When it comes to math in schools, there’s one thing on which teachers, students, parents, and administrators tend to agree: We have a problem no one can seem to solve.
The data backs this up. According to the National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has been tracking student performance since 1990, fourth and eighth grade math scores peaked nationally in 2013. After that, scores modestly declined across the country until the pandemic—and then plummeted.
Since then, big-picture trends show mostly flat lines with some glimmers of modest progress. Only 6 percent of children enrolled in American schools tracked by NAEP attend schools that have recovered pre-pandemic levels of mastery in reading and math, with high-income districts being nearly four times more likely to recover than low-income districts. (There is one notable outlier: According to NAEP data, Alabama—a state not historically known for strong academic achievement in its public schools—is the only state in the country with statewide average achievement exceeding 2019 rates.)
Big picture data aside, it’s important to remember that each data point informing those charts is a child with unique abilities and challenges—a student who needs to be able to do math.
“When my daughter was in eighth grade, she told me she was probably going to drop out of school,” Ebony Coleman—a parent in Midland, Texas, and founder of the parent advocacy group JumpStart Midland—said when we talked last month. It was the 2024–2025 school year, and her daughter’s outburst shocked Coleman. The girl had always had decent grades and seemed to be doing well.
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Quitting wasn’t an option Coleman was going to entertain, so she began digging into the problem to see what was really happening. “My daughter told me she didn’t understand what was going on in the math class,” Coleman said. When she asked questions, the girl said, her teacher couldn’t or wouldn’t answer them, instead chiding her for being disrespectful and interrupting the lesson.
“I’m not being disrespectful, Mama,” Coleman recalled her daughter saying. “I just don’t understand.”
Alarmed by her daughter’s desperation and frustration, Coleman started looking beyond the report cards, which had consistently shown adequate progress. What she found surprised her. In eighth grade, she learned, her daughter couldn’t read an analog clock. She didn’t understand basic fractions or how to turn them into percentages. She didn’t know her multiplication tables. Middle school math was getting more difficult, but she didn’t have the foundational skills necessary to do harder computations. Her struggles would only get worse.
A group of middle school Midland Independent School District (ISD) teachers, who didn’t speak on the record due to district policy, told me they are not surprised: They see the same thing every day. (I reached out to the district for comment but did not receive a statement before publication.)
One teacher said many middle school students arrive in her classroom unable to understand the difference between multiplication and division. Other students don’t understand a number line or positive and negative numbers. Many have no fluency in basic math skills, yet they’ve continually been passed to higher grades.
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This is what Coleman discovered of her daughter’s education. “The problem starts in the early grades, but it shows up in the later grades because you need those building blocks in order to be successful,” she said. “But these days teachers don’t usually tell you that your kid is failing. They just pass them along.”
By middle school, let alone high school, it’s hard to catch up. “I feel like if things weren’t sugar-coated back in elementary—if those teachers had really told me that my child was not doing well—things might have been different,” Coleman told me. “Maybe the gap wouldn’t have gotten so big.”
Coleman’s frustration with her daughter’s teachers is more than understandable, but many teachers are frustrated too. They’re pressured by administrators and parents alike to consistently produce students with good grades and bright futures. Too often, they find this to be an impossible demand.
Picture a classroom overcrowded with students who have a wide range of baseline abilities. This variation is concealed by the fact that, like Coleman’s daughter, they all have a long record of passing grades. So teachers have to suss out who’s actually performing at grade level. Then add a few students who are unmotivated, uninclined to participate, or even disruptive. Sprinkle in a handful of children who don’t speak English and therefore struggle to participate no matter how eager they are to learn. Finally, recognize that every kid in the room is tempted to cheat or goof around on the district-issued Chromebooks used for many—perhaps all—assignments, quizzes, and tests.
Would you want to manage that classroom?
This is why it’s easier for many educators to improve letter grades than student mastery. According to the teachers I interviewed as well as national reporting, educators across the country are turning to grade inflation and unmerited grade curves—sometimes even at the direct instruction of district administration, per teachers I interviewed. This masks systemic failure with high GPAs beginning in elementary school.
It should be obvious: This is bad for students. Eventually their ignorance catches up with them, whether in higher grade levels, on the job, or at a prestigious college campus.
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The University of California San Diego has offered remedial math classes for nearly a decade, but in the last five years, the number of students who test into these courses has jumped from 32 (in 2020) to over 1,000 (in 2025). In fact, placement test results show many students need remedial elementary and middle school math, not just high school math. And these are young adults who were admitted to a selective university, in many cases with transcripts showing high grades in advanced math classes.
Perhaps this mode of failure went little noticed for so long—even by engaged parents like Coleman—because it reassures us that everything’s okay. Or perhaps it’s because it doesn’t match the type of educational problem we’ve been trained to look out for.
“We’ve all heard of No Student Left Behind,” said Dr. Matt Friez, a local physician and member of Midland ISD’s Board of Trustees, “but I think that shift ended up leaving lots of kids behind, because schools just keep passing them along.” In this system, Friez told me, “there’s not motivation to be really honest about where everyone’s at because there’s so much pressure to keep everyone on track. So now we’re graduating people who can’t do basic arithmetic. It’s really sad.”
Friez believes this is a national problem, including here in Midland, in the school district he helps lead—the district where my own children are being educated.
“We’re kind of at a crisis as far as where our kids are at in math,” Friez said. Across the district, he told me, math mastery in Pre-K to second grade looks strong. But then it starts dropping, really falling off in fifth grade. “By the time you get to junior high, 60 to 70 percent of our kids in all our junior highs are two-plus years behind in math. That is just completely unacceptable.”
This is part one of a three-part series on math education in America. Return for part two tomorrow.
