Beyond the Plateau on Math Scores

The latest edition of the "nation's report card" shows that math scores failed to improve for the first time since 1990, and you don't have to have great math skills to know that isn't good enough. But how do we move skills forward?

The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported this week that fourth-grade math skills have been flat since 2007, after more than 17 years of steady if limited progress. That's prompted a lot of debate over whether this means the federal No Child Left Behind law has stalled, what this may mean for the standards movement in general, and how we teach math in the public schools.

Those are all critical points. Based on Public Agenda's research, we'd suggest one more factor to think about: parents.

Overall, we've found that parents see standards as "necessary, but not sufficient" in raising student achievement. But we've also found a troubling complacency among parents about math and science achievement, in particular. Parents say they're generally satisfied with the math education their children get, and their concern about math and science achievement declined since the mid-1990s. To be fair, that was during a period when NAEP math scores were rising. But parents certainly didn't share the urgency of business and academic leaders, who worry that the U.S. has a lot further to do, and is in danger of losing its edge in math and science.

Our work also suggests ways of closing that urgency gap. In Kansas City, where our public engagement team has worked with local groups on math and science education, we found it helps to"speak the language of opportunity," pointing out the connection between math skills and getting ahead in life.

The other question the new scores raise is how well teachers are performing when it comes to math. NAEP did an intriguing analysis this time based on the training of math teachers: whether they had an undergraduate degree in math or in education.

According to NAEP's analysis, fourth-graders whose teachers reported having an undergraduate major in education scored higher than those with teachers who reported having a minor or not having a degree in education. Eighth-graders with teachers who had an undergraduate major or minor in math scored higher than students whose teachers did not have a major or minor in math.

Our 2007 Lessons Learned survey of first-year teachers had an interesting counterpoint to this. We asked elementary school teachers if they felt "confident and well-prepared" to teach different subjects. This isn't a measure of how well teachers are actually trained – just where they feel confident and where they feel shaky.

There wasn't much difference in reading and math, with 64 percent saying they were "very confident" teaching reading and writing and 61 percent very confident in math. In math, there wasn't any statistically significant difference between alternative certification teachers and those who were traditionally trained (although the alternative certification teachers had unique concerns in other areas, like not getting enough support overall).

For more elementary school teachers, the weak area turned out to be not math, but science, where only 38 percent said they were very confident.