Story Summary
- Students in Illinois, like their peers nationwide, tend to score lower in math than they do in reading and writing.
- The trend has been consistent for years, leading some to question whether it’s due to cultural issues among Americans or the way math is taught in public schools.
- To address the issue, the Illinois State Board of Education is developing a “comprehensive numeracy plan” aimed at boosting students’ math skills statewide
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (Capitol News Illinois) – Each year, the Illinois State Board of Education releases an annual report card with data showing how students are doing in the basic subjects of reading, writing and math.
And each year when those numbers come out, reporters, teachers, parents and school officials sift through the data looking for evidence to show whether scores are improving, holding steady or getting worse.
But one trend has been so consistent over the years, it rarely draws much public attention. Overall, students score lower in math than they do in English language arts.
That was true on the 2025 report card, which showed only 38.4% of Illinois students overall scored proficient or better in math, compared to 52.4% in English language arts.
Illinois students are not unique in that regard. Nationwide, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card,” 59% of eighth graders in 2024 scored at or above the “basic” level in math — the achievement level most closely aligned with grade-level expectations — compared to 66% who did so in reading.
Even on the international stage, American students do not perform as well in math as their counterparts in many other industrialized democracies. Scores from the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS exam — a project of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics — showed eighth grade students in the U.S., on average, scored below their peers in countries like Singapore, Japan, Sweden and Australia.
In Illinois, officials at the State Board of Education hope to close the gap through the development of a statewide, comprehensive “numeracy plan.” The document will direct not just the way math is taught in the classroom, but how math teachers are trained in the profession and math programs are administered in school districts.
Culture or teaching
Latrenda Knighten, a retired math teacher who is now president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, says the difficulty many Americans have with math is now so common, it has become socially acceptable for people to openly admit that they are just not a “math person.”
“It’s like a badge of honor to some people,” she said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “And what you say publicly aloud has a huge impact on impressionable young minds and their outlook on a subject or content area, or their beliefs about themselves. And we have to change that. We can no longer accept that it’s okay to say, ‘Oh, I’m just not good at math, and so it’s okay if I don’t understand this.’ You should say, ‘Why is it that I can’t make sense of this?’”
But Beth MacDonald, an education professor at Illinois State University who trains prospective teachers to teach math in early elementary grades, said she believes the problem of lagging math skills in America is not just a cultural issue.
“It’s more about how we teach mathematics,” she said in a separate interview.
MacDonald traces much of the problem with today’s math education techniques to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. That’s the signature education policy law of the George W. Bush administration that mandated standardized testing in public schools nationwide and tied federal funding to those test results.
“When you go into a school, you’ll see educators all on the same page of the curriculum on the same day, and they’re being held accountable to stay on pace with the curriculum,” she said. “So what we’ve removed now is the need to even understand where our kids are at in their own learning.”
Statewide ‘numeracy’ plan
Knighten said she has been paying close attention to a project underway in Illinois, where the Illinois State Board of Education hopes to reverse the trend by developing a comprehensive numeracy plan aimed at boosting students’ math skills statewide. She’s also had conversations with stakeholders at the state board in the early stages of the project.
“And from what I have observed, one of the things they’ve done is looked at this holistically,” she said. “They actually are looking at developing a plan and actually identifying what numeracy is, so that people are understanding, it’s not just that we want to raise students’ ability to memorize math facts. We’re looking at building procedural knowledge from conceptual understanding.”
The planning process was modeled after the recent development of a statewide literacy plan, which lawmakers mandated in 2023 and ISBE formally adopted the following year. Unlike the literacy plan, however, the numeracy plan did not begin with a legislative mandate but was instead initiated by State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders.
It began in April and May when ISBE staff conducted a “needs assessment” survey of various stakeholder groups — including teachers and other classroom staff, school and district administrators, and regional superintendents of education — to get a clearer sense of what needs to be included in a numeracy plan.
The agency then held a summit meeting in June to study the survey results and form a team to begin drafting a numeracy plan.
An initial draft of the plan was released in October. The agency then held a series of listening sessions to receive feedback from teachers and other educators, which concluded in November.
“Numeracy is more than arithmetic or the memorization of procedures,” reads an initial draft of the plan. “As defined in this guidance, numeracy is the ability for all students to confidently understand, interpret, and apply mathematical concepts across all domains of mathematics in a variety of real-world and academic contexts.”
Much of the 94-page document is technical in nature — one person who took part in a Nov. 4 virtual listening session described it as “wordy” — with discussion of topics such as the difference between “traditional” and “reform” approaches to mathematical instruction.
But it also includes discussion of topics that suggest solving the problem of lagging math skills could be costly. Those include the lack of resources in school districts that are still funded far below their adequacy target and the need for more training and professional development for teachers, to name a few.
Agency officials plan to present a second draft of the plan to the state board in February. A final draft is expected to be completed in June.
“I think they’re doing a great job with the numeracy plan so far, with regard to how policy can change,” MacDonald said. “But we need some money behind a lot of these initiatives.”
(Reporting by Peter Hancock, Capitol News Illinois)
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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