Nation’s Report Card says less than 1/4 of Texas eighth-graders proficient in math

Fort Worth school district leaders say they’re confident that a pair of new curricula, as well as added support for teachers and students, will help the district bounce back from the sharp declines in math performance outlined in a report released Monday.

U.S. Department of Education officials released the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, on Monday, adding to the growing sources of data showing the dire state of school performance following years of pandemic-disrupted learning. Both in the Fort Worth Independent School District and across Texas, the report showed that students largely avoided serious academic losses in reading, but lost substantial ground in math.

Among the district’s fourth-graders, 23% scored proficient in math this year, down from 29% in 2019, the last year the test was administered. About 11% of eighth-graders who took the test this year were proficient in math, down from 18% in 2019.

Across Texas, 38% of fourth-graders scored proficient in math this year, down from 44% in 2019. In eighth grade, 24% of Texas students scored proficient in math, down from 30% in 2019 and the lowest score since 2000, according to the most recent data.

The Nation’s Report Card is primarily used to compare states to other states, and to analyze performance on a national scale. But more than two dozen school districts participate in a more granular version of the test, allowing districts, including the ones in Dallas and Fort Worth, to compare performance.

Sara Arispe, the Fort Worth district’s associate superintendent of accountability and data quality, said she wasn’t surprised by the trends in the report, which were consistent with what the district has seen in other testing data, including the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR).

“We saw students with less unfinished learning in reading, and bigger, unfinished learning gaps in mathematics, which, obviously, all of our teachers are working very hard to fill in,” she said.

Students showing ‘excellent growth’ after low scores

Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP testing is also used by districts including the one in Fort Worth to help track student progress throughout the year. Those scores have shown growth since last winter, Arispe said.

“We saw some really excellent growth last spring, and we’ve already done our beginning of year MAP testing this year, and we will assess again in January,” she said.

The way students learn to read versus how they learn math could be one of the reasons for the decline in scores, Arispe said — explaining that students are able to find reading materials in books, menus and street signs.

Multiplication tables, adding and subtracting fractions, and other math concepts are not as ubiquitous, she added.

In addition, students learn to read by repeating similar concepts, she said.

“You learn to read, and then you refine your skill and you get better,” Arispe said. “With math, we’re learning new skills all the time. So children start off learning to add then to subtract and multiply and divide. And then we add on some geometry and some algebra. So if you’re not getting that with some support in school, I think that accounts for bigger gaps.”

Despite the growth, there is work to be done, Arispe said.

Particular attention is being paid to Black students, who the report shows are performing far below their white peers on both math and reading assessments.

Only 4% of Black eighth-graders in Fort Worth, taken from a representative sample, scored as proficient on a math test as compared to 32% of white students — and only 6% on reading as compared to 37% of white students.

Those trends reflect the numbers presented at school board meetings, where members called them unacceptable. Tutoring and weekend learning opportunities are being stressed as possible solutions for these groups of students, Arispe said.

While the district has rolled out a number of new initiatives to address low reading scores, it has also begun to restructure how it teaches math, including introducing two new curricula and a new intervention program.

New curricula rethink how math is taught

The district is using Eureka Math in elementary school and Carnegie Learning in middle school for the first time this year, school officials say.

“Teachers have gone through a lot of professional learning on how to appropriately work with students in those new curriculum,” Arispe said. “We’re also adding some supplemental supports, much like we did in reading, where students have additional opportunity to practice in an online program, in addition to their teacher-led instruction for mathematics.”

The new approach puts a greater emphasis on conceptual learning and problem solving over memorization, Marcey Sorensen, the district’s chief academic officer, said in a video introducing the new curriculum.

“Not all math is equal, and it’s more than just numbers,” Sorensen said. “Eureka K-5 is conceptual … students learn key concepts that apply to any number of problems.”

The new approach aligns with a redesign of the state standardized test, which includes more conceptual problems than those in the past, Sorensen said in the video.

Carnegie, the curriculum for 6-8 graders, builds on that approach, while adding more advanced activities.

“Collaborative activities will help them build important social skills in independent learning, activities that will help them get the one-on-one supports that they need,” she said.

In addition to the two new curricula, which rolled out this year along with a new reading curriculum, teachers have an intervention tool called MATHia that “gives … teachers insight into their students’ progress and their skill gaps so that they can make timely adjustments.”

Research nationwide is showing that recovery from learning losses accrued during the COVID-19 pandemic will take years to recover from, Arispe said.

“I think that as an educator, that doesn’t sound like something that we can accept,” she said. “And so we are hoping to accelerate that, and we’re pleased to see that we are starting to cover some of that ground and reading, we still have a long way to go.”

Local results reflect statewide trends

Jonathan Feinstein, the nonprofit Education Trust’s state director for Texas, said the results reinforce much of what education leaders and policymakers in the state already knew from STAAR results: Texas students avoided the worst damage in reading, but have considerable ground to make up in math. Monday’s report gives the state an additional data point to show how students are doing and how educational leaders need to help them recover, he said.

“It’s going to take continued focus investment in strategies to help recover, and to continue to hopefully close some of those disparities that existed and worsened during the pandemic,” Feinstein said.

Part of the reason for the stronger results in reading could be a statewide focus on literacy that began before the pandemic, Feinstein said. In May 2019, Texas lawmakers passed House Bill 3, a sweeping overhaul of the state’s education finance system. The bill included a requirement that all teachers from kindergarten through third grade, as well as principals of those grades, attend special training on the science of teaching reading.

But the state hasn’t seen a similar focus on math instruction. Education researchers also say that most parents are more comfortable supporting their children’s reading instruction than they are in math, which could partly explain why students nationwide lost more ground in math than reading during school shutdowns.

Feinstein noted that, although an achievement gap persists between Black students and their peers in Texas, the state’s Black students came out ahead of those in any other state in math in both fourth and eighth grades. Although the state still has much work to do to correct the disparity, he noted that the achievement gap between Black and white students is beginning to narrow. What’s worrisome, though, is that similar achievement gaps between Hispanic students and white students, as well as low-income students and more affluent students, haven’t budged.

In the years to come, Feinstein said, the state will need to continue to invest in successful programs if it hopes to close those gaps. Among other things, the state should continue to broaden access to high-quality early childhood education, he said. Education researchers and advocates say that high-quality pre-K programs can help level the playing field between economically disadvantaged students and their peers.