DALLAS - At Eddie Ber -
nice Johnson STEM Academy in the Dallas Independent School District, students teach each other math.
Students brave enough to share how they solved a problem stand up in front of the other third graders and say, “All eyes on me," and the classroom responds, “All eyes on you,” ready to learn from their peer's explanations. If a student disagrees with an ex-
planation, they might debate the concepts to figure out how they got to certain conclusions.
Moving away from tests to measure success, a new curriculum called Eureka Math is “more focused on the kids un- derstanding the concept, and in turn, that will help a child pass assessments,” math teacher Eran McGowan said.
While previous curriculums emphasized knowing the answer for standardized tests, this new method focuses on learning the process behind each answer.
Last summer’s state standardized testing scores showed that Texas students have yet to catch up to the pre-pandemic math scores from 2019. Forty-five per cent of students who took math in third through eighth grade or Algebra I last year passed the STAAR test. While these scores represent a slight increase from last year, they are still 7 percentage points behind the 2019 state average.
Even more concerning, the number of students who went above and beyond and “mastered” the subject has not recov- ered since the pandemic.
The low number of students mastering math worries some policymakers and educators as it means not enough Texans will have the skills to meet the demands of the most lucrative jobs in the next few decades. A Stanford University study found students who do not bring their
math scores back up to pre-pan demic levels will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students with better grades just before the pandemic.
Michelle Rinehart, superin -
tendent of the Alpine Independent School District, said the state's
teacher shortage crisis and the departure of experienced teach ers from schools exacerbates the learning problem, which is worse for rural districts with fewer re-
sources like Alpine as they can't pay teachers as much as their ur -
ban counterparts.
Rinehart said only two out of her seven math teachers in grades 3-8 have even taught math before.
Educators won't know how well Eureka Math is working until the next STAAR results are released later in the year, but
400 other school districts, both private and public, remain opti - mistic as they adopt the new cur riculum.
