Putnam — For the past three years, improvement in math among Putnam Elementary School’s most disadvantaged students has ranked among the bottom 10% of schools in the state.
More than 66% of Putnam Elementary School students are considered “high needs” — a state classification that encompasses students with disabilities, as well as those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch or are English-language learners.
Last year, the average math improvement rate for Connecticut fourth-graders on state standardized tests was 37% for high-needs students and 54% for non-high-needs students. For Putnam, the respective math improvement rates were 17% and 25%, according to data from the state Department of Education.
As the district works to secure state funding and channel more resources into math, Superintendent Steven Rioux said the Putnam Elementary School is taking another approach to improve student performance — a community-based strategy that works by shifting the public’s attitudes around math.
“Part of this is helping change the mindset about mathematics, not just with students but with adults,” Rioux said. “People normally wouldn’t brag if they say they can’t read, but some people who are not good at math have no problem saying, ‘Oh, I struggle with math’ — that’s a mind-shift change. We need to make numeracy and understanding how to reason mathematically just as important.”
What Rioux described is a cultural issue that is larger than any one school or district.
Just 41% of Connecticut residents between the ages of 16 and 74 were “considered proficient at working with mathematical information and ideas,” according to 2017 estimates from the Survey of Adult Skills. The study, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics found that numeracy rates were even lower in New London and Windham counties, where 40% and 36% of adults reached proficiency thresholds.
According to the survey, individuals who do not meet proficiency standards can range from those who cannot perform basic arithmetic operations, including multiplication and division, with whole numbers” to those who can “perform calculations involving fractions, decimals, time, measurements, and less common percentages.” Among other tasks in the assessment, they may have difficulty recognizing and using patterns. They cannot “reflect on and use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of conclusions drawn from data” or perform “mathematical processes that require the application of two or more steps and where multiple conditions need to be satisfied.
While the 2017 survey offers the most recent look at state-and-county-level performance, national data suggests that adult numeracy is on the decline.
In December, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average numeracy score for U.S. adults had reached its lowest point in over a decade — falling more than 3% from the first survey in 2012 to the latest one in 2023. Over the same period, the share of adults falling into the lowest-performing category of the survey had grown from 28% to 34%.
U.S. adults also lag behind their global peers. The study found that average numeracy scores were 5% lower in the U.S. than the international average. Of 31 countries surveyed, 23 outperformed the U.S.
While many frame the consequences of the nation’s lagging proficiency with a global lens, Megan Staples, an associate professor of mathematics education at the University of Connecticut, said it is important to consider the domestic implications.
“Although we often think about this in terms of STEM opportunities and international races and comparisons and staying on top, there’s this whole piece of it that is also just about the power of the individual to navigate your everyday life, especially in a world that’s becoming increasingly quantitative and algorithmic by design,” Staples said.
Staples explained that one of the challenges is getting our culture to think about math as something that happens outside of the classroom.
From planning for retirement, to managing health care, to voting for public policy, Staples said Americans need “mathematical savvy” to inform their decisions using concepts like the time value of money, probability, risk and cost-benefit analyses. But she said the list of real-world applications is even more vast.
“Part of it is understanding how much numbers and algorithms are shaping our world and supporting our world,” Staples said. “We don’t have a broad enough understanding of mathematics and mathematical reasoning (for) people (to) really see its importance in every single aspect of our lives.”
“Calculations are the least of our worries now,” Staples added. “You need to have number sense, you need to have quantitative sense and reasoning. … We’re in this vast river of change right now and it’s not slowing down.”
Staples said building these numeracy skills at a young age is critical.
“There are very strong correlations between elementary confidence in math and then later achievement in high school,” Staples said. “If you want to look at literacy as a predictor of success, there’s also very strong correlations with numeracy and mathematics as a predictor of success as well.”
Staples said there is consensus in the math world that the education system’s adoption of Common Core math standards has helped shift the focus toward “conceptual pieces” of numeracy.
Since 2010, curriculums have emphasized problem-solving, abstract and quantitative reasoning, and modeling with mathematics. However, this realignment has created a generational gap in the way math is taught and learned.
Keely Macalister, the math interventionist for Putnam Elementary School, believes that the cultural prevalence of “I’m bad at math” attitudes stems from traditional methods of teaching math.
For decades, students picked up math through rote learning, Macalister explained. Today’s adults likely memorized their multiplication tables, the “carry the one” rule for addition, and the steps for other mathematical algorithms.
Macalister said the problem with this method is that students “don’t really understand what they’re doing” once “the math gets more complicated.”
“That learning kind of falls apart when the concepts get trickier,” she explained.
“When you’re talking about fluency, the goal is not to have everything memorized. The goal is to be fluid and flexible with your ability to use numbers,” Macalister said. “For example, if a student is being asked to add eight plus five, we would’ve memorized that. (Students today) are thinking, ‘Huh, well a five is a three and a two, so I’m going to add the two to the eight and make it a 10 because I know 10 plus three is 13.”
“The goal is for students to really have a good solid understanding and number sense so that they can apply it later on,” Macalister said.
Putnam Elementary School Principal Kaye Jakan said that a lot of the learning in classrooms today is centered around open-ended math tasks that require students to explain their reasoning and demonstrate what is going on “behind the scenes in their brains.”
Although schools have been teaching math this way for more than a decade, for parents, it is a new concept.
“It’s more complex,” Jakan said. “For parents to be home and they just see the problem on the (homework) page, they’re probably like, ‘Well why don’t you just do the math?’ But it’s a little more complex than that now because we want them to get that conceptual understanding and not just the basics of what we’ve done in the past.”
Assistant Principal Meaghan Wakely said it can be challenging for parents to know how to help when their child comes home with a math problem.
“For parents, it is hard because they learned it one way and they see it a different way,” Wakely said.
In an effort to bridge those gaps, Jakan and Wakely said Putnam Elementary School has worked to offer resources and programming that welcomes families into the school to help them understand how and why students are learning math the way they are.
They described the effort as part of a broader initiative to integrate math practice into families’ day-to-day lives by placing numeracy on equal footing with literacy.
“Everyone talks about reading to your baby,” Wakely said. “No one really talks about how to do math with your baby.”
At the policy level, Jakan said, districts “haven’t seen that same push for math” that has been apparent for literacy.
“We need everybody to have that same message, similar to the ‘right to read,’ the right to math,” Jakan said.
Jakan said that part of the challenge is resources. Putnam Elementary School has two literacy specialists, but because of budget cuts, the school went from two math specialists in 2022 down to one.
“We’ve put a lot into literacy, and we have to start to shift the focus to be more math-based,” Jakan said. “It’s kind of all hands on deck when it comes to these things. Everybody’s doing this. Not just classroom teachers, but the whole school, the families, it’s everybody. We try to work on it together as a team.”
“If the family believes that they’re not good mathematicians … that message goes right down to the child,” Jakan said.
Jakan and Wakely stressed that students “have to see themselves as mathematicians.”
In order to build positive math identities for their children, families need to cultivate the right attitudes.
“When we were kids, our math teachers told us, ‘You need to know this because you’re never going to walk around with a calculator in your pocket.’ Clearly, that has changed,” Wakely said. “In this world, kids have all the information they need at their fingertips and adults have all the information they need at their fingertips. So it’s not about having the information, it’s about how do you know what to do with it. How do you know how to think critically through it? How do you know how to solve problems with it?”