Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science.

One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.

Such efforts can only improve current practices. According to the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, which compiled the information on minutes spent learning science, only 17 percent of early elementary classes had science lessons most days of the week.

“We think the best kind of science that happens at that level is real-world based,” said Jeanne McCarty, CEO of Out Teach, a national nonprofit that promotes new approaches to science education and builds outdoor learning labs at schools. “We work with schools to engage kids in much more hands-on science learning outdoors, that not only gives them that foundational knowledge they need early on, but it also helps inspire them to see themselves as scientist and think about science as a future career path.”

Schools that get an outdoor learning lab also get coaching on teaching science in the lab. The outdoor lessons are tailored to where students live — a school in Texas, for example, uses a section of their lab to grow a salsa garden and native yucca plants. The labs vary, but typically include garden beds, weather stations, earth science stations and signs to reinforce concepts students are learning.

One goal of installing the labs, McCarty said, is to give teachers an outdoor space where they can not only teach science, but also embed science instruction into other subjects. The hope is these lessons will also spark students’ interest in science at a young age.

Some research seems to back this idea up — a study from 2017 found that, after an innate interest in science, women in STEM-related fields were more likely to point to playing or spending time outdoors as the spark for their initial interest in STEM than other activities. Most respondents said they became interested in STEM prior to sixth grade.

“Anything we can do to help get kids to see science and STEM as things that are useful to them and things they can interact with and they can do, or recognize things around them in the world that are happening — that’s going to be really valuable,” said Adam Maltese, one of the study’s authors and a professor of science education at Indiana University.

With a set amount of instructional time each day, elementary schools are less likely to significantly shift class time to science because most states do not have accountability measures tied to science as they do for reading and math. But embedding science instruction into other subjects has had positive results, said Jenny Sarna, director of director of the NextGenScience project of nonpartisan research agency WestEd. The project is a multi-state effort to create common teaching standards for science from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“Students who have positive science identities are more likely to see themselves as a science person, or good at science, and then they’re more likely to pursue STEM careers,” Sarna said.

A study of first grade students whose classroom used a curriculum that embedded science into language arts found that the students performed higher than their peers on standardized science tests at the end of the school year, and their reading performance was the same.

“Those students learn more science and the same amount of literacy, so if you could pick between your kid having science and reading every day, or just reading, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Sarna said.

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In some states, child care can cost as much as college tuition. But those costs don’t translate into higher wages for those who work in the industry; child care staff aren’t paid like college professors.

On average, child care employees and early educators earn less than half as much as K-12 teachers. They are more likely than other educators to live in poverty and less likely to have health insurance.

Billions in federal aid propped up the industry during the pandemic, but those funds ran out this fall. As a result, child care centers have already started reporting decreased wages and benefits.

In the midst of this crisis, some states are trying to come up with their own creative solutions. The Early Educator Investment Collaborative, a coalition of philanthropies that provide grants to support early childhood programs, is sending about $9 million in grants to Louisiana, Colorado and D.C. to find long-term answers for raising early educators’ pay.

“We knew that the federal investment was coming to a close,” said Ola Friday, director of the collaborative. “So, we turned our attention to what was happening at the state and local levels and thought that this was now a really ripe opportunity to support those states and localities that were trying to be innovative and creative and think outside the box.”

As one example, a $2.4 million grant to the District of Columbia will go toward improving work the district already started on boosting wages and benefits. Two years ago, D.C. started an Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, one of the first large-scale programs in the nation to put child care and early educator pay on par with K-12 teacher starting wages.

That program, which the D.C. Council paid for with a wealth tax, uses between $53 million and $73 million annually to raise early educator pay by up to $14,000 a year so that it aligns with the minimum salary received by D.C. public school teachers with a similar education.

But the cost of this program will increase as minimum teacher wages rise, and the city must come up with a way to fund those additional costs.

Additionally, District of Columbia public school teachers are paid more based on experience, and they also receive a pay bump, or a salary step increase, each year. Currently, the early ed pay equity fund does not account for experience or annual step increases.

Sara Mead, deputy superintendent of early learning for the D.C. district, said it will use part of the Early Education Investment Collaborative grant on researching ways to fix those problems. And, she added, “part of what we’re doing with the grant money is also documenting what we’re doing so that other states can learn from us.”

Because child care is not primarily funded by the federal government, the quality and cost vary by state. A solution to raising child care wages in one state may not be feasible in another, but without significant federal investment, states will need to find their own funding sources to prop up an industry that has been collapsing for a while, said Annie Dade, a policy analyst with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It is a shift, hopefully, that early education is a public good and should be funded as such,” said Dade. “And then looking for the public funding to do so is the next logical step.”

The collaborative is also sending Louisiana about $3 million; another $3.8 million in grant funding will go to Colorado. One step of Colorado’s grant proposal includes having a liaison dedicated to early ed compensation in various state agencies so that each department can contribute to finding solutions for low pay among child care staff. In Louisiana, part of the grant will be used to help local parishes come up with ways to raise money for early ed pay.

