The United States is navigating a math crisis. In 2024, only 39% of fourth graders and 28% of eighth graders were proficient in math on the NAEP. While these figures are influenced by multiple socioeconomic and institutional factors, they highlight a persistent tension in American classrooms: a tendency to prioritize speed and correctness over deep conceptual understanding. After decades of reform churn—from rote memorization to the Math Wars—today’s math education landscape requires a coherent, system-wide strategy to create a sustainable path forward.
In my work with district leaders, I’ve found that coherence involves much more than aligning pacing guides or purchasing a new curriculum. It also often involves a gap between the way we teach and the way a student sees themselves as a mathematical thinker. To move forward, we must ensure our instructional design prioritizes a student’s math identity as much as their test scores.
The Invisible Barrier: One Reason Why Math Gaps Persist
We hold fundamentally different expectations for how children acquire literacy versus how they master math. In literacy, adults rarely admit to struggling with reading. And we try to mitigate any potential struggle through early engagement, from singing to bedtime stories. Math, however, is treated differently. When a child struggles with math, the response is often that it is okay because “some people just aren’t math people.” This sends an incredibly damaging message: that math ability is a fixed trait, rather than something that can be built through effective instruction and application opportunities. If we want to change student outcomes, we must start by shifting the mindsets of the adults.
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