Math education clarion call
Math education in the US suffers pervasive and profound systemic dysfunction. If this is true for the general population of students, the impact on student with disabilities is significantly greater.
This is not hyperbole as evidenced in University of California San Diego report (UCSD).
The UCSD is listed as a top 5 public university. While such rankings are somewhat dubious, UCSB is a very good university at minimum. This year, a report from UCSD revealed that prior to COVID, 1 in 200 incoming students needed remedial math. The rate in 2025 is at 1 in 8, with 70% considered to be at an elementary school level. (Yes, elementary.)
Certainly, COVID had an impact, but this still reveals two major issues.
Before COVID there was a serious problem, as indicated in the UCSD report. In Connecticut, a state considered to have one of the best K-12 education systems (per multiple state ranking reports), around 70% of incoming students at community colleges and state universities (not UCONN) needed to take a remedial math or English course (or both). Based on reports by PISA (international assessment) and OECD (international organization), the US ranks around the middle of countries included.
If the US math education system is failing most of our students at large, it is exponentially worse for students with special needs. Before and after COVID the system cannot catch up students in the general population when they fall behind. Consider our students with special needs who face a steeper hill to climb as they fall more than a single year behind.
As a 30-year math educator, I have seen two major flaws play out.
First, there is too much math covered. In the CCSS Math image (Ratios and Proportions) you see some of the topics covered. There are 39 in 6th grade with around half requiring at least 2 days of coverage. Most states have 180 days of school. Take away days spent on state testing and class assessments and half days (including school programming like assemblies) and we have around 1 ½ days per topic or around a little more than 1 hour per topic. (Looking at some of these problems, many adults would want a lot more than an hour.) Then consider the impact of absences and the challenges of helping students catch up on missed content.
Second, the US education is rightly characterized as an assembly line. There is minimal opportunity to meet student needs. For example, a teacher may have 20 students in math class for 1 hour. That amounts to an average of 3 minutes per student for 1 on 1 support. Given that a new topic covered after an hour or so, a student easily falls behind with limited support.
Then throw in the time constraints of math teachers who have 45 minutes to an hour of planning each day. That time is used to create lesson plans, grade papers, enter grades, respond to emails and phone calls, respond to administrators, complete reports, implement 504 and IEP requirements, and address school initiatives (e.g., documenting professional growth). Differentiating to meet student needs effectively would take the entire planning time by itself.
Then consider our students who may need extra time but also have significant gaps resulting in a great many more topics to cover. Their special ed teachers are trying to solve this problem for 15 students on a case load.
I have reviewed hundreds of math sections of IEPs and a common situation is what I consider to be an unrealistic number of math objectives. A special ed teacher may have a case load of 15 students each with 6 math objectives – 3 being addressed simultaneously. That alone is 45 IEP objectives to monitor simultaneously and that is out of all the other IEP objectives to address. (When I meet with special ed teachers, my first recommendation is to focus on 1 math objective at a time.)
Dr. Deming was an NYU and Columbia professor of mathematics. His statistical analysis approach to quality control for car manufacturers transformed Toyota into the number one car maker in the world. His quality control involved ongoing testing and incremental improvements. Prior to that, the process in auto production was to address flaws after-the-fact. This is analogous to US math education in which the US system relies on remediation, with intervention that is in effect in name only. That is how we end up with 1 in 8 incoming students needing remedial math at UCSB and US math test scores that are in the middle of the pack.
Given this, consider what happens to our students.