Math anxiety isn’t just about feeling nervous before a math test. It’s been well-known for decades that students who are anxious about math tend to do worse on math tests and in math classes.
But recently, some of us who research math anxiety have started to realize that we may have overlooked a simple yet important reason why students who are anxious about math underperform: They don’t like doing math, and as a result, they don’t do enough of it.
We found that highly math-anxious students went on to perform worse not just in math classes, but also in STEM classes more broadly. This means that math anxiety is not something that only math teachers need to care about — science, technology and engineering educators need to have math anxiety on their radar, too.
We also found that students who were anxious about math tended to avoid taking STEM classes altogether if they could. They would get their math and science general education credits out of the way early on in college and never look at another STEM class again. So not only is math anxiety affecting how well students do when they step into a STEM classroom, it makes it less likely that they’ll step into that classroom in the first place.
This means that math anxiety is causing many students to self-sort out of the STEM career pipeline early, closing off career paths that would likely be fulfilling (and lucrative).
Our study’s third major finding was the most surprising. When it came to predicting how well students would do in STEM classes, math anxiety mattered even more than math ability. Our results showed that if you were a freshman in college and you wanted to do well in your STEM classes, you would likely be better off reducing your math anxiety than improving your math ability.
We wondered: How could that be? How could math anxiety — how you feel about math — matter more for your academic performance than how good you are at it? Our best guess: avoidance.
If something makes you anxious, you tend to avoid doing it if you can. Both in our research and in that of other researchers, there’s been a growing understanding that in addition to its other effects, math anxiety means that you’ll do your very best to engage with math as little as possible in situations where you can’t avoid it entirely.
In some of our other work, we found that math-anxious students were less interested in doing everyday activities precisely to the degree that they thought those activities involved math. The more a math-anxious student thought an activity involved math, the less they wanted to do it.
If math anxiety is causing students to consistently avoid spending time and effort on their classes that involve math, this would explain why their STEM grades suffer.
What does all of this mean for educators? Teachers need to be aware that students who are anxious about math are less likely to engage with math during class, and they’re less likely to put in the effort to study effectively. All of this avoidance means missed opportunities for practice, and that may be the key reason why many math-anxious students struggle not only in math class, but also in science and engineering classes that require some math.
Giving students clear structure on how they should be studying (trying lots of practice problems) and how often they should be studying (spaced out over multiple days, not just the night before a test) was effective at helping students overcome their math anxiety and perform better.
Especially heartening was the fact that the effects seen during the study persisted in semesters beyond the intervention; these students tended to make use of the new skills into the future.
Math anxiety researchers will continue to explore new ways to help math-anxious students fight their math-avoidant proclivities. In the meantime, educators should do what they can to help their students struggling with math anxiety overcome this avoidance tendency — it could be one of the most powerful ways a math teacher can help shape their students’ futures.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers.
Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields. The number of activegrants by the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within the education directorate was slashed almost in half, from 902 research grants to 461.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Combined with two earlier rounds of NSF cuts at in April, education now accounts for more than half of the nearly 1,400 terminated grants and almost three-quarters of their $1 billion value. Those dollars will no longer flow to universities and research organizations.
Cuts to STEM education dominate NSF grant terminations
… and nearly three-quarters of their $1 billion value are in education
Data source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025. Charts by Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report
The cuts are being felt across the nation. Grant Watch also created a map of the United States, showing that both red and blue states are losing federal research dollars.
Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025
It remains unclear exactly how NSF is choosing which grants to cancel and exactly who is making the decisions. Weekly waves of cuts began after the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE entered NSF headquarters in mid April. Only 40 percent of the terminated grants were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled last year by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” Sixty percent were not on the Cruz list.
Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025
Other NSF cuts also affect education. Earlier this year, NSF cut in half the number of new students that it would support through graduate school from 2,000 to 1,000. Universities are bracing to hear this summer if NSF will continue to support graduate students who are already a part of its graduate research fellowship program.
NSF watchers were still compiling a list of the research grants that were terminated on May 9, the date of the most recent fourth round of research cuts. It was unclear if any research grants to promote equity in STEM education remained active.
The Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, a unit of the Education Directorate, was “sunset,” according to a May 9 email sent to NSF employees and obtained by the Hechinger Report, and all of its employees were fired. According to the email, this “reduction in force” is slated to be completed by July 12. However, later on May 9, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration from implementing its “reduction in force” firings of federal employees at the NSF and 19 other agencies.
An initial hearing for a group of three legal cases by education researchers against the Department of Education is scheduled for May 16. At the hearing, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments over whether the court should temporarily restore terminated research studies and data collections and bring back fired Education Department employees while it considers whether the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority.
A first hearing scheduled for May 9 was postponed. At the May 16 hearing, the court will hear two similar motions from two different cases: one filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and the other filed by National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). A third suit by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) was filed in federal court in Maryland and will not be part of the May 16 hearing.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news.
The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF’s total annual budget of $9 billion.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Neither the NSF nor the Trump administration has provided a list of the canceled grants. Garisto told me that he obtained a list from an informal group of NSF employees who cobbled it together themselves. That list was subsequently posted on Grant Watch, a new project to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. Garisto has been working with outside researchers at Grant Watch and elsewhere to document the research dollars that are affected and analyze the list for patterns.
“For NSF, we see that the STEM education directorate has been absolutely pummeled,” Noam Ross, a computational disease ecologist and one of the Grant Watch researchers, posted on Bluesky.
