences influence the rest of their life? Alvin Chang’s interactive “This Is a Teenager” tackles that question with ease — turning National Longitudinal Surveys data into conversational, visual storytelling. The project follows hundreds of teens into their late 30s, allowing viewers to dive into 24 years of circumstances and consequences. As the interactive timeline moves through the years, you can see who went to college, who stayed financially stable, who was the victim of violence, who considers themselves happy. I was absorbed for hours. The project revisits one teen in particular, called Alex, who grew up in a high-risk environment. He had a difficult home life, was bullied and held back in school. By 2021, he reported feeling depressed “most of the time.” Yet, as Chang writes, “we are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing.” That line hit hard, especially after watching Alex’s life unfold. The equally engaging complements the piece, making decades-long data feel digestible.

By  The Hechinger Report

A report on Trump administration college admissions proposals, published earlier this month by The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus, may turn out to be one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the year. 

Marcus looked at admissions data and found that while President Trump’s scrutiny largely zeroes in on race, his ban on DEI policies could harm men, notably white men, his most loyal demographic.

That’s because universities for decades have been quietly offering men, who tend to leave high school with fewer skills and lower GPAs, an advantage. While they’ve historically enrolled more women than men, federal data show, they’ve also admitted higher percentages of male applicants. At Baylor University, for instance, 56.8% of males who applied got in, versus. just 47.9% of females.

So while colleges may soon follow U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s exhortation to judge aspiring students “solely on their merits, not their race or sex,” the end result could be thousands of young men who don’t have a place in future freshman classes — a development that “drips with irony,” says one top policy wonk.

By , The Philadelphia Inquirer

Anyone who’s spent much time reading about schools will remember New York City’s “rubber room” — an archipelago of reassignment centers for hundreds of school employees awaiting arbitration for alleged professional offenses. In January, more than 15 years after journalist Steven Brill first popularized the term, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Kristen Graham gave us an account of Philadelphia’s own rubber room, a way station where some teachers and administrators spend years gathering paychecks and dust. The dispatch offers excellent texture about wasted days in what is effectively a professional prison — the long-timers graduate into the best seats, while access to extension cords is carefully negotiated — but many of the details are dispiritingly familiar: Complaints from former rubber room occupants first bubbled into a citywide scandal back in 2011. It increasingly feels like the broader subject of teacher job protections and complaint adjudication is itself akin to the rubber room, a windowless abyss to which all education journalists must eternally return.   

By , NBCU Academy

Alvin Irby, a former first grade teacher, saw an opportunity to improve literacy among Black boys while watching one of his students get a haircut. In 2013, he founded Barbershop Books, providing books for children to read while sitting in the barber’s chair and training barbers to become mentors to their young clients. Reporter Maya Brown, who was then with NBCU Academy Multimedia, provides a beautiful masterclass in visual storytelling that shows how familiar cultural settings can be used to boost literacy and reading comprehension. In Brown’s video and text package, we see students getting haircuts and walking away with a stronger motivation to read and barbers who are passionate and committed reading coaches. What excited me most about this story was knowing that Black boys across the country are being seen and supported through Barbershop Books, which is now in 60 cities across the U.S. Brown brilliantly captures how these encounters not only shape the students’ hairline but their education journey, too. 

By and , ProPublica 

What if the leaders put in charge of the nation’s public schools are actually rooting against them? ProPublica analyzed dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events — as well as writings — for Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s appointees finding “a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools.” and ’s story dug deep into these records to paint a vivid picture of the powerful forces that both govern and seek to dismantle public education. Every sentence was impactful and the graphics, while cartoonish and playful, powerfully illustrate each point. The voices that fill the piece were well chosen, each offering an insightful view, to a movement that started well before the current administration. For instance, Maurice T. Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts provided helpful context, saying parents’ rights groups have long aimed “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization.” 

By , The Hechinger Report

In 2006, Minnesota passed a law requiring all eighth graders to take Algebra I, a move designed to boost the number of students taking calculus and eventually going into math and science careers. But an investigation by The Hechinger Report suggests it hasn’t worked as planned. Reporter Steven Yoder analyzed federal data from 2009 to 2017 and found the share of the state’s students taking calculus rose modestly, from 1.25% to 1.76%. But other states saw far larger gains, and Minnesota dropped from sixth to 10th place among states for calculus enrollment as a share of total enrollment. The state’s ranking for eighth grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress also fell. Yoder’s research, including visits to classrooms in one Minnesota school district, demonstrates the need for more nuance in determining who should take algebra and when.  

