For Sarah Murmann’s high school geometry students, it’s the little things that cause the biggest problems.
Her students can, for the most part, understand the concepts she’s trying to teach. They can memorize and use the Pythagorean theorem, for instance. But ask them to add 12 + 15, and some need to pull out their calculators. Tell them to estimate the square root of 50, and many don’t know that it’s close to 7.
None of these skill gaps, on their own, pose that much of a roadblock. But add them together, and “it slows things down,” said Murmann, who teaches at Crystal Lake South High School in Crystal Lake, Ill., outside of Chicago.
In Murmann’s classroom and others like it across the country, many students’ underlying difficulties with basic operations and numeracy skills are making it hard for them to succeed in middle and high school math classes, teachers say. And student struggles in those foundational areas appear to be mounting, according to educators.
Getting through any math problem feels like a slog. Receiving several for homework seems an insurmountable challenge.
“It just compounds to be a motivational issue,” Murmann said.
It’s an observation backed by data. Eighth graders’ math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress haven’t recovered from pandemic-era declines, and the lowest-performing students dropped even further behind their peers in the latest set of results released in 2025. High school seniors’ math scores have continued to fall, and more of them than ever before are performing at the lowest level in math, NAEP results show.
More states are passing new laws aimed at improving math teaching, some of which require that schools intervene early to support struggling students, use evidence-based classroom practices, and offer training for teachers.
Still, there are students in middle and high school now who never got those early interventions, said Erica Fanning, a school psychologist in New York state who supports math intervention for middle and high school students.
At those older grades, teachers have less time to provide extra support—and in the time they do have, they face pressure to focus on grade-level content, she said.
“Remediating skill deficits in middle school becomes so much more complicated.”
‘Math is hierarchical’
Older students’ struggles run the gamut, teachers say.
In interviews with Education Week, teachers said their students had trouble with understanding and manipulating fractions, adding and subtracting negative numbers, knowing times tables, and working with decimals.
Some of these problems likely trace back to pandemic-era disruptions, teachers say.
“My 8th graders were in 3rd grade during their virtual year,” said Sung Hong, an 8th grade math teacher at Brooke Charter Schools’ Roslindale campus in Boston. “You see gaps in what they should have learned.”
Third and 4th grade math help solidify students’ understanding of fractions, Hong said. It’s an area where his students “struggled greatly” this year, more so than past years’ groups, he said.
But the issues these teachers enumerated have long been among the most common foundational skills gaps, according to studies of students’ weaknesses in math.
Struggles with automatic recall of basic facts and fractions are on this list, said Robin Codding, a professor in school psychology at Northeastern University in Boston. So are challenges in doing multi-step calculations, solving word problems, and understanding math language.
Students tend to struggle with math metacognition, too—mainly knowing how to begin solving a problem and checking their work effectively.
Mastering those skills is essential to succeed in higher-level math, said Codding.
She referenced the 2008 report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, a group of experts convened by President George W. Bush to surface the best evidence on math instruction.
“This is a really foundational math report that says, math is hierarchical,” said Codding. “It depends on proficiency with foundational skills in order for students to access higher knowledge.”
How teachers decide where to intervene
One of the main questions educators have about math intervention in the middle grades and beyond is, “how far back do we go?” said Amy Brodesky, a mathematics instructional design expert at EDC, a nonprofit research organization that works on global education, workforce development, and health issues.
Math is cumulative, meaning that mastering a new skill hinges in large part on having mastered those that came before it. Some schools have found that they need to go all the way back to the beginning.
For Freya Mercer, that meant focusing on fact fluency. In 2022, Mercer was a principal in a grades 5-8 middle school in Coxsackie-Athens Central School District in New York. Students there often relied on calculators for basic computation.
“So much brain space was being taken up by, ‘I’ve got to do this on the calculator; I’ve got to do this on the calculator,’” she said. “It was really slowing kids down, and they were making silly mistakes.”
A teacher in the building found an intervention that retaught basic computation—subtraction up to the number 9 and multiplication up to the number 10. Some of the other teachers regarded the program with “disbelief,” Mercer said, unconvinced that their middle schoolers hadn’t mastered these skills. But screening tests showed that many students couldn’t do these calculations quickly, Mercer said.
