Gambino (centre) helping her twin daughters, Giada (left) and Giuliana work on math worksheets as they go through homework from school in their home in Spring, Texas. — AP
ON a breezy morning in South Seattle, United States, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind an elementary school.
One by one, they raced to a table, where they scribbled answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer programme run by the non-profit School Connect Washington, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills lost during the pandemic.
There are 25 students in the programme, and all of them are one to three grades behind.
One 11-year-old boy couldn’t do two-digit subtraction. Thanks to the programme and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up. Now, he says math is challenging, but he likes it.
Other kids haven’t fared so well.
Across the country, schools are scrambling to catch up students in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of missing skills. On average, students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.
Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.
Emeli Ousitu (left) and Diana Chen, both 11, working on division and multiplication of fractions with Roy Chang, executive director for School Connect WA at Dearborn Park International Elementary School in Seattle. — AP
The result: students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare in high school and beyond.
Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, fourth and eighth grade math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card”.
“It’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.
At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes. Her students have shown indifference to understanding her pre-algebra and Algebra I lessons.
And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Basic fractions, for instance, continue to stump many of them, she said.
Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: the September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.
Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021. Leveraging pandemic aid, the district placed math coaches in all of their middle schools.
The coaches help teachers learn new and better ways to teach students.
About one in five public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data. The efforts appear to be paying off: state testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the Jefferson County middle schools.
In Pittsburgh’s school system, which serves a student population that is 53% African American, special education teacher Ebonie Lamb said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups. But she believes those academic gaps can be closed through culturally relevant lessons, and targeting teaching to each student’s skill level.
Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals.
Ultimately, those connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace.
“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.
In Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially word problems. Gambino says helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.
She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information on how students are being taught.
“The more parents understand how they’re being taught,” she said, “the better participant they can be in their child’s learning.” — AP
