That decision won’t come until next April when the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce chooses between competing visions of how math should be taught and names textbooks and other learning materials low-scoring schools will be forced to use.

In the meantime, schools will be in a holding pattern of what lessons to use while advocates and state education officials duel behind closed doors over which approaches win out.

With Ohio’s math scores still below pre-pandemic levels, the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine passed a law this summer that mirrors Ohio’s 2023 law mandating the use of the science of reading in classrooms by requiring schools to better track math skills and give students extra help. 

The new law also requires elementary school teachers to show they are proficient in math skills before they can teach math.

But unlike the science of reading law which sets a clear path for how schools should teach, there is no consensus — both nationally and in Ohio — on how students can best learn math, with ongoing debate nationally between a self-proclaimed science of math movement and more holistic approaches favored by many educators.

The differences in math approaches are nuanced — simplified by some as focusing on teaching concepts versus teaching procedures — and have not become a full public debate in Ohio, at least not yet.

But educators are watching cautiously as the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce follows the model of the reading law and creates a list of “high quality” math textbooks and other learning materials by April 2027.

Most schools can still pick their own textbooks, but an estimated 450 schools with low test scores will have to use only books from that list. 

The department won’t clear up concerns by saying which studies or resources will guide its evaluation of materials. Asked by ����Ӱ��, if the science of math was under consideration, the department did not respond, only saying it is still in the planning stages.

“It would be premature to speculate on those details,” the department told ����Ӱ��.

Both the state superintendents association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers union said during debate over the law they oppose letting the state, not each local district, decide what to use.

Ohio’s math teachers also object to the state taking that control.

“I don’t like the state telling me I have to use a certain textbook,” said Mike Lipnos, president of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 

Lipnos wants the state to follow a state math learning plan he helped create last year that prioritizes teaching math concepts and making sure students develop problem-solving and reasoning skills. But he sensed some opposition within the department to the plan and worries the state will instead approve science of math books he believes teach math as a set of procedures to memorize.

His organization has criticized the science of math as trying to “capitalize” off of the science of reading.

“We want to say clearly to all mathematics stakeholders that OCTM rejects the outdated and inappropriate instructional practices that are being repackaged and promoted as some sort of new ‘scientific’ ideology,” the group

The science of math wasn’t an issue in debate over the bill: Backers did not testify and have not made any public comment. University of Texas professor Sarah Powell, leader of the movement, also told ����Ӱ�� she is not talking with Ohio officials to promote her approach.

The movement’s While backers favor teacher-led lessons with explicit instruction on how to solve math problems — prioritizing them over lessons on concepts that Powell has said can “ waste students’ time” — they say schools need a balance.

How schools teach reading has become a major issue nationally in the last several years, with the majority of states passing laws mandating use of phonics-heavy science of reading lessons. Low math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress then focused states’ attention on math. 

Ten states have passed policies to change math instruction just this year, said Lindsey Henderson, the senior policy director for math of the ExcelinEd nonprofit education advocacy group.

, such as having math coaches, teaching math at least 60 minutes a day, or making sure students can take advanced math classes. Alabama, an early adopter of some of the policies, leads the way with eight of the 11 approved and Ohio, as one of the ten states setting math policies this year, is also a leader in the effort, Henderson said.

But Henderson and other experts concede that math research is a few years behind where reading was when the science of reading caught on.

“Math doesn’t have a nice short term like the science of reading, and everybody knows what it means and everybody knows where to look for the research,” Henderson said.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, another nonprofit research and advocacy group, characterized the two sides of the “math wars” as favoring “traditional” teacher-led classes as opposed to “reform-oriented” classes in which student exploration takes priority. 

In a recent survey of states, CRPE found that as of late last year 18 states and Washington, D.C., have passed math policies, “many of which emphasized priorities associated with the science of math.”

But the report notes that both sides claim to be “evidence-based,” which makes it hard to decide what’s best.

“The Science of Math has not achieved the academic and professional consensus that the Science of Reading eventually did, and the gap matters,” the report states. “Whether the field will eventually reach comparable agreement, remains unclear.”

In Ohio, the bill enacted this summer by the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine comes as just 55 percent of students across all grades scored as proficient or better in math in 2025, while more than one in four scored at the lowest level, the state equivalent of F grades on state tests.