Friday, the collaborative’s leader, said the point of the grants is to help states “put into place the infrastructure, the capacity, the resources, the funding, so that we can get to the ultimate goal of increased long-term compensation for the workforce.”

This story about early childhood education salaries was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Nearly one year ago, Tennessee school districts warned thousands of parents that because of a new state law, third grade students could be held back a year if they are not reading on grade level by spring.

The law — which created “a little bit of a firestorm” according to one of its legislative co-sponsors — was seen by supporters as a necessary step to address lagging literacy rates in the state. Concerned parents and school staff flocked to community meetings and legislative sessions to speak out against it.

But of the roughly 44,000 third grade students who scored low enough to be at risk of retention, just under 900 students, or 1.2 percent of all third graders who took the test, were actually held back because of their reading scores. That’s similar to retention rates in previous years — a report from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance shows that around 1 percent of third graders were held back each school year between 2010 to 2020.

Tennessee’s law was modeled after a much-praised literacy program in neighboring Mississippi that includes tutoring, improved literacy training for teachers and a retention policy for third graders who don’t pass its state test. Mississippi held back 8 percent of third graders in 2015, the first year its retention policy was in place. That includes some students held back for other reasons.  

So, what happened in Tennessee?

By the end of spring 2023, about 40 percent of third graders achieved a “met expectations” or “exceeded expectations” score on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. That was a higher passing rate than previous years, but 60 percent of third grade students were still set to be held back because they scored in the “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” range.

However, the law was written to offer several escape hatches for students with low scores.

About 24 percent of all third graders who took the test this spring were exempt from retention because they either had a disability, were an English language learner with less than two years of English instruction, were previously retained or “met other exemptions determined locally,” according to the state’s report.

An additional 10 percent of students were granted a waiver because their parents appealed.

Related: Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic

Just under 5 percent of students re-took the test and earned a passing grade. About 2 percent of students scored “approaching expectations” on the test, attended summer school and showed “adequate growth” by the end of the summer.

That leaves more than 12,000 students, or just under 17 percent, who were promoted to fourth grade but are required to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the year. For these students, the threat of retention still looms.

The law says students who are promoted but required to attend tutoring could still be held back in fourth grade if they do not pass the reading portion of the test or show “adequate growth” by the end of the year.

“For those 12,000 students, the story is not over,” said Breanna Sommers, a policy analyst with The Education Trust in Tennessee.

The definition of “adequate growth” is a complicated formula that includes student’s TCAP scores and the probability that they’ll reach proficiency by 10th grade. During a recent meeting of the Tennessee Board of Education, the department said they are projecting 5,000 to 6,000 fourth grade students will be held back this year.

In Metro Nashville Public Schools, 77 third graders — or 1.4 percent — were held back last school year when the law went into effect. In the five prior years, the district only held back between one and 10 third graders a year. Nearly 1,200 fourth grade students in the district are required to get tutoring interventions this year.

To fill the demand, the district is providing teachers with a stipend to tutor students during their planning periods. Metro Nashville Public Schools has also hired full- and part-time tutors and contracted with an online tutoring service called Varsity Tutors.

Sonya Thomas, co-founder of the parent advocacy group Nashville PROPEL and a supporter of the law, said Tennessee’s renewed focus on reading was a long time coming, though her own children are now too old to benefit from it.

“It’s one of the strongest literacy packages that this state has ever put into place,” Thomas said. “I’m excited about the momentum that it’s going to create in the state.”

Related: Third graders struggling the most to recover in reading after the pandemic

But she’s still concerned that most children did not pass the reading portion of the third grade test this spring.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going in the right direction, it’s just a matter of the quality of instruction and the quality of interventions that need to be given to children with a sense of urgency. We should not have to wait until third grade to know whether a child is going to pass or fail,” Thomas said.

Studies on the impact of retaining students are generally mixed, but the practice is more successful with younger students and when it is coupled with resources and support aimed at helping students catch up.

Education analysts are still studying the effects of Tennessee’s law — the state has not released demographic data on who makes up the 1.2 percent of third graders held back or the more than 12,000 fourth graders who could be held back this spring. Research on retention laws in other states indicates Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to be retained.

“We all share a common goal of wanting our kids to read on grade level. We definitely want to maintain high expectations and know that our students can exceed and reach those. And we still believe that retention is a high-stakes intervention that should only be used in very limited cases in which it’s paired with extensive support,” said Sommers, the Education Trust analyst. “We’re looking forward to more long-term outcome impact data to see. We’ll be really excited if the tutoring was impactful or if summer camp was impactful.”

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Transportation to centers is one of the biggest barriers for families accessing Head Start programs, according to a survey from the National Head Start Association — distances that might be manageable for adults on their own can be insurmountable with a baby or toddler in tow.

