The Many Factors of America’s Math Problem

I can tell you the story of how math instruction is failing many students in my town of Midland, Texas. But the problem is far bigger than Midland. It’s the nation’s story—and understanding what steps we can take to fix our math problem starts with understanding what is broken. 

On that question, I found a lot of agreement among teachers, parents, students—and Matt Friez, a local doctor and member of Midland Independent School District’s Board of Trustees. (Midland ISD doesn’t allow teachers to speak on record, and my request for comment from the district went unanswered before publication.) My sources pointed to generational, technological, administrative, personnel, political, and pedagogical factors that together are robbing a whole cohort of children of the math skills they need.

Some problems are unique to this generation. Neuroscientists see alarming trends that indicate Gen Z is “less cognitively capable” than previous generations, with dips in executive functioning abilities and lower working memory. These difficulties correlate with growing up in a highly digital age where information like phone numbers, addresses, and multiplication tables is always at our fingertips and therefore doesn’t need to be mentally stored, processed, and recalled. 

The last decade of educational practices, instead of pushing against this pattern, have only exacerbated it as school-issued screenshave become the norm. And building mental skills is like building muscles: Without practice, we lose capacity.

Classroom dynamics are also newly challenging compared to decades past. Multiple teachers talked with me about the difficulty of getting through a lesson when just one or two students are disruptive. Even low-level behavior problems that don’t merit classroom expulsion can derail a teacher’s ability to deliver quality instruction, and until recently, many districts moved away from firm discipline even as student misbehavior increased post-pandemic. (Midland ISD is working to strengthen student discipline.) 

The difficulties inherent to bilingual classrooms are real too. As teachers, students, and Friez all explained to me, kids who don’t speak English fluently—some of whom have been educated in this district since early childhood—struggle to understand math instruction in an English-only classroom. Low literacy, including among native English speakers, creates a similar hurdle. If students can’t read and understand a word problem, how can they solve it?

Hiring is another pinch point for campus administrators and district leaders. Teacher shortages are a crisis nationwide, and it’s not like you can hold off on teaching algebra until a proficient teacher can be found. Instead, seasoned educators frantically try to fill gaps. One veteran teacher told me she regularly instructs her fellow math teachers in how to get through their daily lessons. Even well-meaning and hardworking teachers, she said, often don’t understand the material themselves, which raises serious questions about the quality of collegiate teacher education programs.

To all this, state benchmark testing pressures educators to “teach for the test,” lest their school lose needed resources. This often looks like introducing new concepts more rapidly than students can handle, rushing on to a new topic before children master the first.

Here in Midland, in an effort to increase classroom accountability and hold students to grade-level standards, our school district has begun requiring daily data reporting from all teachers. Both the teachers and Friez talked about using daily “exit tickets”—short quizzes to check for understanding—with teachers being required to post results at the classroom door for administrators to see. The goal is good, but in practice, it’s just another item on teachers’ already overlong checklists. 

Then there’s the culture wars: Education has become a battlefield in these larger political conflicts. Here in Midland, where it’s not unusual to see election results of 90 to 10, you might expect culture warring to be rare. Yet even here we’re caught up in these fights, guilty of giving more attention and outrage to tribal disputes than the difficult practical work of ensuring our children can do math. Teaching methods and class content have been politicized, judged less for their usefulness than their fit with ideological agendas—to the point that concerns about equity have led some districts to cancel advanced math classes.

And undergirding all these factors is an often-unrecognized philosophical shift in math instruction driven by novel guidance from influential experts and authorities. With the advent of the controversial Common Core instructional standards, which was broadly introduced around the same time national math performance peaked, instructional emphasis moved from “drill and kill” fluency practice to building conceptual understanding. 

If that sounds fuzzy, well, for many students, it is. Classroom time is increasingly given over to complex discussions of math concepts, while fundamental math fluency is neglected. What good is it to understand triangle congruence defined by rotations, reflections, and translations when you can’t multiple 12 times 12 in your head? 

Grade inflation can ensure students make it to graduation day. But with all these forces shaping their daily instruction and classroom experience, it can’t make them competent and confident in math.

This is a difficult conversation for all of us. But it’s also undeniably necessary. “Given the challenges of the political nature of public education, and the fact that we have so many students far behind, it is essential that we operate in the sphere of truth and grace,” Friez told me. And these, he added, are “two bedrocks of Christianity. We must recognize and acknowledge the truth—but just as God gives us all grace when we didn’t earn it or deserve it, we need to extend that same grace to teachers, students, administrators, parents, extended families, board trustees, and everyone when we discuss truths that might not always be pleasant.”

This is part two of a three-part series on math education in America. Read parts one and three at this links.