Miscalculating Math

Students’ math scores hit historically low levels on national assessments during the pandemic. A big reason why: students’ poor grasp of statistics and geometry. But scores began to slip in statistics and geometry long before the pandemic, driven in part by reform-related shifts in math instruction that pushed those topics to the back of the textbook or into higher grades. The problem: Students need data skills to land high-paying jobs in an evolving economy. Now the push is on to rebalance the equation for math instruction. This enterprise package examines the reasons behind students’ faltering math skills, employers’ increasingly urgent calls for workers with data skills, the kinds of math skills need for high-paying jobs in data science, and efforts afoot to find places to wedge geometry and statistics into an overcrowded math curriculum.