A new awareness campaign sponsored by the association, which represents Head Start providers, and a philanthropic group called the Civic Mapping Initiative, is hoping to ease that burden by encouraging local transit agencies to add bus stops closer to Head Start centers.

As a kickoff to the effort, the Memphis Area Transit Authority added three bus stops to its existing routes to bring them closer to Head Start programs in the community.

A lot of parents who send their children to the Porter-Leath Early Head Start programs in Memphis rely on families and friends to help them get there, said Sheronda Smith, director of Early Head Start at Porter-Leath and president of the Tennessee Head Start Association.

Often when families can’t get a ride, their children simply don’t attend that day.

“We have had families who we’ve had to place back on the waiting list because they make the decision that it’s too hard to get to the center,” Smith said.

There are more than 16,400 Head Start centers across the United States that provide federally funded pre-K and school readiness programs for low-income families. About 42 percent of those programs are within 0.2 miles of public transit, or what the National Head Start Association considers a walkable distance for families with toddlers.

Another 29 percent of centers are not near any public transit, or more than five miles away. It makes sense that some centers are far from transit because many Head Start programs serve rural areas, said Abigail Seldin, co-founder of the Civic Mapping Initiative.

The rest of the nation’s centers, nearly 30 percent, fall somewhere in the middle: between 0.2 and five miles away from public transportation.

The Head Start association and the mapping initiative are focusing their efforts on a smaller subset of those centers –- the 19 percent that have a bus stop within a mile of their location. Simply adding a bus stop can make the distance walkable for families with toddlers, Seldin said.

“In those cases, the ask of a transit agency is to move a stop perhaps 2,000 feet,” Seldin said. “Anyone who has walked 1,000 feet with a toddler understands viscerally why this concept is so important and why these changes are essential.”

In some of these areas, local transit authorities can add bus stops without significantly changing routes or adding to their costs. In Memphis, buses were driving right past the Head Start centers before the transit agency added three stops as part of this mapping campaign.

“It’s a low-cost solution that makes a big difference for families and for early childcare workers who are commuting,” Seldin said.

Smith, with the Porter-Leath program in Memphis, hopes the added stops will help stabilize attendance for students whose families don’t have reliable transportation.

“Moving this closer to the centers and making it more accessible to them is important because now they don’t have to depend on someone else,” Smith said.

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At the start of her Math Methods course at Drexel University, Karen Greenhaus has a simple assignment for her pre-service early ed teachers: Write down how you feel about math.

The responses are enlightening — and often negative.

Students have told Greenhaus about upsetting experiences they had in elementary school math classes, how embarrassed and anxious they felt when they were confronted with math problems, and how those feelings led some to choose a major in college that did not require extensive math instruction.

“Math fear is a huge thing for teachers,” Greenhaus said.

This summer, I set out to learn more about math anxiety and how it can affect early ed teachers. I spent the better half of a humid week in July at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school for social work and early-childhood education in Chicago, learning about early math alongside child care workers and elementary teachers. My story on teachers conquering their math fears was published in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative.

For a lot of adults, math dredges up uncomfortable memories of standing in front of classrooms and reciting equations or multiplication tables. But for teachers, there’s an added layer of worry: How can they teach students math concepts without transferring their own discomfort with the subject?

“What happens is math gets shortchanged,” Greenhaus said. Throughout her course, Greenhaus encourages students in the class to feel better about math by focusing on learning the many ways to solve a given problem, such as by using manipulatives or other objects.

Research dating back decades has shown that educators are no more immune to math anxiety than their students. Some studies have found that teachers’ perceptions of math can negatively affect their students’ achievement.

In the early grades, math lessons should go beyond simple addition and subtraction to include more abstract concepts, like spatial awareness and how objects fit together to make shapes, said Lisa Ginet, director of program design and operations at Erikson. Early childhood educators do not necessarily have to be experts in advanced math, Ginet said, but they do need to know how those abstract ideas relate to mathematical thinking and later concepts.

At Erikson’s summer conference in Chicago, educators got hands-on math lessons they could take back to their classrooms. They played with blocks and watched demonstrations on how to work one-on-one with students who struggle with certain math concepts.

For Ivory McCormick, a first-grade teacher from Atlanta who always felt she was no good at math, working with her school’s new math specialist helped her gain confidence. At the conference, McCormick said she not only learned new strategies, but she also felt validated in the work she was already doing in her classroom.

“[Our math specialist] really opened my eyes to new ways of doing things and just made me appreciate math in a more general sense,” McCormick said. “And a lot of the things we’re doing are so foundational.”

Providing teachers with professional development in math is one way to boost their confidence and lower their anxiety. Another way to combat math fears is to address the problem before teachers enter the classroom by ensuring undergraduate and graduate programs provide a thorough grounding in math content rather than just in methods of teaching, said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

“There seems to be much more emphasis in teacher preparation programs on preparing aspiring teachers to teach the mathematics, but not as much emphasis on preparing them to understand the foundational concepts of the mathematics,” Peske said. “And when teachers don’t understand the concepts of math, that’s when they’re anxious and worried about going to teach it.”

