Counting cows: Do 5-year-olds need math help?

Kindergarteners are shown a photo of 10 cows, and asked to count them in Compton Unified near Los Angeles. Those who can't do it get extra help in "number sense."

Math and reading scores are up in Compton Unified, which enrolls students from lower-income Hispanic and black families. The district screens K-8 students for math difficulties three times a year, places those who score below 80 percent in an intervention group and tracks their progress every six to eight weeks, says Jennifer Moon, a district official.

“If you don’t test, how do you know if your students are mastering the concepts?”

California legislators may require schools to test K-2 students's math skills, and provide extra help to those who are struggling, reports Cierra Morgan in the Los Angeles Times.

Do they have a sense of what numbers mean? Can they group items? Can they compare quantities? Do they know the difference between a square and a circle?

"Only about 38% of public school students test at or above grade level when testing begins in third grade," writes Morgan. "And early scores are the start of a steady decline in standardized math assessments through high school."

University of California professors are complaining that students with excellent high school grades in math are not prepared for STEM classes.

"Students who don't master foundational knowledge in the early grades -- such as counting, number comparison, basic operations and simple word problems — rarely catch up," writes the bill's sponsor, Akilah Weber Pierson, in a Sacramento Bee commentary.

California needs to have a sense of urgency, Pierson told the Times. “We’ll look up and 10 years have gone by, we’ve lost a whole other generation of students.”

"The proposed law shares similar goals with California’s early literacy screening program — signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 and rolled out this school year — which assesses kindergartners, first- and second-graders for reading difficulties," writes Morgan.