Are State Math Standards Setting Your Kid Up To Fail? What Parents Need To Know
Last Tuesday, I sat across from my 10-year-old Jax at our kitchen table, half a bowl of cold mac and cheese in front of him, and watched him crumple his 4th grade math worksheet into a ball. “I know how to add fractions,” he said, voice tight. “Why do I have to write three whole paragraphs explaining how I did it?” My own stack of 8th grade math grading sat by the toaster, still warm from me carrying it in from the car, and I didn’t have a good answer to give him right then. I just handed him a paper towel to flatten the sheet back out.
As a middle school math teacher and a mom, I’ve spent the last seven years working with our state’s math standards, long enough to see the good and the very broken parts of them. The question I get from parents every month at parent-teacher conferences is the same one I’ve been asking myself lately: are these standards designed to fail kids?
The original intent wasn’t bad, I’ll say that. Back when these standards were first rolled out, the whole point was to fix the old problem of math being a mile wide and an inch deep—kids memorized a hundred disconnected facts every year, but couldn’t apply any of them to real problems. We were told we’d slow down, focus on deeper understanding, and meet kids where they were. That sounded great to me. I’d seen too many kids leave middle school hating math because it was just a list of rules to memorize for a test.
But somewhere between writing the standards on a document and rolling them out into every classroom, things went sideways. Every standard has to be assessed, so every standard gets turned into a box that has to be ticked on every worksheet, every quiz, every semester benchmark. Last month, I marked a 7th grader’s benchmark question wrong not because she got the algebra wrong—her answer was perfectly correct—but because she didn’t label each step of her problem solving the way the standard requires. She wrote “I did this in my head” in the margin and moved on. Per district grading rules, that problem was zero points, even though she understood the skill completely.
Pace is the other big problem. Every grade level has 20+ standards that have to be covered before the end-of-year test, so we move on even when half the class hasn’t mastered the last skill. If a kid needs an extra two weeks to get long division, too bad—we’re on to fractions next week per the pacing guide, because the standards say 4th graders have to master fractions by May. If a kid masters all the 4th grade standards in October, too bad—they have to sit through the rest of the year doing extra practice sheets, because they can’t move ahead until they’ve ticked every single box on the standard checklist.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and it’s not the fault of the teachers, most of the time. We’re just working with the rules we’re given. But the end result is that millions of kids come home hating math, convinced they’re bad at it, just because they can’t jump through all the hoops the standards lay out.
So what do you do about it as a parent? I don’t march into the principal’s office and demand a full rewrite of the state standards, that’s for sure. That’s not something most of us have time for. What I do at home with Jax, and what I tell parents to try at conferences, is small, concrete stuff that makes a big difference.
First, separate what the school needs for a grade from what your kid actually needs to learn math. When Jax has to write three paragraphs about adding fractions, we knock that out together in 10 minutes. We don’t argue about it, we don’t agonize over word count, we just write what we need to write to get the points. That 10 minutes is just checking the box the school requires. Then we spend 15 minutes doing actual math that sticks. Last week, that meant doubling our chocolate chip cookie recipe. Jax had to convert 3/4 of a cup of flour to 1 1/2, add that to the 1/2 cup we already needed for the vanilla, and figure out how many total cups that was. No writing required, just him solving a real problem he cared about. He got more practice adding fractions in those 10 minutes of baking than he would have gotten in an hour of writing paragraphs.
Second, if your kid is getting bad grades not because they don’t get the math, but because they aren’t checking all the standard boxes, ask for a skill check. Most teachers don’t want to fail a kid who knows the material, they’re just following the rubric. Email the teacher and say, “My kid can solve all these types of problems correctly at home—would you be willing to give them a 5-question quick quiz to prove they know the skill?” Nine times out of ten, the teacher will say yes. If your kid is ahead and stuck doing work they already master, ask to test out of the unit. That’s what the mom of Jax’s friend did last year, and the school let him skip a full grade level of math once he proved he knew all the skills.
Last week, Jax got that fractions worksheet back with a B. The teacher wrote that his answers were all correct, but his explanation was too short, so he lost points. I didn’t email to argue. I know she’s just following the rules. We baked our cookies that night anyway, and Jax got to add an extra half cup of chocolate chips, which he counted as a win. I don’t know if state math standards were intentionally designed for failure, but I know the way they work right now leaves a lot of kids behind. It’s a messy system, and there’s no quick fix for it. But for now, checking the boxes fast and doing the real math on our own time works pretty well for us.
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