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The first few weeks in a classroom can help set the tone for the rest of the school year. Building a sense of safety and belonging for young students early on is critical, said Berol Dewdney, a pre-K teacher and Maryland’s 2023 teacher of the year.

Dewdney, who’s been teaching pre-K for just over a decade now, said her mother Anna Dewdney, the late author and illustrator of the well-known “Llama Llama” children’s books, helped spark her interest in early-childhood education. I spoke to her about how she creates a welcoming environment for students and about other strategies that help her during the first few weeks of the year.

Maintaining consistent routines for students

Consistency helps children know what to expect each day, which also allows them to feel confident and safe in a familiar environment. An example of a classroom routine could be creating a morning ritual with students, like going over the rules at the start of class or giving students a job to do like greeting each other at the door each day, said Dewdney, who teaches at an elementary school in Baltimore.

“The brain is pattern-seeking and survival-oriented, so we create consistent routines at home and at school so that we can help our kids feel safe so they can effectively connect with others and effectively learn,” Dewdney said. “Those routines, in addition to helping students feel safe and have a dependable sense of what’s going on in their lives, also helps them build executive functions.”

Fostering relationships through interactions

Every day, Dewdney tries to have meaningful interactions with her students, sometimes planning those exchanges in advance. One activity she likes is an “I love you ritual,” a termed coined by Conscious Discipline, a company that provides training on social and emotional learning. The rituals can be about anything, but they always have four components: presence, appropriate touch, eye contact and a “playful spirit.”

One of Dewdney’s ideas of an “I love you ritual” with students is a nursery rhyme that involves fingerplay: “Round and round the garden goes the teddy bear, one step, two step, tickle you under there.” During this rhyme, Dewdney draws a circle on students’ hands before tickling them under the chin or arms.

The game helps build a healthy adult-to-child relationship and it also builds a structure kids can draw on to create similar healthy rituals and interactions with each other, Dewdney said. “Adult-child interactions we know to be one of the most important things in an early childhood classroom,” Dewdney said. “Planning for those interactions and making time for those interactions is essential.”

Taking time to self-regulate and demonstrate calm behavior

Staying calm when a student is misbehaving or when something stressful happens models how to respond to a conflict.

“If we’re going to empower kids to be in charge of themselves and to self-regulate and to love and learn and lead effectively, we have to first do so as adults. And it can be really hard ­— in life, in a classroom, with XYZ going on in the world — to maintain your self-regulation and calm,” Dewdney said. “One of the first things that a grown up and educator can do is really practice the structures that make them feel calm and safe.”

Dewdney uses breathing exercises in the classroom as one way to foster a sense of calm. She teaches her students the exercises to help them learn to self-regulate, but she also uses the activities for her own benefit.

All of these activities are ingredients for creating a safe and welcoming environment for young children, she said.

“It feels really obvious to say that it’s important that a classroom is a loving space, [and that] it’s important that you create a sense of belonging. But what does that actually look like in the classroom? And what are the things that you do as a grown up to make that happen?” Dewdney said. “That’s one of the most empowering things that I’ve experienced as an educator — that these tools help me feel a connection with kids and families and to really create the loving classrooms that we know our kids deserve.”

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CHICAGO — In July, in a packed classroom in downtown Chicago, a group composed mostly of early elementary teachers and child care workers read a story about “Wendi,” a fictional preschool teacher who loves reading but struggles in math.

Even though Wendi was drawn to early education where “math was so easy,” she still felt unsure of her skills. In the story, she decided to skip math concepts, leaving them for the teachers her students would have next year.

Across the room, people nodded their heads as they listened.

“I am Wendi. Wendi is me,” said Ivory McCormick, a kindergarten teacher from Atlanta. Several educators in the classroom identified with Wendi, and that was the point. Decades of research shows that math anxiety is a common problem for adults, and surveys show it particularly affects women, who make up nearly 90 percent of elementary teachers in the United States.

Put simply, a lot of elementary school educators hate the prospect of teaching math, even when the math concepts are beginner level.

Researchers at the Erikson Institute, a child-development focused graduate school in Chicago, started the Early Math Collaborative 16 years ago to provide educators with research-backed professional development to help them better teach young students math. One of the goals of Erikson’s annual four-day summer math conference, where the teachers read Wendi’s story, is to assuage their anxiety by exploring how young children learn math and strategizing activities they can do in the classroom.

Because math competencies build on each other, with skills like counting and learning shapes forming the basis of later knowledge, it’s critical that students receive a solid foundation in the subject, education experts say. The U.S. has long trailed many other developed countries in terms of student math performance, and then scores tanked during the pandemic. Educators say helping teachers in the early grades gain confidence in math could be one key to unlocking America’s post-pandemic math recovery.    