By , The Washington Post

You would know this compulsively readable feature was written by The Washington Post’s Casey Parks even without the byline. Parks is a master at coming to inhabit a small community, chameleon-like, and finding its social glue. In this case, it’s the lone bookstore in Vermillion, South Dakota, threatened with closure when the state legislature voted to force the 10-year-old daughter of its owners to use the boys’ bathroom at school. Five and a half years ago, Mike and Jen Phelan opened the store on Vermillion’s Main Street where, red state reputation notwithstanding, most of the brick storefronts sported Pride flags. The locals embraced the couple’s transgender daughter, with the Vermillion School Board voting in 2021 to allow her to use the girls’ bathroom. Which she did without incident until South Dakota’s GOP statehouse majority passed a bathroom ban this year. As the Phelans packed to move to a New England community where the girl would be affirmed, they prepared to sell the business to Nova and Elias Donstad, a trans couple. “They fell in love reading next to each other most evenings, and they fell for South Dakota the way many transplants did — accidentally,” writes Parks. The bookworms were desperate to rescue the store, but couldn’t afford to buy it. As it happens, their neighbors couldn’t imagine Vermillion without the shop, and raised $22,000 for the couple’s down payment. 

By , CalMatters

Since The Boston Globe’s early 2000s reporting exposed widespread childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic church, similar school-based stories have proliferated. This has been made possible as states open “look-back” windows, temporarily lifting the statute of limitations on civil abuse cases. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse I’ve spoken with for my own reporting have shared the power of these windows: they provide an opportunity — albeit delayed — for justice. CalMatters Carolyn Jones’ reporting on California’s 2020 law — which provided a three-year window for victims to file claims and made it easier to sue school districts and counties — stands out because of her ability to skillfully and thoughtfully walk a tough line: emphasizing the very real presence of sexual abuse in schools and the need to hold complicit institutions accountable, while also exposing the unintended financial consequences that can result from these windows. The story raises complex and thorny questions: Who should be held accountable for years-old sexual abuse, especially in cases where the perpetrator is dead and school district personnel have since turned over? And how can we hold the systems that failed these victims responsible, without pulling funding from current students? 

By , NPR

NPR’s November interview with photographer Melissa Ann Pinney included a trove of incredible pictures that practically jump off the page, err screen. After being granted access to two Chicago schools starting seven years ago, Pinney began taking photos in her “Becoming Themselves” series. Pinney captures incredible facial expressions and body language of what she called “often overlooked communities of children and teens in Chicago.” Her ability to play with light and shadows adds a dimension of moodiness that feels right when teens are the subject. Each picture tells its own story with a range of emotions and experiences, including hope, fear, friendship, and love. My favorites include Lizzie Williams in her My Little Pony leggings;  Kho’vya Greenwood and her brother Coby at a prom celebration; and Jo Gonda and Andrew McDermott at the prom. Each photo is truly a gem — and Pinney’s interview adds to the experience.  

By Photographs by , The New York Times 

This year’s 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act offers a stark reminder that we’re not that far removed from the days when people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were sent away to special public institutions. One of those, the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts — “the Fernald,” as locals call it — housed John Scott, who had spina bifida and spent most of his 17 years there before his death and burial in an unmarked grave in 1973. In this heartbreaking and masterfully told story, New York Times reporter Sonia Rao describes the journey of Scott’s brother David, who was just 7 when John died, as he seeks to learn more about his brother and what happened to him. A direct appeal to the governor eventually led him to a rust-colored accordion folder filled with 70 documents about his brother’s short life. In interviews, a teacher described John as one of her brightest students and “a little ray of sunshine.” But she also spoke of what David called “atrocities” at the school. “Eighty percent of the stuff I saw there, I wish I could erase from my mind,” she said. That reality is especially poignant given that there were at least 10,000 unmarked graves for people like John in Massachusetts alone — and the Fernald is one of hundreds of similar institutions for people with disabilities that once dotted the national landscape.