Terminated grants fall heavily upon STEM Education
Graphic by Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist working for Nature
Many, but not all, of the canceled research projects at NSF were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
Ross at Grant Watch analyzed the titles and abstracts or summaries of the terminated projects and discovered that “Black” was the most frequent word among them. Other common words were “climate,” “student,” “network,” “justice,” “identity,” “teacher,” and “undergraduate.”
Frequent words in the titles and summaries of terminated NSF research projects
Word cloud of the most frequent terms from the titles and abstracts of terminated grants, with word size proportional to frequency. Purple is the most frequent, followed by orange and green. Source: Noam Ross, Grant Watch
At least two of the terminated research studies focused on improving artificial intelligence education, which President Donald Trump promised to promote in an April 23 executive order,“Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth.”
“There is something especially offensive about this EO from April 23 about the need for AI education… Given the termination of my grant on exactly this topic on April 26,” said Danaé Metaxa in a post on Bluesky that has since been deleted. Metaxa, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing a curriculum on how to teach AI digital literacy skills by having students build and audit generative AI models.
Another canceled grant involved college students creating educational content about AI for social media to see if that content would improve AI literacy and the ability to detect misinformation. The lead researcher, Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was almost midway through her two-year grant of less than $270,000. “There is not a DEI aspect of this work,” said Fiesler. “My best guess is that the reason it was flagged was the word ‘misinformation.’”
Confusion surrounded the cuts. Bob Russell, a former NSF project officer who retired in 2024, said some NSF project officers were initially unaware that the grants they oversee had been canceled. Instead, university officials who oversee research were told, and those officials notified researchers at their institutions. Researchers then contacted their project officers. One researcher told me that the termination notice states that researchers may not appeal the decision, an administrative process that is ordinarily available to researchers who feel that NSF has made an unfair or incorrect decision.
Some of the affected researchers were attending the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Denver on April 26 when more than 600 grants were cut. Some scholars found out by text that their studies had been terminated. Normally festive evening receptions were grim. “It was like a wake,” said one researcher.
The Trump administration wants to slash NSF’s budget and headcount in half, according to Russell. Many researchers expect more cuts ahead.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
DRESDEN, Tenn. — In early February, seventh grade math teacher Jamie Gallimore tried something new: She watched herself teach class. The idea had come from Ed Baker, district math coach at Tennessee’s Weakley County Schools. Baker set up an iPad on a cabinet in Gallimore’s classroom at Martin Middle School and hit record.
Gallimore watched the videos twice, and she and Baker ran through them together. They dissected the questions she asked during the lesson, looked at how much time she took to work through problems and analyzed how she’d moved around the room. As a veteran teacher, she did a lot right — but the meeting with Baker also made her change a few things.
Instead of throwing out questions to the whole class, now Gallimore more often calls on individuals. When a student answers, she might turn to the other side of the room and ask, “What did they just say?” The tactics, she said, have helped keep her students engaged.
Coaching is one strategy Weakley administrators and teachers credit with boosting middle school math scores after they crashed during the pandemic. Weakley’s third through eighth graders are more than half a grade ahead of where they were at the same time in 2022 and about a third of a grade ahead of 2019, according to a national study of academic recovery released in February. In three of the district’s four middle schools, the percentage of students meeting grade-level expectations on Tennessee’s standardized math test, including among economically disadvantaged students, rose in 2024 above pre-pandemic levels.
Teacher Jamie Gallimore uses a few new tactics in her seventh grade math classroom at Martin Middle School after working with district math coach Ed Baker. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report
Amid a grim landscape nationwide for middle school math, Tennessee fared better than most states. In two districts in the state that bucked the national trend — Weakley and the Putnam County School District — educators point to instructional coaches, a dramatic increase in class time devoted to math and teachers systematically using student performance data to inform their teaching and push students to improve.
How students do in middle school can predict how they do in life. Higher achievement in eighth grade math is associated with a higher income, more education later and with declines in teen motherhood and incarceration and arrest rates, a 2022 study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research found. In addition, middle school grades and attendance are the best indicators of how a student will do in high school and whether they’re ready for college at the end of high school, a 2014 study found.
Nationally, the news coming in shows trouble ahead: In January, for example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, showed that average eighth grade scores in 2024 were below those of 2019 and didn’t budge from 2022, when scores were the lowest in more than 20 years. Worse, the gaps between high and low achievers widened.
Tennessee, though, was one of five jurisdictions where the percentage of eighth graders scoring proficient in math — meaning they were able to handle challenging tasks like calculating square roots, areas and volumes — increased from 2022 to 2024. That reflects a longer-term trend: Since 2011, Tennessee has climbed from the 45th-ranked state to the 19th for average eighth grade math scores.
But researchers have struggled to determine which interventions were most effective in helping students recover. A June 2024 study that looked at different strategies came to no conclusion because the strategies weren’t comparable across districts, said Dan Goldhaber of the nonprofit American Institutes for Research. In March, the Trump administration eliminated nearly all staff at the Department of Education unit that runs the Nation’s Report Card, which educators and researchers worry could make it even harder to compare how students in different states and districts perform and draw lessons about what works.
In the absence of systematic research, attention has turned to states like Tennessee and districts like Weakley and Putnam where kids have climbed out of an academic hole. At Martin Middle School, the percentage of students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam cratered during the pandemic, falling from 40 percent in 2019 to 24 percent in 2022. But in 2024 that number jumped to 43 percent.
