The latest NAEP scores suggest that math instruction needs just as much coverage as reading. But covering math requires a slightly different lens.
By Holly, Korbey, host of The Bell Ringer
After the success of Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story,” education journalism exploded with stories focused on how schools teach reading.
Now, some journalists are rightfully asking a vital follow-up: if reading instruction was failing so many students, could something similar be happening in math?
Earlier this year, New Bedford Light education journalist and former math teacher Colin Hogan wrote here in The Grade about how math instruction needed its “Sold a Story” moment — watershed journalism that would bring crucial issues about math teaching and learning to light for the public.
Math proficiency is vital for students, maybe more so than the public realizes.
After all, math predicts not only future overall academic achievement and college readiness, but future income as well. American students have lost significant ground in math over the last decade, according to the latest Nation’s Report Card scores. They have middling math performance compared to their global peers, and a lack of math skill provides a significant barrier to often lucrative careers in STEM.
Compared to reading, it’s woefully under-covered.
I’ve been covering math instruction for a little more than a year. Based on my conversations with journalists and experts, it seems clear to me that we should put math instruction under the microscope in the same way we’ve been doing with reading. But to do so effectively, we need to consider a slightly different set of questions.
To put math instruction under the microscope in the same way we’ve been doing with reading requires a slightly different set of questions.
There are some significant differences between math and reading.
There’s currently less research on what makes our math minds tick; math contains many more individual, overlapping skills and less evidence-based clarity on exactly how to teach it. Math’s battles are about different ideas than reading, and they are so nuanced they can often be confusing.
But that doesn’t mean that journalists shouldn’t try to get at the heart of math instruction and lean into that complexity.
Great coverage of math should look closely at empirical, high-quality research and whether it’s making its way into classrooms. Journalists who cover math recommend getting into classrooms to experience how it’s being taught, especially for students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
And perhaps most of all, journalists should familiarize themselves with the history of math reforms to be sure they get the context right.
“Journalists often mistake the surface elements like ‘engagement’ with actual learning,” says mathematician and JUMP math founder John Mighton. They’ve been told things that aren’t supported by research, like memorizing math facts is harmful or that if students are engaged and having fun with “real world” problems, they are learning. But “superficial engagement is momentary,” Mighton notes, and “deep engagement comes from mastery.”
Journalists should familiarize themselves with the history of math reforms.
Get familiar with the research — and the history of math reform
Empirical research on math learning has been growing for decades, experts say, but it gets little attention.
“There is a science of math. It’s not new, but journalists need to know that it exists,” says author and researcher Amanda VanDerHeyden, former standing panel member for the Institute of Education Studies at the U.S. Department of Education. “What’s hard for journalists is to sort through it, find the high-quality references, and ignore the charlatans.”
There are reliable places to find quality research. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s final report — commissioned by the U.S. government in 2008, similar to the National Reading Panel —gathered 16,000 high-quality studies on math learning.
What the report found, by and large, encompasses many of the main tenets of the “science of math” — foundational skills are crucial to success; teachers should have a scientific understanding of how students learn; and the benefits of procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, and the quick recall of math facts all reinforce each other.
Research on teaching, researchers wrote, does not favor either entirely teacher-led instruction or student-centered inquiry, but a mix of both depending on the circumstances, context and skills of the students.
But the findings and recommendations have been largely ignored both by the education establishment, like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the press.
“The report in general just collected dust on bookshelves,” says panel member and former Brookings fellow Tom Loveless on a recent episode of the “Chalk and Talk” podcast.
“It’s pretty disappointing how the report was received.”
Get to know the leading researchers (and the charlatans whose claims are unsupported)
One of the report’s chief critics was Stanford math education professor and lightning rod Jo Boaler, who sells books and teacher training to support her own free curriculum, YouCubed, and has conducted her own research contradicting some of the panel’s claims.
As in reading, journalists should bring skepticism and investigative skills to popular curriculum sellers and their research to see if it aligns with the established body of evidence, says University of Winnipeg mathematician Anna Stokke.
“Jo Boaler is like the Lucy Calkins of math, but there are many others,” Stokke wrote in an email. She included Peter Liljedahl’s popular teacher guide Building Thinking Classrooms, which also claims a research base. “He hasn’t done a single study that actually measures whether students learned any math with the program. Nonetheless districts are buying into it.”
As in reading, journalists should bring skepticism and investigative skills to popular curriculum sellers and their research.
Get familiar with the warring sides — just don’t focus your coverage on them
The math wars center around two main arguments: whether students should focus on conceptual understanding or the procedures of solving problems and whether math classes should focus on engagement and open-ended, inquiry-based tasks or more explicit, direct instruction in how to solve problems.