“This problem has not developed overnight, but its severity grows ever more prevalent as students who were knocked off track by the impact of the pandemic, or who were already struggling academically, continue to be promoted to the next grade despite showing very clear signs of needing significant intervention,” said State Sen. Andrew Brenner, the law’s author and chair of the Senate Education Committee.

The law passed this summer has drawn praise for several changes, including requiring tutoring of students who struggle, schools where fewer than 51% of third graders score proficient in math to develop a plan to improve and letting high-scoring middle school students combine seventh and eighth grade math into one year and start algebra in eighth grade.

The bill has been praised widely for calling attention to math and for taking steps to help improve math skills.

The law falls far short of Ohio’s 2023 science of reading bill in a few important ways, however. The reading bill budgeted over $160 million to pay for new teaching materials and teacher training, while the math bill provides no new money.

The reading bill also mandated that teachers learn the basics of the science of reading, while the math law only requires the Department of Education and Workforce to develop training by December.

Good training in how to teach math is considered crucial by wide-ranging advocates, including ExcelinEd, Lipnos’ math teachers association and its national organization.

The portion of the law that could lead to debate going forward — the requirement that the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce approve a list of “high quality instructional materials” in math — did not spark much discussion during hearings for the law.

In the end, the final law calls for all schools required to set math improvement plans — the 450 schools with fewer than 51% of students testing as proficient in math on state tests — to use only state-approved books and other materials.

And unlike with the reading law, which specifically banned some discredited teaching approaches and mandated phonics-heavy lessons, the law offers no definition of “high-quality.” The new Ohio law only requires that books help students build their math skills toward mastery.

The department declined to answer questions from ����Ӱ�� about whether schools are using bad textbooks, whether bad books are leading to bad scores or which methods of math teaching need to be added or cut.

“That’s precisely the gap,” Steve Dackin, the department’s director told ����Ӱ�� by email.

“Historically, the Department has not been able to collect data on math materials, and there is currently no approved list to compare materials against in Ohio,” Dackin said. “As a result, we are not in a position to characterize what districts are using.”

Dackin and the department declined to say what it would base its “high quality” judgment on, saying only that books should have “coherent learning progressions, strong alignment with standards, embedded assessments that inform instruction and help teachers identify student needs, and evidence-based strategies that create more opportunities for students to engage deeply with core concepts.”

“It’s not about stopping certain materials,” he said. “It’s about ensuring classrooms use resources that truly support strong instruction.”

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. 

���ʷ�’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. “In 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 — to improve student engagement. 

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. 

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.”

Posited by advocates as a companion to the better-known “science of reading,” a juggernaut that has recently brought enormous change in how that subject is taught nationwide, the “science of math” calls for a more orderly, explicit approach to classroom instruction.

Sarah Powell, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the movement’s most vocal proponents, said the circuitous path to learning popularized in recent years might “sound sexy” but doesn’t help kids master the skills they need to succeed — at least not in math. 

“Some teachers are helping to set students up for success,” she said, while others are not. “We don’t want to waste students’ time.”

But critics call the movement poorly researched, saying it resurrects ineffective techniques that should have been abandoned years ago. They say, too, that it won’t counter the current mathematics crisis, evidenced by a troubling cascade of low test results at the local, state and national level.

 Powell said ineffective teaching practices are among the factors that have contributed to students’ performance. She said many educators, in delivering their lessons, are not getting to the point fast enough, especially considering the limited time in which they must teach complex and often abstract concepts. 

Powell, who works in the department of special education, said she observed a fourth-grade teacher last school year who instructed her students, at the start of class, to find a partner and begin to solve a mathematical problem right away, with no prior instruction.

“That can be a really intimidating strategy for a lot of students, especially if they haven’t worked on a multi-step word problem before,” Powell said. “If you put an adult in that situation, they would be really, really annoyed. And that we put students in that situation is quite unfair, particularly when they have weak or sometimes nonexistent foundations in math.”

Instead, she said, teachers would be better to explain the problem first and arm students with some of the vocabulary they will need to solve it. So, a lesson on perimeter shouldn’t start with students staring at a figure on a sheet of paper, asking themselves and one another about where the perimeter might be found, she said, but with a teacher providing a definition of the term, in this case, the distance around the outside of a shape. 

“We would like to see teachers go over vocabulary that’s going to be important or say, ‘Let’s do a problem together,’” she said. “Be more systematic with that than open-ended because it could be that when you do allow students to explore, you might have some students engaging in no exploration … or maybe incorrect exploration.”