She set aside time in the schedule for teachers to do the 15-20 minute lessons, during the school’s daily “what I need” block, a catch-all period for interventions or academic enrichment.
“Very quickly, the teachers who really bought into it started seeing the growth,” said Mercer, now a secondary English/language arts supervisor in another New York district. By the second year of implementation, students’ math scores improved on state tests.
Other schools focus more squarely on the skills that came just before the math that students are learning now.
In Hong’s 8th grade math class at Brooke Roslindale, students have 90-minute periods daily. The first 30 minutes is spent on review, which includes shoring up foundational skills that underpin the main lesson. The rest of the 60 minutes is spent on new content.
The 30-minute review block starts with a one-minute fluency drill, testing students’ speed and automaticity with skills they’ve already mastered. It might cover adding and subtracting integers, finding the slope of a line, or finding a scale factor.
But the majority of the review block gives students practice with concepts the class has struggled with in past units. Hong and his assistant principal pick these after reviewing end-of-unit assessments and identifying the questions that trip students up.
The differing approaches at Mercer’s and Hong’s schools prompt the question: Is it better to go all the way back to basics that students haven’t mastered? Or to try to stay as close to grade-level content as possible?
“The tricky thing is that you really need to do both,” said Codding. “Figuring out how to do that at the middle school level when students might have many missing skills is the challenge.”
This is where assessment can play a role, said Nancy Jordan, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Delaware. Interventionists can test which skills students know and don’t, and which need to be solidified.
“If the students haven’t built the foundations,” she said, “it might not help just going back to 7th grade or 6th grade.”
What effective practice looks like
In the elementary grades, when students are supposed to be mastering foundational math, many schools have dedicated interventionists and time in the day for extra support. But after elementary, when and where math support happens is “all over the place,” said Brodesky.
In interviews with Education Week, some teachers said they are able to work on math intervention during “what I need” time. At other schools, students have the option to double up on math classes, taking one period as an elective.
Elsewhere, students get help through tutoring. In a few instances, intervention time is built into the main math class.
However these blocks are built into the school day, there are some common practices that can be effective, said Codding.
One is skill-grouping. If diagnostic tests show that some children need help with multiplication tables and others with negative numbers, it can be more efficient to put them in groups where a teacher or interventionist can focus solely on those respective skills.
Another is having students work together, she said. This can look like peer tutoring or partner work, both of which studies have shown can support performance.
Research also offers insight about what instructional practice should look like in intervention.
The two big levers for math intervention are explicit, systematic instruction, and practice, Codding said.
Explicit, systematic instruction shows students how to approach problems step-by-step and builds one skill upon the next. But getting students to solve problems accurately is “only the tip of the iceberg,” said Codding. They also need to solve problems efficiently—a process referred to as fluency—and be able to apply their knowledge to new situations. That’s where practice comes in.
“Math requires you to get lots of practice, and I don’t think we do enough of that at the younger ages,” said James Seitz, the principal of Adams High School in South Bend, Ind. “We’re showing kids many different ways to attack problems, and that’s good. But I don’t know if our kids ever master one specific way.”
Adams enrolls 9th graders who are struggling in math into two math classes, Algebra 1 and a companion class called algebra lab. In the lab class, they practice the basics: adding and subtracting integers and fractions. The goal is to get to mastery, building a foundation that can support Algebra 1 success.
For some teachers, even though they agree that fluency with math facts is essential, they worry that homing in on times tables can lead to an overemphasis on procedure without cultivating deep understanding.
“That has been too much of a focus of intervention in the past,” said Michelle Sirois, a grades 3-5 math interventionist in Milford Public Schools in Massachusetts. “We’re only focused on that, and not what kids bring to the table and how we are building their number sense.”
But intervention doesn’t have to focus only on fluency or conceptual understanding, said Jordan. She used fractions as an example.
Plotting fractions on a number line and practicing adding them together can help students get better at fraction operations—but it also builds the understanding that fractions are parts of a whole. Well-designed instruction can do both, Jordan said.
When children have gaps in their foundational knowledge, it can be helpful for teachers to go back to these physical representations of math ideas, like number lines and counters, she continued.
“By the time you’re in middle school, it’s often very focused on abstract symbols—which is good, children need to know that,” she said. “But sometimes, they need more practice.”
