MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Five years ago, the pandemic brought K-12 education grinding to a halt. The latest Nation's Report Card shows, on average, students still haven't made up for all the learning they missed in math, but there is an exception - Alabama. NPR's Cory Turner went there to find out how they did it.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: DeKalb County sits in the northeast corner of Alabama. It's rural, tucked into the shadow of Lookout Mountain, with a majority of students coming from lower-income households. And its math classes are noisy.
(SOUNDBITE OF PENCILS CLATTERING)
TURNER: While many school districts across the country saw their math scores go down during the pandemic, DeKalb's went up. Students returned for in-person learning sooner than they did in many places. But during the pandemic, the district also started a math makeover in its elementary schools.
TRACY BUTTS: Two-digit by two-digit multiplication. And you're going to build it, OK?
TURNER: Instead of relying on worksheets and rote memorization, district leaders wanted to make math more engaging for young learners - by making it more concrete. So when I visited, in the back of every classroom, I found these big containers of stuff. There's a drawer with wooden cubes.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOODEN BLOCKS RATTLING)
TURNER: And a drawer with pattern blocks made of foam.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOAM BLOCKS RUSTLING)
TURNER: And then there are fraction tiles. They have decimals written on one side - looks like fractions on the other.
Making math this concrete for young learners helps build their math fluency, like learning a language. And it's fluency that then allows them to do what I saw in Ms. Tracy Butts' third-grade classroom.
BUTTS: All right. I've got it covered up.
TURNER: Butts leads her kids to the back of the room, where they sit on the floor, crisscross applesauce. On the wall, on a giant sheet of paper, she's written an equation - 9 times 12.
BUTTS: Hands on your chest.
TURNER: But the kids don't have pencils or paper to solve it the standard way.
BUTTS: All right. So remember, one thumbs up is I have one - I have my answer, and I have one strategy to solve.
TURNER: Butts asks the kids to think not about the one way to solve 9 times 12, but how many different ways they can solve it - in their heads.
BUTTS: I saw some of you found three ways to find it.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: I've got five.
BUTTS: You had five ways?
TURNER: One girl counted by nines - 9, 18, 27, until she'd done it 12 times. Another took a different route.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: I broke the 12 apart into 10 and 2.
TURNER: Because 10 times 9 is easy - it's 90 - and 2 times 9 is 18. You add them up, and you get 108. It is a judgment-free zone here, where the kids are encouraged to find their own way to the answer, and they seem genuinely excited doing it. This approach has helped set DeKalb apart, and Alabama with it, as the only state where fourth-grade math scores are better now than they were before the pandemic.
JULIE WEST: And we wanted to bring math alive. I was like, let's bring our math curriculum alive.
TURNER: Julie West has been a driving force behind these changes in DeKalb County. She grew up here, went to school here, taught math, became a principal here. And then, a few years ago, her superintendent used some of the district's federal COVID relief money to give her her toughest job yet - as a district-wide elementary math leader, working with K-5 teachers to reimagine their approach to math.
WEST: Instead of working out problems and models on the page, let's get them out and let the kids touch them, hold them, manipulate them.
TURNER: The district used COVID relief funding to buy a bunch of those counting blocks and shapes and rainbow-colored measuring sticks so kids can feel the math. West also worked with a group of math teachers to quickly carve up their textbooks to be more aligned with the state's math standards.
WEST: This lesson doesn't meet our standards. This chapter is no good. This is better.
TURNER: West then began coaching K-5 teachers, knowing many in the early grades don't get a lot of math training and maybe don't even feel comfortable teaching it. And the district made clear everyone, from teachers to administrators, should be looking at the data. In fact, that is West's favorite four-letter word.
WEST: Data or it didn't happen. Don't tell me you did something unless you have the proof that you did it.
TURNER: This data focus was on full display on a recent Wednesday.
LYDIA PEEK: When we know better, we do better. That's my favorite saying.
TURNER: Lydia Peek is an assistant principal in the district. She's leading a quick check-in with her early-grade math teachers. Invoking West's favorite four-letter word, Peek pulls up the data from one recent math quiz.
PEEK: So you can see, like, when you click in, it will even show you which ones they missed.
TURNER: Peek zooms in on the results for one fourth-grader.
PEEK: He got this one right. Then he got this one wrong. And it even gives you why they might have missed it.
TURNER: Several teachers, including Tanya Ford, say they love the district changes.
TANYA FORD: We've not always had that kind of support from our administrators. And, I mean, we didn't use to have a math coach.
TURNER: But now Ford's school has its very own math coach.
FORD: We're able to swim through it all together instead of just feeling like you're out there by yourself.
TURNER: After DeKalb County began this math makeover, Alabama education leaders began pushing many of the same ideas statewide thanks to the Alabama Numeracy Act, a state law that passed in 2022 with a big push from State Superintendent Eric Mackey.
ERIC MACKEY: Math, when it is properly applied, is not about just solving math problems. Math is a way of thinking about the world. It really is the language of philosophy.
TURNER: Mackey, a former science teacher, hopes to use this law to put a math coach like Julie West in every elementary school in the state to support and grow great math teachers.
MACKEY: So they are teaching students how to approach, how to think about and how to solve problems, not just how to work the algorithm.
BUTTS: OK. Let's hop back to the number chart.
TURNER: In Tracy Butts' third-grade math class, the kids came up with it at least five different ways to solve 9 times 12. And if you're still not convinced they're having fun, too, just listen to this.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Singing) We're stopping at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50.
TURNER: As one DeKalb teacher told me, the big math gains they've seen here shouldn't be a surprise. When kids have fun, they learn.
Cory Turner, NPR News, DeKalb County, Alabama.
(SOUNDBITE OF SUN RA'S "TAPESTRY FROM AN ASTEROID") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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