Related: Seven things parents and teachers should know about preschool math

“If you look at how a child is doing with math when they enter kindergarten, that’s the best way to predict how they’re going to be doing with math later, all the way up through eighth grade,” said Jennifer McCray, an associate research professor at Erikson. “Different types of teaching at an early childhood age make a difference in terms of what children are able to do and understand in mathematics.”

When McCormick started teaching preschool in Atlanta five years ago, she felt anxious about teaching a subject she didn’t feel confident in. “Math was something I always had to work really hard at, and it seemed like I never really got that much better at it,” she said.

Teachers who doubt their math ability often worry they will transfer their math aversion onto impressionable students, educators say.

There are studies that validate this fear: First grade students who were taught by teachers with heightened anxiety about math performed worse in the subject than their peers who were taught by less anxious teachers, one study from 2020 found. 

Math specialists say it is a pervasive issue in elementary classrooms, where educators are typically expected to teach every subject, and it often leads to teachers spending less classroom time on math content.

“I have some kids who say, ‘Nan, we haven’t done math for two weeks,’ ” said Nan McCormack, a retired teacher and math specialist who now tutors young students online from her home in Chicago. “It’s one of those subjects that teachers like to avoid and come up with an excuse, and think, if they don’t get it now, they’ll get it next year.”

At the Erikson Institute’s summer conference, teachers gained practice on concepts they’d use in their classrooms. They drew maps to describe directions: Rosie the hen traveled over the fence, and under the tree branch and through the river, for example. They built large 10-sided shapes out of colorful blocks. The exercises benefited their own math skills, too.

“There’s a misbelief that in order to teach early childhood math, you don’t really need to know math well,” Lauren Solarski, a consultant and coach with the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson, told the group of educators. “But having that deep content knowledge, research finds, makes you then able to draw out what’s happening in a child’s play around math — what they’re doing — and know those trajectories, know the math inside and out so that you can be that expert when you’re with the child.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean early childhood teachers need to be experts in advanced geometry or algebra, said Lisa Ginet, director of program design and operations at Erikson. But it does mean they need to know how different lessons that may not seem to be related to math are connected to mathematical thinking and to topics students will learn as they get older.

“[Instruction] doesn’t just live in the materials — you have to talk about what you’re doing,” Ginet told the educators.

Related: You probably don’t have your preschooler thinking about math enough

It isn’t a coincidence that a lot of early elementary teachers lack confidence in their own math abilities, said McCray of Erikson. Sometimes, their lack of confidence is why they go into early ed in the first place. When college students go to their advisors and tell them they want to be a teacher, but aren’t good at math, McCray said they are often encouraged to teach the early grades.

“There’s this idea that you can probably do the least harm there,” McCray said.

Avoiding high-level math courses was a big part of the reason Stacey Stevens switched her major to early childhood education in college. It wasn’t until Stevens did a yearlong professional development session on math after becoming a preschool teacher in Kentucky that she started to feel that she truly understood how to teach it.

“I think that’s what made me most passionate about it in preschool — I didn’t want kids to grow up having the same struggles as me,” said Stevens, who now works for the Kentucky Department of Education as the director of an early childhood regional training center. “I wanted them to understand that four triangles make a square: to actually see it and do it and not just be told that a triangle is a fourth of a square.”

In preschool and early childhood, counting and learning shapes are big components of math, but more abstract ideas, like identifying patterns and spatial awareness, are also foundational to later concepts. And some research has shown that preschoolers who were taught with math curriculum had stronger oral and literacy skills later on compared to their peers.

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

Professional development training like Erikson’s summer program can help teachers on the back-end, but colleges need to better prepare them to teach math before they step into classrooms, said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Teacher preparation programs should not only show future educators how to teach math to young students, the programs should also spend a substantial amount of time ensuring educators understand math pedagogy and have a firm understanding of math concepts themselves, Peske said.  

But on average, most undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs do not spend as much time on elementary math content as NCTQ believes is necessary, according to the organization’s 2022 analysis of these programs.

That year, undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs spent, on average, 85 instructional hours on math content, less than the 105 NCTQ recommends. Meanwhile, graduate programs spent just 14 hours on math content. The recommendations are based on studies that show teachers’ math coursework in college is linked to student achievement.

“Most teachers who are preparing to become teachers at the elementary stages, they’re not getting enough instructional hours in elementary math subjects,” Peske said. “If we prepared them better, they would be stronger at both their math content knowledge as well as their ability to teach math, and this would reduce their anxiety and improve student outcomes.”

For McCormick, the early ed teacher from Atlanta, attending Erikson’s professional development conference was the next step in her journey to building up her math confidence.

This year, McCormick moved up to teaching first grade at the Galloway School in Atlanta after teaching preschool and kindergarten classes at the school for several years. She credits her school’s decision to hire a math specialist last year with helping change the way she feels about teaching the subject.