Weakley County sits in the state’s northwest corner, its flat farmland populated with small towns of mostly modest ranch homes. The county is poorer than most in the country, with a median household income under $50,000.
When the first federal Covid relief money arrived in early 2020, the district had to choose what to prioritize. Weakley focused on hiring staff who could help kids recover lost learning — instructional coaches for each school to focus on teaching strategies, plus subject-area coaches like Baker, whose role the district created in 2021. “Bottom line, we decided people over things,” said school system Director Jeff Cupples.
Research indicates that coaching can make a big difference in student outcomes. A 2018 study summarizing the results of 60 prior studies found that coaching accelerated student learning by the equivalent of four to six months, according to Brown University associate professor Matthew Kraft, who led the research team. In a survey of Tennessee school districts last year, 80 of 118 that responded said they employ math coaches.
Two Tennessee school districts credit the systematic use of student achievement data for helping their middle schoolers rebound from the pandemic-era slide in middle-school math scores. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report
In 2022, Martin Middle made another big change, nearly doubling the time kids spend in math class. In place of a single 50-minute class are two 45-minute periods that the school calls “core” and “encore,” with the encore session meant to solidify what students get in the first.
On an overcast March day, Becky Mullins, a longtime math and science teacher who’s also assistant principal, helped sixth graders in her encore class calculate area and volume. On a screen at the front of the classroom, she pulled up problems many of them had trouble with in their core class taught by math teacher Drew Love. One asked them to calculate how many cubes of a certain volume would fit inside a larger prism. “What strategy have you learned from Mr. Love on how to solve this problem?” she asked.
When a student in the back named Charlie raised his hand and said he was stuck, Mullins pulled up a chair beside him. They worked through the procedure together, and after a few minutes he solved it. Mullins said helping students individually in class works far better than assigning them homework. “You don’t know what they’re dealing with at home,” she said.
Martin Middle seventh grader Emma Rhodes, 12, said individual help in her sixth grade encore class last year helped her through fractions. Her encore teacher was “very hands on,” said Rhodes. “It helps me most when teachers are one on one.”
Yet studies of double-dose math show mixed results. One in 2013 found a double block of algebra substantially improved the math performance of ninth graders. Another a year later concluded that struggling sixth graders who received a double block of math had higher test scores in the short term but that those gains mostly disappeared when they returned to a single block.
The share of Martin Middle School students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than before the pandemic. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report
Weakley and Putnam County staff also credit the systematic use of student achievement data for helping their middle schoolers rebound. Tennessee was a pioneer in the use of academic data in the early 1990s, devising a system that compiles fine-grained details on individual student achievement and growth based on state test results. Both Weakley and Putnam teachers use that data to pinpoint which skills they need to review with which students and to keep kids motivated.
A four-hour drive east of Weakley in Putnam County on a day in early March, seventh grade math teacher Brooke Nunn was reviewing problems students had struggled with. Taped to the wall of her classroom was a printout of her students’ scores on each section of a recent test in preparation for the Tennessee state exam in April. One portion of that exam requires students to work without calculators. “This non-calculator portion killed them, so they’re doing it again,” Nunn said of the exercises they’re working on — adding and subtracting negatives and positives, decimals and fractions.
The data on her wall drove the lesson and the choice of which students to have in the room at Prescott South Middle School, where she teaches. Starting about 10 years ago, the district began requiring 90 minutes of math a day, split into two parts. In the second half, teachers pull out students in groups for instruction on specific skills based on where the data shows they need help.
Teachers also share this data with students. In a classroom down the hall, after a review lesson, fellow seventh grade math teacher Sierra Smith has students fill out a colorful graphic showing which questions they got and which they missed on their most recent review ahead of the state test. Since Covid, apathy has been a challenge, district math coach Jessica Childers said. But having kids track their own data has helped. “Kids want to perform,” she said, and many thrive on trying to best their past performance.
The district is laser focused on the state tests. It created Childers’ math coach role in 2019 with district funds and later other instructional coach jobs using federal pandemic relief money. Much of Childers’ job revolves around helping teachers closely align their instruction with the state middle school math standards, she said. “I know that sounds like teaching to the test, but the test tests the standards,” said Childers.
Something in what the district is doing is working. It’s not well off: The share of its families in poverty is 4 percent higher than the national average. But at all six district middle schools, the percentage of students meeting expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than in 2019, and at all six the percentage was above the state average.
Goldhaber, the AIR researcher, speculated that the focus on testing might help explain the rebound in Tennessee. “States have very different orientations around standards, accountability and the degree to which we ought to be focused on test scores,” he said. “I do believe test scores matter.”
The share of Martin Middle School students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than before the pandemic. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report
If Trump administration layoffs hamstring the ability to compare performance across states, successful strategies like those in the two districts might not spread. Weakley and Putnam have taken steps to ensure the practices they’ve introduced persist regardless of what happens at the federal level. Most of the federal Covid relief dollars that paid for academic coaches in both districts stopped flowing in January, but both have rolled money for coaches into their budgets. They also say double blocks of math will continue.
Cupples, the Weakley superintendent, worries about the effect of any additional federal cuts — without federal funds, the district would lose 90 positions and 10 percent of its budget. It would be “chaos, doom, despair,” he said, laughing. “But one thing I’ve learned about educators — as one myself and working with them — we overcome daily,” he said.
