Many schools are training teachers, hiring tutors and changing curricula to improve reading instruction, writes Holly Korey on The 74. But what about math?
More students were struggling in math than in reading before the pandemic, and math scores fell the most when schools were closed or disrupted. Students who don't improve will be shut out of most high-paying careers as they get older.
However, most states don't require help for struggling math students. "While 32 states require schools to provide teacher training, evidence-based curricula and support plans for reading, only seven states have similar laws on the books for math," Korbey writes.
“It is typical that most schools screen students in reading and have pretty good intervention systems set up in reading, but that isn’t the case in math,” says Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
While 48 percent of schools employ trained reading specialists to work with struggling students, while only 23 percent have math specialists, Korbey writes.
New elementary teachers often are poorly prepared to teach math and lack confidence in their math understanding, according to a 2022 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.
“Many elementary teachers do not themselves feel adequately confident of their own basic math skills,” researchers wrote. “They may dedicate less time to teaching math than students need, unsure of how to help their students avoid common misconceptions and errors.”
While there's less consensus on the "science of math" than there is for reading, Korbey writes, "research-based practices meant to help struggling math students like explicit, systematic instruction, using mathematical language and number lines, and timed activities to increase fluency, also have strong evidence in making general math instruction more effective for everybody," according to Elizabeth Albro, commissioner of education research at the Institute of Education Sciences.
Beware of fads, Australian educator Greg Ashman tells Education HQ's Sarah Duggan. A popular new program, Building Thinking Classrooms, promises to foster "deep thinking" in math by having groups of students solve problems on white boards. It's an old "discovery learning" idea doesn't work well for novice learners, says Ashman. “You actually need to teach them things, not just let them get on with trying to solve problems – you actually have to teach them some strategies they can use to solve the problem." He predicts "the maths equivalent of whole language."
San Francisco school and city officials spent $71,000 on a two-week trip to Japan to study a problem-based math curriculum called Project IMPULS,, reports Josh Koehn in the San Francisco Standard. That included $4,000 for each of 13 participants paid to the Lesson Study Alliance.
Both the school district and the city are facing financial crises. The trip was funded by the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families.
“Are there not cheaper ways to get to know the program?” asked Siva Raj, who helped launch the 2022 school board recall campaign. “Do you actually have to travel to Japan to learn about it? Can they not get on Zoom?”
The program is credited with raising test scores at San Francisco's Muir Elementary, and is now being tried at three other elementary schools. They could have taken the bus.