“It was really hard in the beginning for me to find a connection to it — I was kind of just doing it because it was part of my job,” McCormick said. “But this past year, I have kind of revamped my thoughts about what math can be and the ways that we teach it in order to make kids want to learn about it and be enthusiastic about it. Because the way we present it to them holds so much more weight than I think I ever realized.”

This story about overcoming math anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, as part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. 

The post Teachers conquering their math anxiety appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind Dearborn Park International School.

One by one, they raced to a table where a tutor watched them scribble down the answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills they lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program hosted at the elementary school, and all of them are one to three grades behind.

James, 11, couldn’t do two-digit subtraction last week. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up.

“I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James said. “It’s challenging but I like it.”

Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing skills. On average students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests, too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in their problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance that existed before the pandemic. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare as they enter high school and college-level math courses that rely on strong foundational knowledge.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card,’ showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to levels not seen in about 20 years. 

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years.

“Another way to put it is that it’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Related: How can we improve math education in America? Help us count the ways

At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes.

Some days this past academic year, for example, only half of her students in a given class did their homework.

Matthews, who is entering her 34th year of teaching, said in the last few years, students seem indifferent to understanding her pre-Algebra and Algebra I lessons.

“They don’t allow themselves to process the material. They don’t allow themselves to think, ‘This might take a day to understand or learn,’” she said. “They’re much more instantaneous.”

And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Working with basic fractions, for instance, continues to stump many of them, she said.

Because math builds on itself more than other subjects each year, students have struggled to catch up, said Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For example, if students had a hard time mastering fractions in third grade, they will likely find it hard to learn percentages in fourth grade.

Math teachers will play a crucial role in helping students catch up, but finding those teachers in this tight labor market is a challenge for many districts.

“We’re struggling to find highly qualified people to put in the classrooms,” Dykema said.

Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021, when students not only dealt with the pandemic and its fallout, but also a new, tougher math test. Math scores plunged 20 percentage points or more across 11 schools that serve middle school students.

The district’s International Baccalaureate school had higher scores — about 30 percent of students were proficient — but that was a far cry from having 90 percent of students proficient in 2019.

It raised the inevitable question: What now?

Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors, offered extended learning programs, made staffing changes or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: The September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.

Progress is possible in upper grades, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on teaching math. But she said it’s easy for students to feel frustrated and lean into the idea that they’re not a “math person.”

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle,” she said. “And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Jefferson County educators took that approach and, leveraging pandemic funds, placed math coaches in all of their middle schools starting in the 2021-2022 school year.

The math coaches work with teachers to help them learn new and better ways to teach students, while math specialists oversee those coaches. About 1 in 5 public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data.

Jefferson County math specialist Jessica Silas — who oversees middle school math coaches — said she and her colleagues weren’t sure what to expect. But efforts appear to be paying off: State testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the district’s middle schools.

Silas is confident they’re headed in the right direction in boosting middle school math achievement, which was a challenge even before the pandemic. “It exacerbated a problem that already existed,” she said.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization.”

Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council for the Teachers of Mathematics

Ebonie Lamb, a special education teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups and try to close those academic gaps. Her district, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, serves a student population that is 53 percent African American and 33 percent white.

But she believes those gaps can be closed through culturally relevant and differentiated teaching. Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals.

“We have to continue that throughout the school year — not just the first week or the second week,” she said.

Ultimately, Lamb said those personal connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace. By February, Lamb said she observed an increase in math self-esteem among her students who have individualized education plans. They were participating and asking questions more often.

“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Adding to the complexity of the math catch-up challenge is debate over how the subject should be taught. Over the years, experts say, the pendulum has swung between procedural learning, such as teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step-by-step, and conceptual understanding, in which students grasp underlying math relationships, sometimes making these discoveries on their own.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization. You had to memorize exactly what to do, and there wasn’t as much focus on understanding the material,” said Dykema, of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “And I believe that when people start to understand what’s going on, in whatever you’re learning but especially in math, you develop a new appreciation for it.”

Powell, the University of Texas professor, said teaching math should not be an either-or situation. A shift too far in the conceptual direction, she said, risks alienating students who haven’t mastered the foundational skills.

“We actually do have to teach, and it is less sexy and it’s not as interesting,” she said.

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle. And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin 

Diane Manahan, a mother from Summit, New Jersey, said she watched the pandemic chip away at her daughter’s math confidence and abilities. Her daughter, a rising sophomore, has dyscalculia, a math learning disability characterized by difficulties understanding number concepts and logic.

For years, Manahan paid tutors to work with her daughter, a privilege she acknowledges many families could not afford. But, Manahan said, the problems in math instruction are not limited to students with learning disabilities. She often hears parents complain that their children lack basic math skills, or are unable to calculate time or money exchanges.

Manahan wants to see school districts overhaul their curriculum and approach to emphasize those foundational skills.