“It’s just what we do.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He knew that he needed to have a plan for when he got out.
“Once I am back in New York City, once I am back in the economy, how will I be marketable?” he said. “For me, math was that pathway.”
In 2015, Maxis completed a bachelor’s degree in math through the Bard Prison Initiative, an accredited college-in-prison program. He wrote his senior project about how to use game theory to advance health care equity, after observing the disjointed care his mom received when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She’s now recovered.)
When he was released in 2018, Maxis immediately applied for a master’s program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He graduated and now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He helped guide the hospital’s response to Covid.
Maxis is one of many people I’ve spoken to in recent years while reporting on the role that learning math can play in the lives of those who are incarcerated. Math literacy often contributes to economic success: A 2021 study of more than 5,500 adults found that participants made $4,062 more per year for each correct answer on an eight-question math test.
While there don’t appear to be any studies specifically on the effect of math education for people in prison, a pile of research shows that prison education programs lower recidivism rates among participants and increase their chances of employment after they’re released.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
Plus, math — and education in general — can be empowering. A 2022 study found that women in prison education programs reported higher self-esteem, a greater sense of belonging and more hope for the future than women who had never been incarcerated and had not completed post-secondary education.
Yet many people who enter prison have limited math skills and have had poor relationships with math in school. More than half (52 percent) of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons lack basic numeracy skills, such as the ability to do multiplication with larger numbers, long division or interpret simple graphs, according to the most recent numbers from the National Center for Educational Statistics. The absence of these basic skills is even more pronounced among Black and Hispanic people in prison, who make up more than half of those incarcerated in federal prisons.
In my reporting, I discovered that there are few programs offering math instruction in prison, and those that do exist typically include few participants. Bard’s highly competitive program, for example, is supported primarily through private donations, and is limited to seven of New York’s 42 prisons. The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release.
Alyssa Knight, executive director of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, which she co-founded while incarcerated, said that for years, educational opportunities in prison were created primarily by people who were incarcerated, who wrote to professors and educators to ask if they might send materials or teach inside the prison. But public recognition of the value of prison education, including math, is rising, and the Pell Grant expansion and state-level legislationhave made it easier for colleges to set up programs for people serving time. Now, Knight said, “Colleges are seeking prisons.”
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Jeffrey Abramowitz understands firsthand how math can help someone after prison. After completing a five-year stint in a federal prison, his first post-prison job was teaching math to adults who were preparing to take the GED exam.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and Abramowitz is now the CEO of The Petey Greene Program, an organization that provides one-on-one tutoring, educational supports and programs in reading, writing and now math, to help people in prison and who have left prison receive the necessary education requirements for a high school diploma, college acceptance or career credentials.
The average Petey Greene student’s math skills are at a fourth- or fifth-grade level, according to Abramowitz, which is in line with the average for “justice-impacted” learners; the students tend to struggle with basic math such as addition and multiplication.
“You can’t be successful within most industries without being able to read, write and do basic math,” Abramowitz said. “We’re starting to see more blended programs that help people find a career pathway when they come home — and the center of all this is math and reading.”
Abramowitz and his team noticed this lack of math skills particularly among students in vocational training programs, such as carpentry, heating and cooling and commercial driving. To qualify to work in these fields, these students often need to pass a licensing test, requiring math and reading knowledge.
The nonprofit offers “integrated education training” to help students learn the relevant math for their professions. For instance, a carpentry teacher will teach students how to use a saw in or near a classroom where a math teacher explains fractions and how they relate to the measurements needed to cut a piece of wood.
“They may be able to do the task fine, but they can’t pass the test because they don’t know the math,” Abramowitz said.
Math helped Paul Morton after he left prison, he told me. When he began his 10.5 years in prison, he only could do GED-level math. After coming across an introductory physics book in the third year of his time in prison, he realized he didn’t have the math skills needed for the science described in it.
He asked his family to send him math textbooks and, over the seven years until his release, taught himself algebra and calculus.
The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release. Credit: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images
“I relentlessly spent six hours on one problem one day,” he said. “I was determined to do it, to get it right.”
I met Morton through the organization the Prison Mathematics Project, which helped him develop his math knowledge inside prison by connecting him with an outside mathematician. After his release from a New York prison in 2023, he moved to Rochester, New York, and is hoping to take the actuarial exam, which requires a lot of math. He continues to study differential equations on his own.
The Prison Mathematics Project delivers math materials and programs to people in prison, and connects them with mathematicians as mentors. (It also brings math professors, educators and enthusiasts to meet program participants through “Pi Day” events; I attended one such event in 2023 when I produced a podcast episode about the program, and the organization paid for my travel and accommodations.)
The organization was started in 2015 by Christopher Havens, who was then incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Havens’ interest in math puzzles, and then in algebra, calculus and other areas of mathematics, was ignited early in his 25-year- term when a prison volunteer slid some sudoku puzzles under his door.
“I had noticed all these changes happening inside of me,” Havens told me. “My whole life, I was searching for that beauty through drugs and social acceptance … When I found real beauty [in math], it got me to practice introspection.”
As he fell in love with math, he started corresponding with mathematicians to help him solve problems, and talking to other men at the prison to get them interested too. He created a network of math resources for people in prisons, which became the Prison Mathematics Project.
The group’s website says it helps people in prison use math to help with “rebuilding their lives both during and after their incarceration.”
