03/21/2025
Prior to the pandemic, Texas student performance had stalled. Now it’s worse.
By Karen Olsson
This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Texas Monthly as part of our public-education feature, “What Our Schools Actually Need.”
Is There a Better Solution to Our Public Schools’ Math Problem?
Prior to the pandemic, Texas student performance had stalled. Now it’s worse.
By Karen Olsson
This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Texas Monthly as part of our public-education feature, “What Our Schools Actually Need.”
Humans have been learning math for thousands of years. As long ago as the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian scribes-in-training practiced calculation and geometry by etching numbers into clay tablets. Measuring, accounting, computing totals, divvying up resources: One generation has taught these techniques to the next—and the next and the next—for a dizzyingly long time, a lineage that indirectly connects the scribes of old Babylon to the kids in room 413 at Kealing Middle School, in Austin, where I volunteer in a class on Wednesdays.
Some 1,200 kids fill Kealing’s campus during school hours. Between periods a river of bodies churns through the halls, and shortly after 11:00 a.m., it disgorges around ten kids into Ms. Wally’s room. A mix of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, they arrive bubbly or dragging or brimming with news, drop their bags, and maybe ask Ms. Wally if she has any snacks. All of them scored low on the state’s STAAR math test last spring and this school year were enrolled in an intervention course—“math lab”—that meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and some Fridays to supplement their regular math class.
Across the U.S., student achievement in math had stalled before the pandemic, then declined after schools shut down. While standardized tests may not give a satisfying picture of any one learner, averages and trends show progress across groups, and those indicators were not good. Scores on national math assessments, which had climbed in the aughts and stagnated in the 2010s, dropped to what they were twenty years earlier. There were much bigger drops among kids from lower-income families, who started further behind and then slid more steeply.
The wealth gap is a mile wide at Kealing, which has a magnet program that enrolls richer-skewing kids from all over the city while also serving those from varied backgrounds who live in the attendance zone. (My son was a magnet student here.) Last year just 41 percent of the lower-income students in eighth grade at Kealing passed the STAAR math test, compared with 91 percent of the non–economically disadvantaged. Five years earlier, in April 2019, those numbers were 75 percent of the kids from lower-income households and 92 percent for the others. The gulf between groups, already large before the pandemic, has ballooned.
The kids in Ms. Wally’s room spend around half of the class working on Chromebooks, logged in to an online learning program called MyPath. Early on, many of them didn’t exactly embrace its long march of problems and videos. “I f—ing hate this s—!” I remember one girl yelling as she slammed her backpack on the desk. There are many, many things a kid (or really anybody) might find more appealing than an unending digital math worksheet, and so on a given day I would look on as a girl ate hot sunflower seeds and, licking the spicy salt off her fingers, teased a boy sitting nearby. Another day I asked a student whether he knew what the total length of the boundary of a closed shape was called, and he responded: “It’s called these nuts, Miss.”
Last school year, I tutored Kealing students in math, and I kept hitting the same wall: Someone would grasp a concept but then couldn’t solve the assigned problems because they were missing foundational skills, such as division. So I was heartened to learn that this year the school would devote a class to filling those holes. And then I found myself in a room with an underpaid new teacher trying to implement an unsatisfying tech fix in response to an underfunded mandate from the state legislature—all so as to teach material that humans have been imparting to other humans for actual millennia—and I wondered, were we giving these kids the help they needed?
Back when she was in high school, outside Houston, Andrea Wallingsford was two kinds of nerd—band and math—and friends with pretty much everyone. Now she’s a thirtysomething mom of a ninth-grade baseball player and two much younger girls, married to a pastor, trying to stick with keto. What she lacks in experience she makes up for with a warm and steady presence. If a kid is, for mysterious kid reasons, blowing into a balloon they found someplace or sticking a paper clip into a desk fan, she’ll cock her head and call their name fondly, almost wistfully, before asking them to stop.
In August she had a chance to prepare her classroom ahead of time—repainting, organizing materials, getting the projector to work—but it wasn’t until after the start of classes that she was prepped for the course itself, at a half-day training for MyPath. There, someone from the district referred to additional curriculum materials online, but they weren’t designed for a mixed-grade classroom, and so in her first year of full-time teaching, Ms. Wally was left with just MyPath—and her deep affection for kids—to figure things out mostly on her own.
Adaptive computer programs like MyPath ought to be useful tools, because they can continually assess a student and adjust material accordingly. In practice, though, the adjustments don’t always suit the kid. One girl, an even-keeled seventh grader, would attempt MyPath and then announce, softly, “This is boring.” More than once she struggled with an animated baseball-themed game that required her to enter a multiplication fact before a ball made it from pitcher to a batter. Because she’d never before committed to memory, say, the multiples of six, she couldn’t answer quickly enough and would fail the game.