“If you do not have math fluency, it will affect you all the way through school,” she said.

Related: Proof points: How a debate over the science of math could ignite the math wars

Halfway across the country in Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially the word problems. Gambino says she has strong math skills, but helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.

She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information to walk parents through how students are being taught to solve problems.

“The more parents understand how they’re being taught, the better participant they can be in their child’s learning,” she said.

It doesn’t take high-level calculations to realize that schools could run out of time and pandemic aid before math skills recover. With schools typically operating on nine-month calendars, some districts are adding learning hours elsewhere.

Lance Barasch recently looked out at two dozen incoming freshmen and knew he had some explaining to do. The students were part of a summer camp designed to help acclimate them to high school.

The math teacher works at the Townview School of Science and Engineering, a Dallas magnet school. It’s a nationally recognized school with selective entrance criteria, but even here, the lingering impact of Covid on students’ math skills is apparent.

“There’s just been more gaps,” Barasch said.

When he tried to lead students through an exercise in factoring polynomials — something he’s used to being able to do with freshmen — he found that his current group of teenagers had misconceptions about basic math terminology.

He had to stop to teach a vocabulary lesson, leading the class through the meaning of words like “term” and “coefficient.”

“Then you can go back to what you’re really trying to teach,” he said.

Barasch wasn’t surprised that the teens were missing some skills after their chaotic middle school years. His expectations have shifted since the pandemic: He knows he has to do more direct teaching so that he can rebuild a solid math foundation for his students.

Filling those gaps won’t happen overnight. For teachers, moving on from the pandemic will require a lot of rewinding and repeating. But the hope is that by taking a step back, students can begin to move forward.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

The post How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Is screen time for preschoolers as bad as we think?

A new study from researchers at Ohio State University suggests the answer is more nuanced than popularly believed.

Using data gathered in 2018-19, researchers in the recent study tracked the screen time of preschoolers from minority and lower-income households. Families of 179 children were asked to fill out a 24-hour time diary of their children’s activities, including media use. The study also measured the children’s social and academic performance in the fall and spring.

Researchers found little effect on children’s social and academic development when they averaged about two hours’ screentime during the day over the course of the year. But when children spent more than two daytime hours on screens, researchers noted that their social skills grew more slowly than those of other children in the study. Children who spent more than an hour in front of screens at night also showed smaller gains in social skills, a result researchers said could be caused by poor sleep.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that families limit screen use to one hour per day for children ages 2 to 5.

“A lot of the conversation demonizes media use, and I don’t think that’s productive for anyone,” said Rebecca Dore, the study’s lead author and the director of research at OSU’s Crane Center for Early Childhood and Research Policy.

I spoke with Dore about the study and what parents can take away from it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the benefit of using a time diary for this kind of research?

A lot of studies on this subject will say, “On average, how much does your child use media on a typical day?” So, you’re having to recall media use, but you’re having to recall it in this very generalized way that is (a) hard to remember, and (b) really easy to talk yourself into being different. So, it’s like if I say: “Probably on average my kid uses about five hours a day on screens. No, it can’t be five hours a day. It must be more like three.” And in these cases, we expect that people are probably lowering those averages, and there might be differences in how much people are adjusting or misremembering in those average, typical day questions.

We think that this time-diary approach — where you’re just thinking about yesterday, you’re not thinking about media use in this context because we were just asking them to report on the full day, and that just happened to include media use — is likely to be more accurate and less prone to both memory bias and social desirability bias.

Did any of the screen time data surprise you?

In general, there is some literature suggesting that media use might have negative effects on some of these outcomes, but I think it’s very aligned with a lot of previous work coming out of my lab that it really only seems to be these high levels of media use that matter. So, I wasn’t surprised by that. I think the piece we were surprised by is the outcomes for these social behavioral skills and not for academic skills.

So much of this literature and societal hype around this issue is related to academic skills, like: “TV is melting their brains. It’s replacing all this reading they’re supposed to be doing.” So, it was surprising that that’s not what we saw here. And we think of social skills, perhaps, as more resilient to these potential effects. We’re seeing that media use is not necessarily replacing time spent reading or time spent doing a lot of educational activities. Rather, kids who use really high levels of media aren’t having time to interact with peers and with their parents and family members. And that can be leading to these more specific effects on social and behavioral skills.

The study isn’t saying we shouldn’t care about screen time at all. What impact do you hope research like this will have?

Very few families are doing zero media use with their kids, even from a very young age. It’s likely to seem not feasible or practical, or even desirable, to have zero media use with young kids. I hope that this type of research will shift that conversation in terms of not talking only about how terrible media use is, but talking about these more nuanced aspects of the findings.

This data doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no negative effects of media use for other outcomes, like sleep, or obesity, or other populations. I think this data has some important implications for how we think about media use for preschoolers in this particular population, but there is a lot more rigorous research needed to fully explore this topic.

