Shenandoah Valley News

Inside the new middle school math crisis

It was a Thursday morning in November, a few minutes into Ruby Voss’ and Amber Benson’s eighth grade math class at Northside Middle School just outside Roanoke, a city of roughly 100,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This story also appeared in The Washington Post

Thursdays are spent in review in preparation for tests each Friday. The teachers posted a question on screen — “What’s the slope of the equation below?” — and gave students a few minutes to answer it. The room grew loud as students jostled into line to bring their completed graphs to the front, where Voss separated kids into two groups: Those who got the right answer wrote their initials on a touchscreen up front, and those who answered incorrectly went to Benson for additional help.

It was a public exercise, with the whole class watching. Each Monday, the class does something equally public: Teachers review their students’ test performance, with charts showing both the group’s recent performance and that of each student. “The whole class will either go ‘yay’ or ‘ohhhh,’ depending on how the class did,” said Voss.

That approach turns students into stakeholders in each other’s success, said Benson. And it’s possible because teachers dedicate significant time to fostering relationships with students and helping them get to know one another. At the start of each school year, for example, the class devotes a few days to trust-building exercises, not math. That focus, combined with other strategies like longer math periods and tutoring, has helped Northside Middle’s students bounce back from learning losses during the pandemic more quickly than middle schoolers in many other districts, teachers and administrators here say. Nationwide, students who started middle school early in the pandemic lost more ground in math than any other group and don’t appear to be recovering.

Test data paints a dire picture: Educational assessment nonprofit NWEA found that seventh and eighth graders’ scores on its math assessments fell in 2022, the only group of kids for whom that was true. NWEA researchers estimate it will take these students at least five years to catch up to where they would have been absent the pandemic. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, average eighth grade math scores declined eight points from 2019, hitting a level not seen since the early 2000s.

Original source can be found here