What’s the Matter with U.S. Math Education?

Results for the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — widely considered the most accurate snapshot of educational progress in the U.S. — were released this week and their most striking revelation is the pervasive decline in math performance among American students. Thirty-three states have experienced statistically significant math declines in fourth or eighth grade since 2013, and 15 states saw declines for both grades.

Experts caution against drawing conclusions about specific policies and practices based on NAEP results. Nevertheless, the widespread decline in math suggests a systemic problem: Namely, the math curricula and textbooks in wide circulation across the country are profoundly inadequate.

When we opened our first Success Academy in 2006, we expected to be able to buy a strong math curriculum from one of the many curriculum and textbook publishing companies. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

The first thing I noticed was that virtually all math programs assumed that children routinely forget everything they learn. Every company dedicated the first three months of each grade’s curriculum to reviewing content that students were supposed to have mastered the prior year. So much redundancy adds up, and by the end of elementary school, the curriculum lagged far behind what was taught to students of the same age in high-performing nations. Secondly, the curricula either focused entirely on conceptual math, ignoring procedural fluency; or neglected deep conceptual understanding.

Perhaps most significantly, the curricula tended to do the thinking work for students — presenting math concepts and strategies in a way that removed opportunities for intellectual struggle. The programs were designed around the premise that math was a foreign concept that students couldn’t possibly intuitively understand; lessons were structured to impart math knowledge for students to memorize. In fact, all children have an implicit understanding of mathematical concepts from their daily life experiences: All kindergartners, for example, demonstrate outrage when a friend gets the larger half of an unevenly divided cookie — and this reveals a basic understanding of fractions. A strong math program asks students to grapple with these concepts as the foundation for deeper understanding and mastery.

After trying and discarding a few packaged math programs, we concluded we would have to build our own. Today, we have an extremely successful math program that incorporates elements from a variety of curricula and approaches. It builds conceptual mastery by asking students to independently tackle complex, contextualized problems (we literally scour the globe for great math problems!) — and ensures computational speed and accuracy through mini-lessons and daily practice of math facts. But building this curriculum was laborious and time-consuming — and took years to get it right.

Meanwhile, textbook companies, who are supposed to be the experts, are making billions of dollars selling inadequate materials to school districts. Ed Reports, a nonprofit organization that reviews curriculum, found that of the seven most widely used K-8 math curriculum, not one meets expectations for rigor as laid out in college- and career-ready standards, and six out of seven are not fully aligned.

Of course curriculum is only one piece of the schooling puzzle — pedagogy, teacher training, and school management are all immensely important, and our nation’s stagnating performance and widening achievement gaps on NAEP indicate that we must be far bolder in enacting system-, school-, and classroom-level changes to accelerate student learning. Nevertheless, curriculum is the essential foundation to a great education. If math teachers across the country are working with a bad one, their efforts will inevitably yield suboptimal results.