Across the country, states are passing new laws aimed at improving math teaching—mandating that schools intervene early to support students who struggle, expanding access to advanced courses in later grades, upping the amount of math instruction in the school day, and requiring new training for teachers.
At the same time, several states—including Illinois and New York—are redesigning their guidance on how math should be taught.
The flurry of action comes in a post-pandemic landscape where student math achievement is an urgent priority for state and district leaders. National scores in the subject have stagnated after more than a decade of decline—a slow creep downward that accelerated in the aftermath of the COVID era.
But while the field has reached broad consensus that schools and districts need to take action to reverse this trend, disagreements continue about how to do so and how to identify the best strategies from research evidence.
Others emphasize that legislation alone likely won’t move the needle. States that have managed to improve math scores, such as Alabama, married policy changes with strong implementation, said Chelsea Waite, a research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation.
That caution should be familiar to followers of the “science of reading” movement. While more than 40 states have passed legislation over the past decade requiring schools and teacher-preparation programs to use evidence-based practices in literacy, implementation has varied—and not all have seen big jumps in student reading scores.
“There’s a big picture around state leadership and focus that is not contained in legislation alone,” Waite said.
Early intervention, access to advanced math stand out as policy priorities
The recent surge in math-related legislation dates to 2022, with the passage of the Alabama Numeracy Act. The law mandated early screening and intervention for students with math difficulties and assigned one to two math coaches to every K-5 public school.
By 2024, Alabama was the only state in which 4th graders were outperforming their 2019 counterparts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Since 2022, at least nine other states have passed legislation requiring or recommending early screening and intervention: Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.
Other states have launched new teacher training. A 2023 law in Louisiana mandated a 50-hour course for all 4th-8th grade teachers, designed to deepen educators’ math knowledge and demonstrate how skills taught in elementary years build a foundation for higher-level concepts in middle school.
In 2025, Texas lawmakers mandated professional development for classroom teachers, math coaches, interventionists, and building leaders working with students in grades K-3. To fulfill the law, the state education agency is developing Texas Mathematics Academies this school year, and will launch a pilot in 2026-27.
Other policy priorities have emerged, too, said Lindsey Henderson, the senior policy director of math for ExcelinEd, an advocacy group founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The organization, which has also been active in the science of reading movement, has created a model math policy and tracks state-level changes.
Most notably, Henderson said, more states are focusing on Algebra 1 access. Thirteen states have expanded access to advanced math classes that can put more students on a path to taking the course, which acts as a gatekeeper to higher-level math, in middle school.
This legislative session, at least 16 states are considering bills related to math instruction, Henderson said, spanning a range of topics. Among them: mandating early intervention, requiring math be taught for at least 60 minutes daily in elementary schools, adding new professional development or coaching, and guaranteeing access to advanced courses.
These kinds of shifts can affect math pedagogy in a way that “really moves the needle on student outcomes,” said Henderson.
Others aren’t so sure.
Math standards in states across the country require teachers to cover many different topics over the course of the year, meaning they aren’t always able to delve deeply into any of them, said Linda Darling-Hammond, the chief knowledge officer at the Learning Policy Institute and the president of the California State Board of Education. This differs from the approach in many high-performing countries, she said, where students spend more time on a smaller number of topics.
“Unless we deal with more fundamental approaches to the content and concepts of teaching mathematics, we’re kind of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic,” she said. California adopted a new math framework in 2023, which emphasizes the role of problem-solving and applying math knowledge to real-world situations.
Still, in voicing support for math reforms, several state legislators have pointed to science of reading laws, citing the boosts to student scores that followed when teachers started using evidence-based approaches to teaching students how to read.
“Hopefully we can do something similar to that regard in math,” Rep. Jake Teshka, an Indiana Republican, told Chalkbeat last year.
Teshka’s bill was signed into law in May. It directs schools to identify and support students who struggle in math and automatically enroll qualified students in advanced courses. It also requires that teacher-preparation programs align their coursework to “evidence-based instructional strategies.”
Indiana isn’t the only state to say that schools’ approach to teaching math should be “evidence-based.” It’s a common requirement in new math legislation.
How the ‘math wars’ could affect classroom practice
But what counts as evidence based in math is still hotly debated.
Research conducted in cognitive psychology and with students who struggle in math has shown consistent benefits for explicit instruction: clearly explaining how to do something, and giving students lots of opportunities to practice.
But the math education field tends to promote a more inquiry-based approach, which favors presenting students with complex problems and offering support as needed. They say the method leads to gains in students’ deep understanding of math concepts and confidence in the subject that can’t always be captured in test scores.
Advocates on both sides of the divide usually agree that there’s some room for both explicit instruction and inquiry. But how to sequence these pieces, and which to emphasize, are contentious topics.
Over the past year, one battle in this debate has played out in New York, which published a series of guidance documents for math instruction in 2025, called the Numeracy Briefs.
Developed by Deborah Loewenberg Ball, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, and TeachingWorks, a project also located there, the briefs say that explicit instruction and inquiry are both necessary, and “comprise intersecting, not dichotomous, goals of mathematics instruction.” It is a myth, one brief reads, that “the most effective teaching method is providing step-by-step procedures for solving problems.”
The briefs raised concerns in some corners of the math education community. The documents “ignored” the large body of experimental research on what works to support struggling students, said Ben Solomon, an associate professor of school psychology at the University of Albany, SUNY who studies instruction and intervention with a focus on math.
“It’s your bottom 75%, and especially your bottom 50% that I’m worried about. Because what the research says is that these students really benefit from explicit instruction,” he said. “If we’re going to use these more loose discovery methods early on, you’re just eviscerating their ability to succeed later.”
Solomon sent a petition to the state department of education, with more than 200 signatories, calling for the briefs to be retracted.
In a response to Solomon in October, the department said it would “not be swayed by misinformation.”
In that letter, Loewenberg Ball wrote that the research cited by Solomon on explicit teaching only shows improvements in students’ speed and accuracy, taking “an extremely limited and partial perspective on the goals of mathematics learning.”
The state department of education did not respond to a request for comment. Lowenberg Ball didn’t respond to specific questions on the briefs, but she said in an email that the nation has been debating how to improve math learning for decades. “These are not new challenges,” she said.
The back-and-forth in New York could be a preview of similar battles in other states. Explicit instruction has become a “flash point” that state leaders are going to have to reckon with, said Waite, of CRPE.
It’s not the only instruction that students should get, but it is “one of the best and most effective ways we know to make sure that students who are struggling in math grasp the concepts that they need to do more complex math,” she said.
“Somebody, and ideally multiple people, are going to have to be really sharp consumers of the ideas about math instruction and improvement strategies that are out there.”