But Ben Jeffers, its executive director, has noticed that the message doesn’t connect with everyone in prison. Among the 299 Prison Mathematics Project participants on whom the program has data, the majority — 56 percent — are white, he told me, while 25 percent are Black, 10 percent are Hispanic, 2 percent are Asian and 6 percent are another race or identity. Ninety-three percent of project participants are male.
Yet just 30 percent of the U.S. prison population is white, while 35 percent of those incarcerated are Black, 31 percent are Hispanic and 4 percent are of other races, according to the United State Sentencing Commission. (The racial makeup of the program’s 18 female participants at women’s facilities is much more in line with that of the prison population at large.)
“[It’s] the same issues that you have like in any classroom in higher education,” said Jeffers, who is finishing his master’s in math in Italy. “At the university level and beyond, every single class is majority white male.”
He noted that anxiety about math tends to be more acute among women and people of any gender who are Black, Hispanic, or from other underrepresented groups, and may keep them from signing up for the program.
Sherry Smith understands that kind of anxiety. She didn’t even want to step foot into a math class. When she arrived at Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center in December 2021, she was 51, had left high school when she was 16, and had only attended two weeks of a ninth grade math class.
“I was embarrassed that I had dropped out,” she said. “I hated to disclose that to people.”
Smith decided to enroll in the prison’s GED program because she could do the classes one-on-one with a friendly and patient teacher. “It was my time,” she said. “Nobody else was listening, I could ask any question I needed.”
In just five months, Smith completed her GED math class. She said she cried on her last day. Since 2022, she’s been pursuing an associate’s degree in human services — from prison — through a remote program with Washington County Community College.
In Washington, Prison Mathematics Project founder Havens is finishing his sentence and continuing to study math. (Havens has been granted a clemency hearing and may be released as early as this year.) Since 2020, he has published four academic papers: three in math and one in sociology. He works remotely from prison as a staff research associate in cryptography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote a math textbook about continued fractions.
Havens is still involved in the Prison Mathematics Project, but handed leadership of the program over to Jeffers in October 2023. Now run from outside the prison, it is easier for the program to bring resources and mentorship to incarcerated students.
“For 25 years of my life, I can learn something that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn in any other circumstances,” Havens said. “So I decided that I would, for the rest of my life, study mathematics.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
When I was 12, my family lived adjacent to a small farm. Though I was not old enough to work, the farm’s owner, Mr. Hall, hired me to man his roadside stand on weekends. Mr. Hall had one rule: no calculators. Technology wasn’t his vibe.
Math was my strong suit in school, but I struggled to tally the sums in my head. I weighed odd amounts of tomatoes, zucchini and peppers on a scale and frantically scribbled calculations on a notepad. When it got busy, customers lined up waiting for me to multiply and add. I’m sure I mischarged them.
I was thinking about my old job as I read a quirky math study published this month in the journal Nature. Nobel Prize winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a husband and wife research team at MIT, documented how teenage street sellers who were excellent at mental arithmetic weren’t good at rudimentary classroom math. Meanwhile, strong math students their same age couldn’t calculate nearly as well as impoverished street sellers.
“When you spend a lot of time in India, what is striking is that these market kids seem to be able to count very well,” said Duflo, whose primary work in India involves alleviating poverty and raising the educational achievement of poor children. “But they are really not able to go from street math to formal math and vice versa.”
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Ina series of experiments, Duflo’s field staff in India pretended to be ordinary shoppers and purposely bought unusual quantities of items from more than 1,400 child street sellers in Delhi and Kolkata. A purchase might be 800 grams of potatoes at 20 rupees per kilogram and 1.4 kilograms of onions at 15 rupees per kilogram. Most of the child sellers quoted the correct price of 37 rupees and gave the correct change from a 200 rupee note without using a calculator or pencil and paper. The odd quantities were to make sure the children hadn’t simply memorized the price of common purchases. They were actually making calculations.
However, these same children, the majority of whom were 14 or 15 years old, struggled to solve much simpler school math problems, such as basic division. (After making the purchases, the undercover shoppers revealed their identities and asked the sellers to participate in the study and complete a set of abstract math exercises.)
The market sellers had some formal education. Most were attending school part time, or had previously been in school for years.
Duflo doesn’t know how the young street sellers learned to calculate so quickly in their heads. That would take a longer anthropological study to observe them over time. But Duflo was able to glean some of their strategies, such as rounding. For example, instead of multiplying 490 by 20, the street sellers might multiply 500 by 20 and then remove 10 of the 20s, or 200. Schoolchildren, by contrast, are prone to making lengthy pencil and paper calculations using an algorithm for multiplication. They often don’t see a more efficient way to solve a problem.
Lessons from this research on the other side of the world might be relevant here in the United States. Some cognitive psychologists theorize that learning math in a real-world context can help children absorb abstract math and apply it in different situations. However, this Indian study shows that this type of knowledge transfer probably won’t happen automatically or easily for most students. Educators need to figure out how to better leverage the math skills that students already have, Duflo said. Easier said than done, I suspect.
Duflo says her study is not an argument for either applied or abstract math. “It would be a mistake to conclude that we should switch to doing only concrete problems because we also see that kids who are extremely good at concrete problems are unable to solve an abstract problem,” she said. “And in life, at least in school life, you’re going to need both.” Many of the market children ultimately drop out of school altogether.
Back at my neighborhood farmstand, I remember how I magically got the hang of it and rarely needed pencil and paper after a few months. Sadly, the Hall farm is no longer there for the town’s children to practice mental math. It’s now been replaced by a suburban subdivision of fancy houses.
