Few elementary education programs give future teachers enough exposure to foundational math concepts, like number sense and algebraic reasoning, before they reach the classroom.
That’s the upshot of a new report on elementary teacher preparation nationwide released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit research and policy group that has studied teacher-preparation programs since 2006.
NCTQ considers a program to meet minimum requirements if elementary teacher-candidates receive at least 150 instructional hours (or about 10 credits) in math, including 105 hours in math content and 45 hours on math instruction, or pedagogy. Programs that meet all of those standards get an A+, while those with less than 90 instructional hours get an F. Programs get credit for some of the content requirements if they only admit students who have passed a content knowledge licensing test.
Sixteen percent of undergraduate programs rated an A or A+, slightly higher than in 2022.
In 2025, 22 percent of undergraduate teacher-preparation programs and 84 percent of graduate-level programs received a failing grade.
NCTQ found undergraduate elementary-education programs averaged 136 instructional hours in math. Algebraic reasoning and numbers and operations content were the most underrepresented in the syllabuses.
That’s a problem, according to Heather Peske, the president of NCTQ , because many elementary students need intensive support in these math areas.
Nearly a quarter of 4th graders could not meet basic math achievement on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Before the pandemic, U.S. 4th graders had held steady in both numbers and operations and algebraic reasoning since 2015, but performance in both areas took a steep dive in 2022 and has not yet recovered.
“Being able to understand ways of representing numbers or relationships among numbers, that content is so critical to elementary students that we were surprised to see programs on average are not spending enough time focused on preparing teachers to do numbers and operations and algebra,” Peske said.
What’s happening in math preparation?
Math preparation has been in the spotlight, thanks to declines in performance that predate the pandemic, controversies over California’s influential new math framework, and increasing attention to dyscalculia—a learning disability that hinders math learning.
Not much is known at scale about how math teachers are trained or their philosophies about how to teach the subject. But there are some notable disparities: In 2023, Education Week conducted a survey of math teacher educators and math teachers and found that those preparing teachers, for example, were more likely than practicing math teachers to say that learning math facts such as times tables were “helpful but not essential.”
Valerie Sakimura of the higher education group Deans for Impact, a nonprofit group that works to align teacher preparation with evidence about how children learn, said teacher education programs often focus their math content courses on more advanced subjects, such as calculus, that student-teachers may not have taken in high school.
“Sometimes that early numeracy is somewhat overlooked because there’s a perception that those foundational math skills are easy,” Sakimura said. “And I think from a content knowledge standpoint, that’s true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to teach the content.”
In December, Deans for Impact launched an initiative to expand math content instruction in teacher-preparation programs. The initiative aims to “create a coherent trajectory of learning for aspiring teachers,” by bringing together math and education departments in colleges along with local school districts.
The University of Montana, which was among the few programs to receive an A+ rating in both undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation, requires would-be teachers at both levels to complete three courses on math content knowledge, followed by two courses on how to teach math concepts.
The university’s dean of education, Dan Lee, said the program digs deep in math because his mostly rural student-teachers—some of whom go on to work in very small schools—can’t just “teach by the textbook.”
“They might be teaching multi-grade [classrooms], so they’re making decisions about where 1st graders stand in numbers or operations versus 4th graders. No textbook can do that for them,” Lee said. “They have to be trained well enough to make those decisions on their own about the materials they need to assemble in order to put instruction forward.”
Giving elementary teachers more time to explore math content can also boost their confidence, Lee said. While secondary math teachers often major or minor in math, Lee said, many of his undergraduate teacher-candidates for elementary education come in with “math phobia,” Lee said.
“We have people, often women, who come to college and take their general ed. requirements, and then they come to our [math] classes and say, ‘I’m not really good at mathematics,’” Lee said, “So getting our teacher-candidates to feel efficacious about mathematics is really important. If they believe that they can be good at mathematics, they can translate that to their future students.”
Program evaluation revised
This marks the second time NCTQ’s controversial independent rating system has evaluated programs since it was revised in 2021.
The group’s A-F rating has been criticized for years for using course syllabi, descriptions, and other class materials to evaluate how well elementary education programs prepare preservice teachers in subjects like reading and math, rather than direct class observations. Other math groups, like the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, have similarly recommended preservice teachers take courses on math content and pedagogy, but they vary in the suggested hours. No national studies link specific preservice course hours for teachers to later student outcomes.
Rather, Peske said, a group of math researchers, teacher-preparation program leaders, and school and district educators developed the standards and evaluation process, which was revised based on both public comment and a technical advisory group that included mathematicians, economists, and psychometricians—measurement experts.
In particular, the group distinguishes education-related math courses from general undergraduate math courses. For example, a math teacher must learn “to not only carry out but also explain algorithms for solving problems and conducting error analysis.”
Lee said the independent reviews won’t replace traditional program accreditation, but “for us, NCTQ is a measure of quality and a way of using those rubrics to ask ourselves: What exactly are we doing?
“They’re not telling you how to teach, but they’re saying you need to have balance in your courses,” he said. “NCTQ keeps holding people’s feet to the fire.”
In all, NCTQ rated more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate programs that train elementary teachers in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The analysis does not include preparation programs for secondary teachers or alternative programs outside of colleges and universities, though a separate study due out in June is expected to look at alternative programs.