Wallingsford had her own frustrations. “They need to learn their fast facts,” she would muse while the kids were at lunch. (In the years since she and I were students, grade school math curricula have deemphasized memorizing times tables and the like.) She wanted to track down the students’ regular math teachers so that she could align her warm-up problems to what they were teaching, but getting time with those teachers was easier said than done.
The special education math teacher quit, and for weeks no one with the right credentials even applied for the job. That left some of Ms. Wally’s intervention kids with a substitute in charge of their regular math class. (Elsewhere in the building, magnet students were learning algebra and geometry from an award-winning longtime teacher.)
While the recent lean years for Texas public schools have made it hard to keep enough teachers on campus, it’s been a better time for so-called ed tech companies, which may, perversely enough, benefit from all the belt-tightening. In 2021, as schools were resuming in-person classes, the Legislature required that students who didn’t pass the STAAR be tutored in small groups or placed with an expert teacher. It didn’t allocate extra funds to pay the tutors, though, so this was a tall order, especially for larger districts.
Enter MyPath, which Austin Independent School District licensed for $321,830 this school year. The program includes access to virtual tutors, in theory. But the tutors were only available once the students had performed poorly on multiple lessons, Ms. Wally told me, and mostly relied on cumbersome text chats rather than audio. So the class gave up on them. Without the tutors, MyPath doesn’t strike me as significantly better than the free-to-use Khan Academy website, except in one way: Its interface more closely resembles the STAAR test.
According to its mission statement, Imagine Learning, the company that owns MyPath, “empowers educators to inspire breakthroughs in every student’s unique learning journey.” In a 2023 interview with a business podcast, CEO Jonathan Grayer pitched its products in a different light, seemingly as a way for districts to balance the books. “We are disintermediating, if you will, the teacher-textbook classroom model,” he said. “That allows educators and planners . . . to think about their budgets differently and to think about the relationship of teacher-student ratios differently.”
This gave me pause: Were teachers, then, just the expensive middlemen of the learning economy? I contacted the company and received a response from chief strategy officer Sari Factor, who explained in an email that it was not teachers but the “one-size-fits-all textbook model” that technology would replace. Imagine Learning’s products “free educators from standardized, linear approaches,” she wrote.
It’s hard for me to reconcile this vision of liberated teachers and enhanced learning with Ms. Wally’s room at Kealing. Granted, digital tools like MyPath are still relatively new additions to the classroom. Yet even if Imagine Learning didn’t intend to replace humans, the program was purchased by a district too strapped to hire enough actual tutors to comply with state law. In other words, MyPath’s virtual tutors were probably supposed to substitute for actual ones, although that didn’t pan out.
When it comes to helping students gain ground, a few basic rules apply, according to the education nonprofit TNTP (formerly known as the New Teachers Project). Last year the group published an analysis of 28,000 schools, identifying 5 percent of them as “trajectory-changing schools,” ones where students who tested poorly at the outset were advancing by significantly more than a grade level within a year. The report found common practices: a strong focus on student growth, an emphasis on belonging, and a consistent, coherent approach to curriculum. It sounds simple, but it’s not the norm, says Michael Franco, the vice president for national consulting at TNTP. “So many students who are behind just experience a random set of instructional events,” he told me.
Good planning takes time, itself a scarce resource. I talked to Melanie Pondant, who’d been the principal of Judson STEAM Academy, in Longview, an East Texas middle school TNTP had identified as a trajectory changer. (She has since been promoted.) The practices she described were in line with those in the TNTP report. Crucial to the school’s success, she said, was that roughly every six weeks, each department’s teachers are given a full day to plan instruction together, while aides took over for them in the classroom. But as a charter and as a school that qualifies for Title I federal money, Judson STEAM receives more per-student funding than Kealing, which isn’t allotted enough substitutes to give teachers that kind of extra planning time.
For all the challenges, and in spite of the ambient distractions and low enthusiasm for MyPath, some of the kids in Ms. Wally’s class would, for at least some of the period, work on math problems. Others devoted more time to Spotify or to sneaking their phones out of their pockets. I’ve been impressed with the girl who howled early on about hating it all. In October she would demand that I just tell her the answer to a problem, but a month later she was more willing to think things through.
The girl bored by the baseball fact practice, worryingly, has been losing steam. Some days she mostly listens to music. When I ask her why she’s not doing anything, she complains about the fact-fluency game, though it’s been weeks since she was presented with that task. There’s more going on, including health challenges for family members. She also went to an elementary school with below-average test scores and a large population of poor students.
Middle school can be where the differences between one elementary school and another, one family situation or another, one personality and another, solidify into distinct futures, which is why I’m desperate to get this girl back to doing some online math exercises. But, as she says to me one day, I’m not even a teacher at this school—why should she listen to me?
kommonsentsjane
kommonsentsjane 