This story about applied math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The results of a major national test released Wednesday showed that in 2024, reading and math skills of fourth and eighth grade students were still significantly below those of students in 2019, the last administration of the test before the pandemic. In reading, students slid below the devastatingly low achievement levels of 2022, which many educators had hoped would be a nadir.
The test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is often called the nation’s report card. Administered by the federal government, it tracks student performance in fourth and eighth grades and serves as a national yardstick of achievement. Scores for the nation’s lowest-performing students were worse in both reading and math than those of students two years ago. The only bright spot was progress by higher-achieving children in math.
The NAEP report offers no explanation for why students are faltering, and the results were especially disappointing after the federal government gave schools $190 billion to aid in pandemic recovery.
“These 2024 results clearly show that students are not where they need to be or where we want them to be,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a briefing with journalists.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
More than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders, selected to be representative of the U.S. population, took the biennial reading and math tests between January and March of 2024.
Depressed student achievement was pervasive across the country, regardless of state policies or instructional mandates. Student performance in every state remained below what it was in 2019 on at least one of the four reading or math tests. In addition to state and national results, the NAEP report also lists the academic performance for 26 large cities that volunteer for extra testing.
An ever-widening gap
The results also highlighted the sharp divergence between higher- and lower- achieving students. The modest progress in fourth grade math was entirely driven by high-achieving students. And the deterioration in both fourth and eighth grade reading was driven by declines among low-achieving students.
“Certainly the most striking thing in the results is the increase in inequality,” said Martin West, a professor of education at Harvard University and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP test. “That’s a big deal. It’s something that we hadn’t paid a lot of attention to traditionally.”
The starkest example of growing inequality is in eighth grade math, where the achievement gap grew to the largest in the history of the test.
Source: NAEP 2024
The chart above shows that the math scores of all eighth graders fell between 2019 and 2022. Afterward, high-achieving students in the top 10 percent and 25 percent of the nation (labeled as the 90th and 75th percentiles above) began to improve, recovering about a quarter of the setbacks for high achievers during the pandemic. That’s still far behind high-performing eighth graders in 2019, but at least it’s a positive trend.
The more disturbing result is the continuing deterioration of scores by low-performing students in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent. The huge pandemic learning losses for students in the bottom 10 percent grew 70 percent larger between 2022 and 2024. Learning losses for students in the bottom 25 percent grew 25 percent larger.
“The rich get richer and the poor are getting shafted,” said Scott Marion, who serves on the NAEP’s governing board and is the executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit consultancy. “It’s almost criminal.”
More than two-thirds of students in the bottom 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. A quarter of these low performers are white and another quarter are Black. More than 40 percent are Hispanic. A third of these students have a disability and a quarter are classified as English learners.
By contrast, fewer than a quarter of the students in the top 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. They are disproportionately white (61 percent) and Asian American (14 percent). Only 5 percent are Black and 15 percent are Hispanic. Three percent or fewer of students at the top have a disability or are classified as English learners.
Although average math scores among all eighth grade students were unchanged between 2022 and 2024, that average masks the improvements at the top and the deterioration at the bottom. They offset each other.
The NAEP test does not track individual students. The eighth graders who took the exam in 2024 were a different group of students than the eighth graders who took the exam in 2022 and who are now older. Individual students have certainly learned new skills since 2019. When NAEP scores drop, it’s not that students have regressed and cannot do things they used to be able to do. It means that they’re learning less each year. Kids today aren’t able to read or solve math problems as well as kids their same age in the past.
Students who were in eighth grade in early 2024, when this exam was administered, were in fourth grade when the pandemic first shuttered schools in March 2020. Their fifth grade year, when students should have learned how to add fractions and round decimals, was profoundly disrupted. School days began returning to normal during their sixth and seventh grade years.
Harvard’s West explained that it was incorrect to assume that children could bounce back academically. That would require students to learn more in a year than they historically have, even during the best of times.
“There’s nothing in the science of learning and development that would lead us to expect students to learn at a faster rate after they’ve experienced disruption and setbacks,” West said. “Absent a massive effort society-wide to address the challenge, and I just haven’t seen an effort on the scale that I think would be needed, we shouldn’t expect more positive results.”
Learning loss is like a retirement savings shortfall
Learning isn’t like physical exercise, West said. When our conditioning deteriorates after an injury, the first workouts might be a grind but we can get back to our pre-injury fitness level relatively quickly.
“The better metaphor is saving for retirement,” said West. “If you miss a deposit into your account because of a short-term emergency, you have to find a way to make up that shortfall, and you have to make it up with interest.”
What we may be seeing now are the enduring consequences of gaps in basic skills. As the gaps accumulate, it becomes harder and harder for students to keep up with grade-level content.
Another factor weighing down student achievement is rampant absenteeism. In survey questions that accompany the test, students reported attending school slightly more often than they had in 2022, but still far below their 2019 attendance rates. Eleven percent of eighth graders said that they had missed five or more school days in the past month, down from 16 percent in 2022, but still far more than the 7 percent of students who missed that much school in 2019.
“We also see that lower-performing readers aren’t coming to school,” said NCES Commissioner Carr. “There’s a strong relationship between absenteeism and performance in these data that we’re looking at today.”
