As of late last year, 40 states and DC had passed “science of reading” laws setting requirements around evidence-based requirements for teaching kids how to read.
But what about math? There’s a burgeoning movement trying to establish an equivalent “science of math,” but the systems and supports around math instruction are far less developed. To understand more about what’s missing on the math side, I spoke with Arun Ramanathan, the CEO of PowerMyLearning. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Chad Aldeman: Before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit about PowerMyLearning and how you got interested in this work?
Arun Ramanathan: What really excited me about PowerMyLearning was the focus on early grades math preK-5. There are not many organizations that focus on math in the early grades, and we know from the research that a student’s success in early grades math is predictive of their success in higher-level math, just like their success in early literacy is predictive of their reading and literacy moving forward.
Aldeman: Let’s talk about early math versus early literacy investments. How should we think about the differences here of math versus reading?
Ramanathan: This is something I’ve noticed for quite some time. I started my career as an elementary educator, and my wife is an elementary educator, so I’m around elementary educators all the time. And the essential thing that hasn’t changed since I started teaching 25 years ago is that the predominant focus in the early grades is literacy.
Even starting in pre-k we focus on teaching kids to read. The focus is not on numeracy. And in fact, numeracy takes up very little time and attention in comparison to literacy along multiple dimensions, whether it’s teacher preparation, the amount of time spent in the classroom, or the amount of professional learning that teachers get. As a result, it’s not surprising that math scores on state assessments tend to lag reading scores by 10 to 15 points. A lot of it is simply a lack of attention to early numeracy.
Aldeman: There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start from the state level. What are the state level policies and how are they different on reading and literacy versus math?
Ramanathan: Well, think about it this way: We’ve been in a literacy moment around the “science of reading” for the last 10 years or so, right? But the truth is, we were in a literacy moment even before that movement started, especially in the elementary grades. The focus of elementary teachers is on teaching reading, and the way that schools are staffed is on teaching reading.
The science of reading shift has really started from the state level, with Mississippi, Florida, and Colorado, and then spreading other states. Now 40+ states have adopted science of reading legislation at this point. All of that focus was on changing reading methodologies and pedagogy in the early grades.
And states have staffed up to implement those bills. You look at Colorado, there’s a whole department of literacy that reports to the state superintendent. If you look at other states, when they pass literacy legislation, they often create research and implementation centers. The implementation of high-quality instructional materials has now expanded, but it started with literacy. In math, we haven’t had a similar conversation, let alone legislation or implementation supports.
Aldeman: So how do we change the conversation? What sort of investments would you recommend? You can either start at the state or the district level.
Ramanathan: What I started hearing from the state advocates, the ones with the longest tenured literacy legislation, was that there was a shift around two to three years ago to thinking more about math. And in some ways it was kind of, “Hey, we fixed literacy, maybe we should start thinking about math!”
The Alabama Numeracy Act, for one, really helped kick this off. And now a handful of states either have or are proposing early numeracy legislation. And there are a lot of elements in the literacy legislation that correspond to math. There are requirements around screeners, around pedagogy for teachers and teacher professional learning. And I think all of that is fantastic, because once the state actually takes an interest and a focus in a topic, school districts tend to respond.
However, what we’re trying to do on the math side doesn’t perfectly correspond to the literacy side. On the reading side, you’re shifting from a pedagogy like three-cueing and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study to the science of reading.
There isn’t anything similar on the math side. That’s a bit of an advantage, because there isn’t as much fighting on the math side. But there still needs to be funding to support the adoption of tier-one math materials and tier-two and tier-three interventions. There needs to be support for professional learning for teachers and more investments in research on how to provide effective math instruction.
The biggest issue once you get down to the district and the school level is that elementary school staffing is still heavily tilted toward reading. They might have a reading specialist, an English Language Development specialist. Schools don’t have anything like that in math. They should be thinking of the same type of support structures in mathematics, including professional learning for classroom teachers and specialists to work with particular groups of students that need extra math support.
Aldeman: How would this look differently inside of a school?
Ramanathan: Well, the baseline is to look at the amount of time and the quality of the instructional materials.
On time, there are very few places that have instructional minutes requirements in math, compared to a lot of states having instructional minutes requirements in reading. I don’t know if you need to get that bureaucratic, but you would want to see a similar amount of time that you’re spending in early math versus what you’re spending on reading.
You would also want to see a high-quality curriculum, a tier-one curriculum adopted on the math side that’s equivalent in quality, to the tier-one curriculum that’s adopted on the reading side.
Then you would want to see supports for teachers. It’s very common for a school to have a literacy specialist or a literacy coach, but it’s less common to see a similar type of staffing structure on the math side in the early grades.
Then you’d start thinking about what students need. Typically on the literacy side, a specialist may push into the classroom to work with small groups of students who are struggling or just need more support, like for English Learners. In math, you would want to think about a similar structure for how to support students who are falling behind, or who may need additional intensive supports.
And then the last thing is you would want regular assessments that allow you to evaluate student progress. But the screening assessments in math just aren’t there at the same level and the same quality that there is on the literacy side. And even if they were, those are not incorporated into [Response to Intervention] and [Multi-Tiered System of Support] structures that schools have on the literacy side.
I know that’s a lot, but all of these elements need to be in place on the math side.
Aldeman: That’s a helpful framework around time, materials, tools, and teacher supports. Is there anything else that readers should think about in the math space?
Ramanathan: One more. Most people don’t think about math instruction until you get to the secondary level. A lot of folks, from funders to policymakers, only pay attention to math starting with algebra. That is a very significant problem, because students can’t actually be successful in algebra unless they handle preK-5 first.
There is no silver bullet for this. Simply adopting high-quality tier-one materials isn’t going to be enough to change outcomes for kids. And I think that misconception, that you can just do one thing instead of trying to figure out this whole array of supports, will prevent schools from successfully improving higher-level math outcomes. And my big hope is that people will start taking the full set of math systems and supports more seriously.