Reform movements in math also swing wildly back and forth, said Loveless, and could help journalists put the current “math wars” in context. Today’s fights over whether to teach math as a set of procedures to be followed step-by-step or as a series of concepts, for example, or whether math learning should be teacher-led or student-discovered are old ones.
“All these controversies have been around for 100 years,” Loveless says. “I’m not exaggerating. All the reforms that are proposed — more student-centered learning, on and on. Journalists just becoming a little more acquainted with educational history would be huge.”
Infusing some of that history and context is essential for stories dealing with thorny issues of how to teach math, said Sarah Schwartz at Education Week. Her story Universities Are Teaching Competing Math Philosophies to Future Teachers. Why That Matters, for example, used an in-house survey to show how conflicting information on how to teach math reached teachers.
“I try to give context,” Schwartz says. “Where did this idea come from? What’s the history here, what’s underlying this? Explaining underlying pieces can be helpful.”
Algebra, tracking, and math anxiety all matter…
A few issues like Algebra I, tracking, and math anxiety currently dominate math coverage — but they are far from the entire story.
Algebra is a turning point. Students who take algebra in 8th grade instead of freshman year of high school are eligible to take calculus while still in high school — the gateway course to a college STEM major, something pointed out in Troy Closson’s 2024 New York Times story, The Algebra Problem: How Middle School Math Became a National Flashpoint (above).
Great reporting from the Dallas Morning News and San Francisco Standard, for example, look at opposing approaches to attempting to make access to higher math more equitable through which students can take Algebra I in 8th grade, with radically different outcomes for students.
Math anxiety or not being a “math person” has gotten good coverage as well.
“When we look at immigrant children, people think of their want, their need, their inability,” The 74’s Jo Napolitano said in an interview about her story, Being ‘Bad at Math’ is a Pervasive Concept. Can it Be Banished From Schools?
“But I see — one of you is good enough for Harvard; several of you will be teachers. When we count children out, we don’t get to enjoy all the gifts they have that they were never encouraged to develop.”
Last but not least, Joe Hong’s 2024 story for The Hechinger Report (below) on training early elementary math teachers points out that teachers themselves are often math avoidant and anxious, an idea supported by research.
…. But foundational skills might matter more
Missing from this important reporting, however, is why so many students struggle with higher math and math anxiety.
Missing foundational skills needs more coverage — how to help students who struggle, how teachers are trained to teach early math, and whether district curriculum supports the evidence. Like phonics in reading, students without strong number sense and quick math facts will struggle when the math gets more complex, and the keys to understanding might lie in early elementary classrooms.
A story I reported earlier this year showed how kindergarten math is often too easy and too focused on only counting, and keeps students from building the strong foundations of addition and subtraction they need later on.
Reporter Sarah Carr said getting into classrooms and seeing how elementary schools are teaching skills like how to break down a story problem is essential to better understanding foundational skills, like how story problems require both reading and math skills to solve. She visited second graders in Central Falls, Rhode Island, for her 2024 Hechinger Report story Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong (below).
“Spending time in classrooms is just so important,” Carr says. “I didn’t have a real grasp on what the approach was until I went and visited the classrooms.”
There may not be one big thing going wrong with math instruction, but lots of little things.
Math’s “Sold a Story” moment — if there is one — is going to look different
Math instruction is ripe for increased scrutiny, but I’ve learned in my reporting that there are distinct differences that may make it harder to reach critical mass compared to reading.
For a variety of reasons, outside of STEM professional parents in a few places like San Francisco, parents by and large haven’t organized around math in the same way that they did around literacy.
Fewer parents may be able to recognize when math is going wrong compared to reading. Also, parents may expect math trouble for their students in a way they don’t for reading and may be more reluctant to seek help.
Math requires learning a “ladder” of dozens of distinct skills that build on each other. It is, as Stokke says, “relentlessly hierarchical,” an ongoing blend of working on step-by-step procedures and understanding concepts. That kind of complexity can be hard to communicate to the public.
Most of all, there may not be one big thing going wrong with math instruction, but lots of little things.
“In reading, there was this approach that was spreading like wildfire for many years in schools,” says Carr, referring to 3-cueing and Hanford’s reporting. “And that was debunked by the science. There’s nothing quite that clear in math.”
Holly Korbey is an independent education reporter and writer. Her Substack, The Bell Ringer, covers the science of learning. She can be found on X at @hkorbey.
Previously from The Grade
It’s time for math to have its ‘Sold a Story’ moment
Previously from Holly Korbey
Hope — and skepticism — when covering school progress
Covering gifted education through an equity lens
Cracking the code on reading instruction stories