Eighth graders by the number of days they said they were absent from school in the previous month
Source: NAEP 2024
Fourth grade math results were more hopeful. Top-performing children fully recovered back to 2019 achievement levels and can do math about as well as their previous peers. However, lower-performing children in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent did not rebound at all. Their scores were unchanged between 2022 and 2024. These students were in kindergarten when the pandemic first hit in 2020 and missed basic instruction in counting and arithmetic.
Reading scores showed a similar divergence between high- and low- achievers.
Source: NAEP 2024
This chart above shows that the highest-performing eighth graders failed to catch up to what high-achieving eighth graders used to be able to do on reading comprehension tests. But it’s not a giant difference. What’s startling is the steep decline in reading scores for low-achieving students. The pandemic drops have now doubled in size. Reading comprehension is much, much worse for many middle schoolers.
It’s difficult to say how much of this deterioration is pandemic related. Reading comprehension scores for middle schoolers had been declining for a decade since 2013. Separate surveys show that students are reading less for pleasure, and many educators speculate that cellphone use has replaced reading time.
One possibility, said Harvard’s West, is that it’s “premature” to see the benefits of improved instruction, which could take years. Another possibility, according to assessment expert Marion, is that being able to read words is important, but it’s not enough to do well on the NAEP, which is a test of comprehension. More elementary school students may be better at decoding words, but they have to make sense of those words to do well on the NAEP.
Carr cited the example of Louisiana as proof that it is possible to turn things around. The state exceeded its 2019 achievement levels in fourth grade reading. “They did focus heavily on the science of reading but they didn’t start yesterday,” said Carr. “I wouldn’t say that hope is lost.”
More students fall below the lowest “basic” level
The results show that many more children lack even the most basic skills. In math, 24 percent of fourth graders and 39 percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic.” (The others are “proficient” and “advanced.”) These are fourth graders who cannot locate whole numbers on a number line or eighth graders who cannot understand scientific notation.
The share of students reading below basic was the highest it’s ever been for eighth graders, and the highest in 20 years for fourth graders. Forty percentof fourth graders cannot put events from a story into sequential order, and one third of eighth graders cannot determine the meaning of a word in the context of a reading passage.
“To me, this is the most pressing challenge facing American education,” said West.
This story about the 2024 NAEP test was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger newsletters.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Many students in New Zealand have a story to tell about “streaming” — being grouped into separate math classes based on their perceived ability to master the subject.
Manaaki Waretini-Beaumont, now 18 and an environmental science major at the University of Canterbury, learned about the downside of streaming when she enrolled in Avonside Girls’, a 1,000-student high school in Christchurch.
Avonside starts at Year 9, equivalent to eighth grade in the United States, and ends at Year 13, equivalent to 12th grade. Before the start of her Year 9 term, Waretini-Beaumont and her fellow students were divided up into groups to take tests in “maths,” reading comprehension, and patterns and shapes.
Afterward, the students were separated into lettered groups that spelled out the word B-I-N-O-C-U-L-A-R-S. Waretini-Beaumont was a “9-N” student in mathematics — as she describes it, “the top of the middle block.”
But she said she didn’t feel comfortable as one of the few Māori students in the class.
“I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be in that space,” said Waretini-Beaumont, whose iwi, or tribal affiliations, are Te Āti Haunui-A-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Apa, Ngāti Paoa. “If there was something I wasn’t understanding, I felt like I wasn’t able to say that, because I’m supposed to be in the smart class with all these smart people.”
So she shifted to another mathematics class with her Māori friends, who were in the “S” classes.
“Being in two different spaces, I could really see the change,” Waretini-Beaumont said. “At the top classes, the teachers’ language towards the students was always positive and it was always encouraging. And they really wanted students to learn and were trying to help them.”
Manaaki Waretini-Beaumont experienced the effects of “streaming,” or academic ability tracking, during her time as a high school student at Avonside Girls’ School in Christchurch, New Zealand. Credit: Image provided by Richie Mills/Ngāi Tahu
In the classroom where her friends were assigned, in contrast, the mathematics work mostly amounted to simple worksheets — “coloring pages and word find,” Waretini-Beaumont said.
For years, much like in the United States, New Zealand has worried about sliding student proficiency in mathematics, as captured by both national and international test scores. Later this month — the beginning of the New Zealand school year — the country is launching an overhaul of mathematics instruction that education leaders hope will reverse the trend.
But other groups in the country have been trying to approach the problem of academic achievement from a different angle. They believe that streaming is driving achievement gaps in the country, including in mathematics. Tokona te Raki/Māori Futures Collective, a think tank focused on youth, has been working since 2019 to persuade schools to voluntarily end the practice by 2030. The initiative is called “Kōkirihia”— Māori for “take action.”
Streaming is just one of many ways that schools group students by academic ability. Ability grouping can include separating students into vocational or university tracks at different schools as early as age 10, as is common in Germany and other Western European countries. But it could also include teachers creating informal and non-permanent groupings within their own classrooms to provide enrichment or extra support to students who need it.
In New Zealand, critics say streaming pushes two groups into so-called “cabbage,” or lower-level mathematics, at a disproportionate rate: Māori students, who are indigenous to New Zealand, and students who are Pasifika, the New Zealand term for people from Samoa, Tonga and other nations in the Pacific Islands.
In the 14th century, the Polynesian ancestors of today’s Māori migrated thousands of miles by canoe to what they called Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. Hundreds of years later, English settlers came to engage in trade and now represent the majority ethnic group in New Zealand. In 1840, the two groups signed the Treaty of Waitangi that established New Zealand’s bicultural identity.
