As a math tutor at Austin's Kealing Middle School, Karen Olsson helps students in a supplementary math "intervention" class for students who did poorly on the state math test. She sees many who need much more help to have any chance to catch up, she writes in the Texas Monthly.

When Olsson tutored last year, she kept hitting a wall, she writes. "Someone would grasp a concept but then couldn’t solve the assigned problems because they were missing foundational skills, such as division."
She was pleased to learn about the new class, which meets Mondays, Wednesdays and some Fridays. Would it fill those holes? She found herself with a first-year teacher trying to implement a glitchy tech fix with minimal training.
Unwilling to pay human tutors, the school uses Imagine's MyPath online program. It includes virtual tutors, who communicate by text. This proved too cumbersome, and students refused to use them. They do spend about half the class on the adaptive program, which provides videos and games. But not fun games.
A seventh-grade girl kept struggling "with an animated baseball-themed game that required her to enter a multiplication fact before a ball made it from pitcher to a batter," writes Olsson. "Because she’d never before committed to memory, say, the multiples of six, she couldn’t answer quickly enough and would fail the game."
“They need to learn their fast facts,” said the teacher, known as "Ms. Wally." She "wanted to track down the students’ regular math teachers so that she could align her warm-up problems to what they were teaching, but getting time with those teachers was easier said than done," writes Olsson.
Some students would spend at least some of their time on MyPath. One girl went from demanding the tutor give her the answers to trying to solve problems. But "others devoted more time to Spotify or to sneaking their phones out of their pockets."
“The math train moves forward at a very steady pace whether kids are on it, whether they’re hanging off of it, or whether they have fallen off completely," Sarah Powell, a University of Texas education professor, told her.
Kealing has an academic magnet program that draws from the entire city, and a separate "academy" program for neighborhood students. The achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students "already large before the pandemic, has ballooned," she writes. The advantaged continue to do well. Students from lower-income families are doing much worse.
Three-quarters of Texas eighth-graders who didn't score at grade level on the state's math test come from lower-income families, Olsson writes. Those who can't chase down the train will be unprepared for college math. They'll probably be shut out of training for high-paying technical jobs.
High achievers are making gains in math, while those in the lowest 25th percentile are slipping farther behind, writes Ed Week's Sarah Schwartz.
Middle-school math is a major concern for Bob Hughes, director of K-12 education for the Gates Foundation, which has invested more than a billion dollars in math teaching and learning. "Math builds on itself," he says. “You need basic skills to then advance and master the next set of concepts.”
"Just like in reading, students who aren’t fluent with key foundational skills — like the ability to think flexibly about numbers, or the ability to manipulate fractions — can see those gaps cause compounding deficits over time," writes Schwartz.
A computer is a box of silicon chips, so "dumb as a box of rocks" can be pretty smart.
Human language acquisition is natural. Reading and symbolic Math manipulation are not natural. They have to be taught.
"Can't" and "don't want to" are so intricately intertwined that it's vain to try to untangle them.
Einstein observed that you can kill a healthy animal's appetite for its favorite food by force-feeding. I don't read music or play an instrument; I'll clear a room if I try to sing, but I love to listen. I know three people who actively dislike classical music. They all have in common that they were made to study piano as children. Math teachers take note.
Children…
Hard truth: kids who didn't memorize math facts in elementary school aren't "behind". They are of lower intelligence. In many cases, you could spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours drilling them and they wouldn't get much better.
Math by definition is a foundation subject, it builds upon previous lessons mastered by
the student...as such, a student who receives poor instruction in math in elementary school
will struggle with math probably their whole lives - i.e. - the "I hate MATH" syndrome, all
because they weren't taught the basics of add subtract multiply and divide using pencil
and paper (and not electronics), along with endless math drills of multiplication tables,
and eventually the student will get to the point where they're able to know that 6 x 6 = 36
without having to write it down, you just blurt out the answer...
When I attended public school, we did math drills up until about the end of the…