More on screen time:

The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay reported in 2021 on a study of 10,000 kindergarteners that found students from low-income families and Black kindergarteners from families of any income level were more likely to use technology heavily by the end of elementary school.

In 2019, Jackie Mader wrote in The Hechinger Report about toddlers’ struggles to learn at all when taught from a screen, via video chat, rather than in person.

This story about screen time for preschoolers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Some screen time for preschoolers won’t hurt their development, study finds appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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By Ariel Gilreath

*|MC:DATE|*

Is screen time for preschoolers as bad as we think?  

A new study from researchers at Ohio State University suggests the answer is more nuanced than popularly believed.  

Using data gathered in 2018-19, researchers in the recent study tracked the screen time of preschoolers from minority and lower-income households. Families of 179 children were asked to fill out a 24-hour time diary of their children’s activities, including media use. The study also measured the children’s social and academic performance in the fall and spring. 

Researchers found little effect on children’s social and academic development when they averaged about two hours’ screentime during the day over the course of the year. But when children spent more than two hours on screens, researchers noted that their social skills grew more slowly than those of other children in the study. Children who spent more than an hour in front of screens at night also showed smaller gains in social skills, a result researchers said could be caused by poor sleep. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that families limit screen use to one hour per day for children ages 2 to 5. 

“A lot of the conversation demonizes media use, and I don’t think that’s productive for anyone,” said Rebecca Dore, the study’s lead author and the director of research at OSU’s Crane Center for Early Childhood and Research Policy. 

I spoke with Dore about the study and what parents can take away from it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

What is the benefit of using a time diary for this kind of research?  

A lot of studies on this subject will say, “On average, how much does your child use media on a typical day?” So, you’re having to recall media use, but you’re having to recall it in this very generalized way that is (a) hard to remember, and (b) really easy to talk yourself into being different. So, it’s like if I say: “Probably on average my kid uses about five hours a day on screens. No, it can’t be five hours a day. It must be more like three.” And in these cases, we expect that people are probably lowering those averages, and there might be differences in how much people are adjusting or misremembering in those average, typical day questions.  

We think that this time-diary approach — where you’re just thinking about yesterday, you’re not thinking about media use in this context because we were just asking them to report on the full day, and that just happened to include media use — is likely to be more accurate and less prone to both memory bias and social desirability bias.  

Did any of the screen time data surprise you? 

In general, there is some literature suggesting that media use might have negative effects on some of these outcomes, but I think it’s very aligned with a lot of previous work coming out of my lab that it really only seems to be these high levels of media use that matter. So, I wasn’t surprised by that. I think the piece we were surprised by is the outcomes for these social behavioral skills and not for academic skills. 

So much of this literature and societal hype around this issue is related to academic skills, like: “TV is melting their brains. It’s replacing all this reading they’re supposed to be doing.” So, it was surprising that that’s not what we saw here. And we think of social skills, perhaps, as more resilient to these potential effects. We’re seeing that media use is not necessarily replacing time spent reading or time spent doing a lot of educational activities. Rather, kids who use really high levels of media aren’t having time to interact with peers and with their parents and family members. And that can be leading to these more specific effects on social and behavioral skills. 

The study isn’t saying we shouldn’t care about screen time at all. What impact do you hope research like this will have? 

Very few families are doing zero media use with their kids, even from a very young age. It’s likely to seem not feasible or practical, or even desirable, to have zero media use with young kids. I hope that this type of research will shift that conversation in terms of not talking only about how terrible media use is, but talking about these more nuanced aspects of the findings.  

This data doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no negative effects of media use for other outcomes, like sleep, or obesity, or other populations. I think this data has some important implications for how we think about media use for preschoolers in this particular population, but there is a lot more rigorous research needed to fully explore this topic. 

The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay reported in 2021 on a study of 10,000 kindergarteners that found students from low-income families and Black kindergarteners from families of any income level were more likely to use technology heavily by the end of elementary school. 

In 2019, Jackie Mader wrote in The Hechinger Report about toddlers’ struggles to learn at all when taught from a screen, via video chat, rather than in person. 

Wages for child care workers grew more slowly during the pandemic than wages of workers in jobs that began at a similar pay scale, according to data from the National Women’s Law Center, published this month. From 2019 to 2022, the median hourly wage for child care workers grew just 3.1 percent, while wages increased by 8.7 percent for food and beverage service workers, by 5.6 percent for retail workers and by 5.3 percent for recreation workers. 

“New research: Unsafe feeding skyrocketed during the infant formula shortage,” Early Learning Nation 

“‘God forbid I have to move again’: One home-based child care provider’s experience with housing,” EdSurge 

“‘You still have to eat’: Wisconsin’s child care worker pipeline is strong, but industry can’t keep staff,” Wisconsin Public Radio 

“California’s hottest new student recruits? 4-year-olds,” LA Times 

The post Preschoolers and screen time appeared first on The Hechinger Report.