Many youth with Pacific Island backgrounds are descended from people who were encouraged to move to New Zealand after World War II to address a labor shortage.
Both Māori and Pasifika are a fast-growing, and young, population. By the 2040s, more than a third of children in the country are expected to identify as Māori, according to Stats NZ, the country’s official data agency.
The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s official stance discourages streaming, but the country’s more than 2,500 schools operate with a great deal of independence: Principals have similar powers and responsibilities as school superintendents in the United States, and each school has an elected board that sets policy and manages budgets.
New Zealand does not track streaming or ability grouping by race or ethnicity, but surveys show it is common: Eighty percent of students are in schools that group students by ability level in mathematics, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment.
Other data shows a wide academic gap among students of different ethnicities in New Zealand.
Students at May Road School in Auckland, New Zealand, work through a lesson on fractions. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
In the Auckland region, the country’s most densely populated of 16 regions in all, 76 percent of Asian students left secondary school with the highest of three levels on the country’s National Certificate of Educational Achievement in 2022. Like a high school diploma, the NCEA Level 3 is a minimum qualification to enter college in New Zealand.
About 66 percent of Pākehā, or white, students left school with that credential. About 46 percent of Pasifika students and 40 percent of Māori students did the same.
In comparison, the high school graduation rate by race and ethnicity in the United States in the 2021-22 school year was 94 percent for Asian American/Pacific Islander students, 90 percent for white students, 83 percent for Hispanic students, 81 percent for Black students and 74 percent for American Indian/Alaskan Native students.
Misbah Sadat, the newly appointed principal at Kuranui College, a high school 50 miles northeast of the capital of Wellington, began actively working to “destream” mathematics courses soon after emigrating to New Zealand in 2009 and becoming a teacher there.
As head of mathematics at a high school called Horowhenua College, she started by identifying promising Māori students on her own, moving them to higher level classes, and mentoring them, as described in a Ministry of Education newsletter.
Eventually she convinced her colleagues at Horowhenua to create mixed-ability classes rather than dividing the students. She continued the same work as deputy principal at Onslow College in suburban Wellington, where she worked before her new appointment.
The streaming practice comes from a patronizing mindset, said Sadat, who was also a math teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Schools are telling parents that their children might be lost and overwhelmed in a more rigorous class. In actuality, “We have demoted some students to learn crap,” she said. “And then we are saying that at age 16, ‘You are dumb at maths.’ How dare we decide what a young person is capable of or not capable of?”
Students at Kaiapoi North School in suburban Christchurch, New Zealand, work through a multiplication problem in chalk on the playground blacktop. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
Both of New Zealand’s unions for elementary and secondary teachers signed onto the pledge to end streaming by 2030. In a newsletter to members, the elementary teachers union noted that its members have noticed “a sense of ingrained hopelessness that comes with being in the ‘cabbage’ classes.”
But in the same newsletter, another teacher said educators struggle with the mix of abilities in one classroom, along with managing behavior challenges.
David Pomeroy, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, is studying schools that have committed to reducing their reliance on streaming.
It’s a difficult task, he said. So many teachers are accustomed to the practice, since they went through it in school themselves. Parents of students in high-level classes are worried their children will be shortchanged. Teachers also say that it is easier to work with students who are all roughly on the same skill level.
And then there is an emotional connection to the practice, Pomeroy said. Unlike in the United States, lower-level mathematics classes are often taught by teachers who have a lot of classroom experience and who express real fondness for their students, he said. Pushing students too hard is seen as setting them up for repeated failure, which teachers were reluctant to do.
Abby Zonneveld’s bulletin board at St. Clair School in Dunedin, New Zealand, asked students to describe their “tūrangawaewae,” or place where they feel a special connection. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
“Even if they accepted streaming wasn’t the right next step, they wanted to protect them from anything that could damage their confidence,” Pomeroy said.
For schools that have made a commitment to reducing or ending streaming, he said, one useful tool has been to bring mathematics teachers in different schools together so they can work through challenges, such as lesson planning, and share successes.
The research into the benefits or harms of academic tracking or streaming show mixed results. In 2016, a group of researchers compiled all the best U.S-based research on ability grouping and acceleration at that point, going back for a century. They found certain kinds of ability grouping, such as placing highly gifted students together, was a benefit to those students. But grouping students in high- or low-performing classes did not show any benefit or detriment for students.
The New Zealand Initiative, a right-of-center think tank, said that the country should conduct its own research on the effects of streaming in the country, rather than relying primarily on research done elsewhere and on qualitative reports that primarily capture feelings about the practice. “Research suggests that lowerstream students are often taught less engaging content by less experienced teachers. So, it may not be streaming itself that increases gaps in achievement but streaming done poorly,” the initiative said in a report.
But the efforts to reduce streaming voluntarily seem to be catching on.
When looking at all academic subjects, not just mathematics, principals on a 2022 PISA survey said 67 percent of students in New Zealand are grouped by ability into different classes for at least some subjects. That’s a drop from 2015, when 90 percent of principals reported that students were grouped into different classes in their schools.
The change is welcome, said Waretini-Beaumont, who works on social media for Tokona te Raki. Streaming “has more impact than just cutting off some opportunities and stopping someone from doing calculus,” she said. “Our grandparents have been streamed and they don’t know it was even a thing. They just thought they were dumb.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