By , Voice of San Diego

Just when you thought you’d seen every kind of shady behavior around AI and digital learning, along comes Voice of San Diego’s Jakob McWhinney with an: Would you believe that fraudsters are stealing community college students’ identities and enrolling in remote classes to cash in on their financial aid? McWhinney finds that thieves create “bot students” that enroll in large online classes and remain just long enough to cash in on state and federal aid. They often turn to generative AI to fake the first few assignments. McWhinney finds that one in four California community college applicants last year was a suspected bot. He offers an to help readers understand exactly how it all works. If the aid theft isn’t bad enough, he finds that the bots also bump real students from classes — and wreak havoc around enrollment. He talks to a Southwestern College professor who realizes that, two weeks into last spring’s semester, just 15 of the 104 students enrolled in her classes and a wait-list, were real. As a result, Southwestern now requires all remote students to show up face-to-face at enrollment time just to prove they’re real. 

By , NBC News

In a year that will be remembered for intensifying political extremism on the internet and a sharp increase in political violence in the physical world, investigative reporter Tyler Kingkade of NBC News surfaces a compelling tale of what happens when everyday people find themselves in the crosshairs of the culture wars. After Charlie Kirk’s murder led to government-endorsed revenge against the far-right pundit’s critics, Kingkade highlighted how a small school district in Arizona was thrust into a campus safety crisis after an online disinformation campaign falsely accused teachers of celebrating his death. The lie, which centered on a costume worn by math teachers, was perpetuated by conservative influencers and Republican lawmakers. The resulting firestorm offers clear evidence that online vitriol can destabilize public safety — including in schools.

When it comes to public policy, there are rarely any easy solutions, but there is one lever states can pull that will ensure more students have access to math courses that will improve their long-term success in life.  

has shown that a student’s math achievement has a stronger correlation with future income than gains in reading or even health-related factors. And one of the most important predictors of future math success is a student’s “” — especially when it comes to Algebra I, a critical gateway course.

While most students take Algebra I or integrated math in ninth grade, many could take it earlier. But there is the catch: Access to Algebra I in middle school, which is considered advanced, is often determined by a variety of metrics including teacher recommendations, parental wishes, grades and GPA.  These factors don’t always reflect a student’s true readiness, and they can unintentionally limit access for students who are prepared to take on advanced math before high school.   

Several states — including Indiana, Nevada North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington — have taken a different approach. They’ve implemented a policy called “Guaranteed Access to Advanced Math” that allows students who score highly proficient on state exams to enroll automatically into advanced math pathways that lead to Algebra I in middle school. This policy is grounded in mathematical readiness and shows that it is the best indicator of Algebra I success.Ìę

Beyond ensuring all students who are ready for advanced math have access to those courses, research indicates this policy is opening more doors for vulnerable students who might otherwise be excluded. 

from The E3 Alliance found that before the state adopted its “Guaranteed Access to Advanced Math Policy,” Black students in Central Texas who scored in the top 20% of their fifth-grade class in math were less likely to be placed in Algebra I by eighth grade than their Black peers who ranked in the 21st through 40th percentile In other words, some of the highest-achieving students were overlooked, not because they weren’t mathematically ready but because the system wasn’t designed to guarantee them access. 

For schools that implemented a guaranteed access to advanced math policy, enrollment in Algebra I in middle school rose significantly across all student groups. After changing the architecture of math classes so Algebra I became the default for students with high test scores, top-performing Black and Hispanic students’ access to Algebra I in grade 8 moved from 33% and 46% respectively to a whopping . The policy also boosted enrollment for top-performing White and Asian students from 75% and 90% respectively to 83% and 92%.ÌęÌę

Nationally, remain below pre-pandemic levels, and are testing at levels close to where they were in 2000. If we want to reverse this decline — and prepare students for the higher-paying jobs and in-demand college majors that depend on advanced math — we need policies like “Guaranteed Access to Advanced Math” that raise expectations and expand opportunity.Ìę

Right now, the approach isn’t consistent across the country.  Only Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Washington now have statewide guaranteed access policies, with Indiana and Virginia joining during the 2025-26 school year.  

Other strategies have missed the mark. San Francisco delayed Algebra I until ninth grade to “level the playing field” but ended up who were mathematically ready to accelerate. Minnesota required all eighth graders to take Algebra I, which ignored individual student readiness and .Ìę

Guaranteed access offers a better path. It meets students where they are, supports those who need more time and accelerates those who are mathematically ready. It’s optional, not required, so parents make the final decision whether their students are enrolled in advanced coursework in middle school.  