Some 25,000 people are members of the science of math Facebook group, where they discuss best practices, share helpful websites and offer feedback on lesson plans. Powell is currently working with around 100 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in Austin this year. 

Nick Wasserman, associate professor of mathematics education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said there has been much back and forth around the teaching of mathematics through the decades, as evidenced by the math wars of the 1990s.

Part of the issue, he said, is that educators sometimes prioritize different aspects of mathematics and draw differing conclusions from the same studies. But even considering these debates, research has shown students learn better when they are asked to reason and think mathematically — a core tenet of inquiry-oriented approaches.

“Of course, teachers have times when they are giving direct instruction and that is not something we disagree about,” he said, adding that, “But it’s also really important that students have times when they are the ones being asked to think and reason mathematically. Giving students tasks for them to work on on their own — without a teacher telling them how to think — is a vital component of that. A key piece is this engagement with thinking and reasoning.”

Michael Greenlee, who also works at UT Austin as a professional learning specialist with the Charles A. Dana Center, said the “science of math” should be approached with caution. 

Greenlee, who serves as a regional director for the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, questions the validity of the idea, adding its special education roots might not make it applicable to all students. 

He argues, too, that there is a political agenda behind it, backed with people trying to fight against the Common Core, what they have wrongly dubbed “new math.” 

“Common Core illustrates more explicitly what math actually is,” Greenlee said. “People look at it as new math because it’s vocalizing and putting in words brain processes and scaffolding strategies that students should use.”

Powell scoffs at the politicization of the issue and said she is in favor of the Common Core standards, put forth in 2009 and which sought to define one rigorous set of English and math skills that every student should have at the end of each grade level. 

Initially widely embraced, the standards, particularly Common Core math, later engendered intense backlash, including from those who considered it an intrusive federal mandate. It was so confusing for parents that it sent them to understand the new techniques. 

Greenlee said the “science of math” has no relationship to “the science of reading” and is unfairly linking itself to the earlier movement. He said, too, that the “science of math” assumes teachers are using certain methods when they are not. 

“The reality is, we don’t know what teachers are actually doing in their classrooms,” he said. “In fact, in my job going into large systems and school districts, my experience is teachers aren’t doing what that research says they should be doing: They’re still not teaching (mathematics) appropriately. They don’t have the background knowledge themselves to be able to teach it properly.”

Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor and one of the main architects of California’s recently , said many educators are exacerbated by the “science of math” debate. 

“They’re rolling their eyes about it,” she said, adding that those who promote the notion have cherry picked data. 

She said research shows students learn better — they are more able to master terms and methods — through activity. 

“But if you stand at the front and tell them first, it often stops them really being able to engage conceptually because their brains are just so taken up with these methods and rules, they can’t even think conceptually,” she said. 

Boaler is no defender of the Common Core standards: She calls them outdated. But this “old is new” tactic, which immediately divides kids into “right” and “wrong”, isn’t the answer, she said. 

“Why are we not teaching kids the mathematics they will need in the world they’re moving into?” Boaler asked, adding students should leave high school with data literacy and the ability to build a mathematical model that would allow them to study the issues most pressing to them. “They’re not learning that in school. They’re just learning the calculation piece. When they’re given a real situation and asked to make a mathematical function, they can’t.”

This lack of knowledge places students at a disadvantage compared to those from other countries, she said. 

“When we have been out interviewing seniors in high school recently, they had never seen a spreadsheet in their whole 12 years of school,” she said. “The U.S. is really far behind the rest of the world in teaching kids about data and data tools.”

Such knowledge would have been tremendously useful during the pandemic: Much of the information shared about the virus was done using graphs and statistics, data impenetrable to those who didn’t understand them, she said. 

But Elizabeth M. Hughes, associate professor of special education at Penn State said educators do not have to pick a side in the debate. 

“A lot of times I see things on the internet that are essentially asking, ‘Are you Team Fact Fluency’ or ‘Team Conceptual Understanding?’” she said. “The reality of it is that students need both. They need to understand the underlying constructs of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and be able to do them accurately with ease. Students need to be able to explore new ideas and have a solid plan to solve known problems.”

And, she said, rote memorization might have been wrongly demonized: Students must be able to recall math facts with ease and accuracy. 

“That shouldn’t be a controversial idea,” she said. 

Wasserman said teachers can find success through many strategies — including a combination of guided instruction and student exploration.  

“It’s fine to give students a definition,” he said, but teachers must also give them tasks “that force them to wrestle and grapple with some of the nuances of that concept.”