Across the country, 4th and 8th graders are taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress in a range of subjects this month, but I’ll be paying particularly close attention to how middle schoolers perform in math.
I teach 8th grade math—the subject and grade hardest hit by historic score drops when the pandemic upended education six years ago. We have yet to see any rebound in middle school math on the nation’s report card, where scores declined by 8 points from 2019 to 2022 and remained at that low point when kids last took NAEP in 2024.
NAEP is not the only measure signaling trouble. A recent University of California, San Diego, study made national headlines when researchers found 1 in 8 of the university’s incoming freshmen aren’t meeting middle school math standards.
I hope this is the year American adolescents reverse course, but I know I can really only control what’s happening in my own classroom and school community. Last year, my district established a team of teachers and administrators to develop a math vision and action plan. To that end, my colleagues and I have been making big changes in how we teach math.
For starters, after completing an EdWeek mini-course on accelerating learning and my state education department’s course on evidence-informed math instruction, I led my department to do away with remedial math. Instead, we have committed to teach at or above grade level for almost every student, with rare exceptions.
Our building only serves 7th and 8th graders, but we used to place 7th grade students who were struggling in a 6th grade level math course. In recent years, we realized, though, that it wasn’t serving them well. Instead of catching up, they were perpetually behind.
Starting last school year, we began placing those struggling incoming students into a 7th grade math class that teaches 7th grade standards while also targeting the 6th grade standards that students hadn’t absorbed. In that course, my colleagues and I routinely use quick assessments to check for understanding. We then provide interventions such as reteaching material through mini-lessons to fill gaps and accelerate student learning. Those interventions are often supplemented with extra help during a schoolwide 30-minute daily free period in which kids can get support from teachers across subjects.
The first group of students who went through this supported 7th grade math class are now midway through their 8th grade year. I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing. Last month, more than 80 percent of them got a C or better on their grade-level end-of-semester math assessment, and those who did not will be receiving intensive support this semester. In the past, they wouldn’t have even accessed that 8th grade math until they got to high school. That’s not a home run, but it is evidence we’re on the right path just a year and a half into this big change.
The other big change my school has made over the last three years is tapping into the power of professional learning communities, a cultural shift among school staff across our district to improve student achievement with a particular focus on math.
The change is highly visible. Previously, teachers in our building tended to work in silos. We didn’t share data or problem-solve collectively. Today, we jointly analyze our state standards, identify priority learning targets, plan lessons together, review data in weekly PLCs to target needs, and visit each other’s classrooms all the time. We now share a clear understanding that we’re all responsible for the learning of every kid in our building.
We do this work within and across grades, focusing on ensuring all students are receiving grade-level instruction (or higher), using common assessments, and getting opportunities for extra support or extension work.
During our PLC time, we also focus on analyzing student data and ensuring that we’re using the latest teaching strategies so that all students get effective instruction on key mathematical practices, such as collaborative problem-solving, using mathematical modeling, and justifying and proving their answers.
Recently, I felt the power of our PLC structure and shared responsibility for students when I was doing a roundtable activity with them. They had to solve equations in a circle, with each student answering part of a question and then passing the task card on to a peer to complete the next step.
I couldn’t quite get the activity to work during first period—the more advanced students were going back and redoing the work of others before tackling their own equations, and only some of them were really learning.
A colleague stopped by during the period, and together we came up with strategies to make the activity work better, including having students discuss their table’s work. The activity worked much better the rest of the day, and I was grateful for my colleague’s support and the shift in our school culture that made this possible.
A third shift in my department has been to work with a regional network of partner organizations to review our math pathways and placements. As we removed our remedial course, we wanted an unbiased, research-based perspective to make sure our placements of students in courses ranging from 7th and 8th grade math to Algebra 1 and Integrated Algebra 2 and geometry were truly supporting their long-term success.
Now, in our first year of this partnership, we’ve gotten some initial feedback from the Regional Educational Lab Central, including affirming our current practice of considering multiple data points from a handful of different assessments before making placement decisions. REL also recommended a slightly higher cutoff score for placement into more advanced pathways, which would make it more likely students will be placed in a class where they can succeed. I would encourage other school communities to pull in outside experts to offer a fresh look at their teaching and learning and math-placement practices.
I hope others around the country are similarly looking inward, keeping what’s working and tossing out what’s not serving kids well. That’s what’s needed to reverse these math declines and give American teens the strong foundation they need to succeed as they move through school, into postsecondary settings, and out into the world.
