Sean Salai | April 10, 2025
(The Washington Times) — Two recent studies show that K-12 teachers’ nagging ignorance of fundamentals has contributed to historic declines in U.S. math performance.
The National Council on Teacher Quality Tuesday that just 13% of the 838 elementary teacher training programs it examined nationwide devoted enough time to “fundamental math content topics” such as numbers, operations, algebraic thinking, geometry, measurement, data analysis and probability. The nation has just over 1,600 colleges of education.
The teachers advocacy group found that the average undergraduate teaching program dedicated 85 of 150 instructional course hours to mathematics content, 20 hours short of what experts recommend. The remaining coursework covered the latest teaching theories.
“We recommend that programs offer math courses specifically designed for teachers, focusing on the content most relevant to elementary instruction,” council President Heather Peske told The Washington Times.
Ms. Peske’s group pointed to federal data released in January that found a quarter of fourth-graders who took the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024 lacked basic math skills. Their scores lagged pre-pandemic levels.
The council’s report called those numbers “particularly troubling given that students with higher math scores tend to earn higher incomes as adults” and that early math scores predict success in science programs and future earnings “better than reading scores.”
The report is the second in recent weeks to flag inadequate teacher preparation as a factor in declining U.S. test scores.
In a survey released last month, the nonprofit Rand Corp. found that more than half of math teachers in the nation’s four most populous states — California, Florida, New York and Texas — reported spending two hours or less each month on professional learning to sharpen their math knowledge.
School district leaders and principals who participated in the survey during the 2023-2024 academic year said their top priority was realigning professional training with math curriculum resources.
Elizabeth D. Steiner, an education policy researcher at Rand, said the findings confirm a growing disconnect between state textbook standards and what math teachers learn in college education programs.
“Best practices in teacher professional learning suggest that it should focus on the specific materials teachers are using, provide specific guidance on how to enact pedagogy using those materials, involve collaboration or collective participation, and be responsive to teachers’ needs,” Ms. Steiner said in an email.
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, a network of undergraduate education programs, declined to comment on the reports.
Several education professors and industry insiders said a combination of politics and low pay has made it harder for U.S. colleges to recruit and train excellent math teachers.
Some said better-paying job prospects in finance and technology have made it hard for education to attract highly qualified mathematicians.
“And that’s because we still don’t regard teachers as engaging in a serious intellectual activity,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Others noted a rising tide of woke pedagogy in education programs since most states adopted a Common Core of math requirements in the 2010s. They singled out social-emotional learning, which emphasizes how students feel about struggling in math, as a key trend in recent years.
“My thoughts are we got away from effective teaching practices when we decided that social and emotional learning took the front seat of learning,” said Courtney Melgares, an algebra, geometry and pre-calculus teacher at Central Valley High School in Grand Junction, Colorado.
The Colorado Measures of Academic Success reported that only 29% of eighth-grade students met or exceeded state math expectations in 2023.
Andrea Haitz, president of the Mesa County Valley School District 51 Board of Education, said math scores fell after Colorado implemented Common Core in 2010.
Although intended to deepen learning, critics have accused Common Core of forcing left-leaning social theories into math classrooms.
“In many teacher prep programs today, there is an overemphasis on pedagogy, equity frameworks and conceptual understanding at the expense of fluency and direct instruction,” Ms. Haitz said. “These shifts have distracted teachers and students from mastering foundational mathematical skills through time-tested, classical methods.”
Pandemic losses
Multiple reports show that U.S. math students fell two years behind their grade levels as schools switched to virtual learning during the COVID-19 crisis.
Although school districts received billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief money, they have still not caught up.
Gema Zamarro, a professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas, cited research showing “limited positive results” from the tens of billions of dollars U.S. school systems spend annually on professional development alone.
As pandemic relief has dried up, some states have pivoted from spending more money on the problem to strengthening teacher certification requirements. Idaho, Louisiana and Maryland recently overhauled their mathematics policies to require curriculum-aligned teacher training.
In Maryland, where most eighth-graders cannot meet the state’s math requirements, officials announced plans last month to ask all teachers in the subject to take a new course to renew their licenses.
Robert Richardson, coordinator of mathematics for the Maryland State Department of Education, said the approach builds on the efforts of Idaho and Louisiana to improve student outcomes without spending more.
“There’s no clear evidence that it costs more time or money to train effective math teachers,” Mr. Richardson said. “What is needed is intentionality: ensuring preparation programs and professional learning experiences are designed to build both deep content understanding and effective instructional practice.”
In Tuesday’s report, the National Council on Teacher Quality awarded an A or A+ grade for meeting minimum math coursework requirements to only 16% of the undergraduate education programs it surveyed.
The council gave 22% of undergraduate programs an F for their math teacher preparation.
On the positive side, the report upgraded Regent University from a D to an A+ after the private Virginia school introduced two new courses to fill math content gaps in its education program.
It praised the public University of Montana for consistently earning A+ grades for graduate and undergraduate programs that require “rigorous math content courses as prerequisites to pedagogical training.”
Sheri Few, president of the conservative U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said these findings confirm that Common Core has weakened rather than improved U.S. math education from kindergarten through college.
“Just like basketball, advanced math requires strong fundamentals, usually taught in elementary school,” Ms. Few said. “Until this problem is fixed, it is unlikely that government schools will improve student learning.”
Conservatives have long attacked Common Core for weakening academic standards. Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the right-leaning Goldwater Institute, said schools should refocus on “rich subject matter training rather than ideological indoctrination.”
“Our public educational institutions have not only prioritized artificial credentialing over subject matter expertise but have bloated their non-teaching payrolls and DEI-based programming at the expense of rigorous academic quality,” Mr. Beienburg said.