Under ExcelinEd’s mathematically ready students would take Algebra I in middle school, and students who need time to build a strong mathematical foundation will take Algebra I in ninth grade. This ensures every student completes Algebra I by the end of ninth grade, taking the course when they are mathematically ready.Ìę

The outcomes are measurable. Students who take more advanced math are more likely to , and . When guaranteed access policies are designed well, they help close by making sure readiness drives opportunity.Ìę

No single policy solution can overcome America’s math challenges. States also need : high-quality instructional materials, at least 60 minutes a day of math instruction and strong support for teachers. But with guaranteed access as part of that foundation, we can ensure that every student, regardless of where they start, has the opportunity to learn and leverage the advanced math skills that power our workforce.Ìę

Recognizing the stakes, three years ago the school underwent a complete overhaul, and the change has been remarkable. Monte Vista has seen math proficiency rise from to , and English Language Arts proficiency climbed from to on the Smarter Balanced Assessment. 

Here are three ways Monte Vista Elementary changed its trajectory and saw meaningful growth.

First and foremost, change began by reimagining the definition of leadership. Rather than relying on top-down directives, the school adopted a model built on trust, collaboration and shared purpose. The goal was simple but powerful: empower teachers to make instructional decisions and position them as partners in driving improvement.

Teacher leadership teams and data-driven professional learning communities were established, keeping student performance at the center of every conversation. These teams analyzed data, identified gaps and collectively determined next steps, ensuring that professional development and instructional strategies were grounded in real classroom needs.

Teacher leaders visited classrooms across grade levels to identify educators’ strengths, growth areas and opportunities to refine practice. The feedback was shared with the full staff, and teachers collaborated to design targeted action plans — whether that meant adjusting curriculum, securing supplemental resources or carving out additional planning time.

Peer observations further deepened this culture of collaboration. Model teachers opened their classrooms so colleagues could see effective strategies in action and reflect together on what worked. This kind of teacher-to-teacher learning proved far more impactful than traditional training approaches. It built shared ownership for student success, professional trust and a collective commitment to doing whatever it takes to improve student outcomes.

The second change came about when school leaders confronted an uncomfortable truth: The data didn’t add up. Internal assessments suggested strong growth, yet students’ performance on state tests told a different story. Misalignment between those results and Smarter Balanced scores signaled a deeper issue: Students could complete assignments that relied on following set steps accurately, but they struggled when asked to apply concepts or reason through complex problems.

Classroom instruction needed to mirror the cognitive rigor students would encounter on the Smarter Balanced exam. To bridge that gap, the school implemented a that provided real-time feedback, question-by-question performance data and types of questions designed to prepare students for the deeper thinking required on state assessments.

Teachers could now see in-the-moment how students were reasoning through problems, identify misconceptions immediately and adjust instruction before small gaps became larger ones. The platform’s dashboards made error analysis part of daily practice, revealing not just what students missed, but why. Educators began using this insight to reteach key concepts, group students flexibly and design interventions that targeted specific learning gaps.

Equally important, the tool reframed assessment as learning. Students were no longer passively tested — they were actively reflecting on their own thinking. They learned to articulate their reasoning, analyze their mistakes and approach challenging problems with confidence.

Integrating this technology also deepened the staff’s collective approach to teaching. With clear evidence at their fingertips, teachers collaborated around patterns in student learning, refining both their questions and their approaches to conceptual teaching. Over time, this focus on strategic approaches to problem-solving — rather than procedural repetition — became part of the school’s DNA.

The result was a powerful alignment between classroom learning and assessment performance. Students weren’t just better test-takers; they were stronger thinkers, capable of transferring understanding across subjects and demonstrating mastery under pressure.

The third component was engaging families through listening. Parents are involved through advisory committees that review data, provide input and offer feedback that is incorporated into achievement plans for English learners, students with special needs and gifted students. 

Over time, the school’s data culture has evolved from one focused on accountability to one centered on celebration — viewing results as a story of growth rather than a measure of failure. Each initiative is anchored in evidence, collaboration and recognition of progress, no matter the scale, ensuring that insights gained from data reach beyond the classroom. Family literacy and numeracy nights, “coffee with the principal” meetings and community events all connect data-driven academic progress, behavior and culture into a coherent framework that invites families to see and share in student success.

Monte Vista shows that regardless of students’ backgrounds or starting points, when teachers collaborate around shared goals, incorporate strategic thinking and prioritize family involvement, educational outcomes change. The focus moving forward is to sustain the assessment-driven cycles that have guided progress, deepen student ownership of learning and maintain a commitment to equity, excellence and the shared belief that our students will succeed.