From wealthy suburbs to rural hillsides, Maryland public school students on average aren’t great at math.

It wasn’t always so.

Back in 2009, Maryland’s eighth graders significantly outperformed the national average on the country’s most rigorous math test, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Then began a gradual decline — apparent across the country but particularly dramatic in Maryland. By 2024, those eighth grade scores on the NAEP showed one of the largest drops of any state in the nation. Only a quarter of Maryland eighth grade students are now proficient in math.

The failure has a profound impact on student’s academic futures and what careers they will be prepared to enter.

What happened to cause this decline is something of a puzzle that educators across the country and in the state are trying to figure out. Was it a major shift in teaching that occurred around 2012? A growing focus on reading or a variety of factors including the pandemic that disrupted math teaching more than other subjects? Or has mathematics anxiety gripped a generation?

As the school year begins, there’s new scrutiny on how the state can raise achievement on this core subject. State education leaders have passed new state standards for all grades, to begin taking effect in a year, but some school districts, including the city, aren’t waiting and have begun making significant changes.

Math anxiety

For Joan Dabrowski, the first thing Marylanders — and her school system — must do is start changing the narrative that being “bad at math” is acceptable. No one laughs off being unable to read, the Baltimore schools chief academic officer said.

It is one reason, educators say, students aren’t taking math as seriously as they should. In other countries, students believe learning math is necessary and possible.

That attitude plays out in a lack of confidence seen by teachers from high school to college. Wicomico County math teacher Danielle Glenn said her students sometimes need reassurance after they do each portion of a problem. “They are big about, ‘Did I do this step correctly?’ rather than finding ways to know whether their answer is correct,’“ she said.

She has students who did fine in honors pre-calculus but steer away from taking a calculus course because they “aren’t good at math.”

UMBC associate professor of mathematics Justin Webster calls it a generation with math anxiety. Students sometimes lack skills and are afraid to get started on a problem. And, increasingly, he said students come to college needing math remediation, which professors have not been trained to provide.

A titanic shift

The root of the math crisis, state education leaders believe, began with the titanic shift in education that happened in 2011 when the country left behind the accountability era of No Child Left Behind, begun in 2002 under the Bush administration, and moved to the Common Core standards.

No Child Left Behind attempted to shine a light on schools with large numbers of low-performing students and to hold them accountable.

In cities like Baltimore, teachers spent far less time on the arts, social studies and science in the elementary grades so that students could spend more time on reading and math, the subjects that were tested.

Schools were judged not just on how well all their students did on tests but on how well groups of their students did, including students with special needs and those living in poverty. Schools couldn’t juice their scores by getting more kids to pass; they had to improve everyone’s scores.

Then in 2010, more than 40 states adopted the same rigorous standards called the Common Core, a set of rules that say what a student must be able to do at each grade level in each subject. It raised the bar for students, expecting more critical thinking and problem solving. But the standards were so high that schools where students weren’t succeeding were no longer the focus.

Josh Michael remembers experiencing the sudden shift in his seventh grade math classroom in Baltimore.

Under Common Core rote memorization, what teachers call fluency and automaticity was downplayed. For years, students had memorized that 2 times 2 equals 4. In elementary school they were given sheets of problems to solve with a high degree of accuracy.

The emphasis shifted to learning to understand the concept behind the algorithm and solve a problem two or three different ways.

That shift may have gone too far, educators now say, because students developed gaps in their knowledge and were slower to learn higher-level skills. In addition, the common core was just harder.

“We became overwhelmed with the number of students who were struggling in mathematics, and we had no plan to support them,” said Michael, who is now the president of the Maryland State Board of Education and the executive director of the Sherman Family Foundation, a financial supporter of The Banner.

Students who had been just barely catching on under the old curriculum began drowning.

The most immediate reaction came from parents all over the state — and country — who were annoyed that they were suddenly unable to help their children with their math homework.

At the time, the accountability movement waned and schools weren’t as focused on the struggling kids anymore, Michael said. So those who weren’t getting it were left behind. By 2000, 38% of Maryland eighth graders were below the basic level, indicating they were far from proficient. By 2024, that had risen to 46%.

Glimmer of hope

But some math teachers believe a variety of changes outside of the move to Common Core contributed to the decline in achievement.

John SanGiovanni, Howard County’s coordinator for elementary mathematics, believes that math hasn’t received as much attention as English language arts.

“In most elementary schools, reading has more than double the amount of instructional time than mathematics,” he said. Maryland elementary teachers must take a reading course to keep their certification. There is no such requirement for math.

The average person would be surprised by what a third grade student is expected to know on the state assessment.

“It is not what they knew in 1990,” he said. In fact, Maryland students know a lot more math than they did two decades ago. Pass rates on the NAEP were lower in 2000 in math than they are today.

And everyone agrees that the pandemic had a more profound effect on students in math than in reading. Because math is so dependent on learning skills sequentially, the gaps in learning created by the pandemic were profound.

Calculators are now widely used by students to do basic math.

“I have watched a student type 5 plus 2 into their calculator,” Glenn said, adding that it takes longer to do that than memorize the fact.

The push toward having students focus on discovery in solving math problems has created a generation of students who have gaps in their knowledge that prove difficult to overcome because math is so cumulative, said Sarah Powell, a professor in the education department at the University of Texas Austin.

“Math scores in high school predict your likelihood of getting into college and graduating college in four years,” she said.

When test scores collapsed during the pandemic and didn’t recover as they did in English, Maryland State Secretary Carey Wright decided to begin revamping standards for all subjects for the first time in 15 years, including math.

In writing the new state standards, the state hasn’t thrown out the Common Core, but has tried to give a more balanced approach that requires both conceptual thinking and fluency in math facts, according to Lyndsey Brightful, director of mathematics at the Maryland State Department of Education.

If they want to improve their child’s performance, educators said, parents should engage their children with math in everyday life, whether it is counting during a trip to the grocery store or piquing their interest in grouping objects.

Parents should also try to answer the question of whether their children are confident that they can apply their math skills to a real-world application.

Brightful said that as the state is renewing a focus on math, there’s been an upward tick in statewide scores in fourth grade. It is a glimmer of hope, she said, that math instruction is improving.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.