Are State Math Standards Designed for Failure? A Middle School Teacher’s Honest Take
Last Tuesday I stayed after school to go over a unit test with Mia, a 7th grader who draws cats in the margin of every notebook page and always turns her homework in on time. She scored a 58. She picked at a loose fray on her gray hoodie while we spread the test across my desk, and finally mumbled, “I get it when we do it step by step together. Why don’t the test questions look like anything we practiced? Did I just forget how to do math?”
I’ve been teaching middle school math at a public school just outside Cleveland for 12 years. I have this conversation at least five times every fall. After Mia packed up her things, her dad waited to talk to me, leaning against the doorframe with a printed copy of our state’s 7th grade math standards he’d pulled up online that morning. He pointed to a line item about proportional relationships and asked me straight out: “Is this thing actually designed for most kids to fail?”
It’s a question I get all the time from parents, and even from newer teachers. I don’t think the answer is a simple yes, but I also don’t think it’s a simple no. Let me tell you what I see, day in and day out.
The state’s 7th grade math standards list 29 separate skill requirements, most with two or three sub-skills tucked under each. To hit every requirement before the state test in mid-spring, my district gives me a day-to-day scope and sequence that leaves almost no room for slowing down. Last month, I had to cut two full days of the hands-on fraction activities I’ve used for a decade— the ones where kids cut paper strips to see why adding unlike denominators needs a common denominator, instead of just memorizing a rule. We were already three days behind, so the activities had to go. That’s the first crack: standards pack so many requirements into every grade that we can’t teach for depth. We rush through topics to check boxes, and kids leave with surface-level knowledge that falls apart on tricky test questions.
The next issue is how standards get translated into test questions. The standard for proportional relationships just says kids need to analyze and solve problems with them. That’s a reasonable expectation. But when state test writers turn that into a question, they wrap the core skill in three or four extra layers to “increase rigor.” Last year’s state test had a proportional relationship question that started with three paragraphs about a small business tracking weekend t-shirt sales, asked kids to convert between inches and yards for the print size, calculate a 12% bulk discount, then compare two different pricing models to find which gives a higher profit. A kid can understand proportions perfectly, get tripped up converting units, and get the entire question wrong. That’s what happened to Mia on her unit test. She can solve a single-step proportion problem cold, but she froze up trying to unpack the 4-sentence word problem and left the whole thing blank.
Mia’s mom told me after that she’s been paying for a tutor twice a week, and the tutor says Mia has no trouble with the core skills. No one can figure out why her test scores don’t match what she actually knows. That’s the part that makes me think the system is set up to produce more low scores than it should, even if that wasn’t the original goal. When you tie standards to high-stakes tests that need a certain number of failing scores to justify interventions or school ratings, you end up with questions that test test-taking skills more than actual math ability.
So what do we do about it, right now, while we wait for policy to change? I’ve started making small shifts in my classroom, and I tell parents to do the same at home. Two years ago, I sat down and mapped out the 5 non-negotiable skills for each unit that kids actually need for next year’s math. I don’t try to drill every minor standard deeply. For example, 7th grade has a standard about finding the area of composite irregular shapes. I spend one day on that, not three, because if a kid doesn’t master that specific skill, it won’t break their progress in algebra next year. I put that extra time into solidifying proportions and integer operations, the skills that matter for everything that comes after.
For parents, the first concrete step I tell them is to separate “does my kid know the skill” from “did they get a good grade on this test.” Next time your kid brings home a bad math test, flip through and pull out a couple of the core skills the test was supposed to measure. If it was a proportion unit, ask them to show you how to solve 3/4 = x/12, or how to find what 15% of $80 is. If they can do that, they know the skill. The low grade isn’t a reflection of their math ability—it’s a reflection of a bad test question or a rushed unit. Then, instead of drilling 20 different skills for hours a week, ask their teacher what the top 3 non-negotiable skills are for their grade level, and practice 10 minutes of those three times a week. That’s way more useful than trying to cover every random standard on the list.
After our conference, Mia and her parents tried this. They cut back on the extra tutoring work that covered all the minor standards, and just did 10 minutes of proportion and equation practice three nights a week. Last week, Mia scored an 85 on our core skill quiz, and drew a little cat wearing an “A” sticker on the top corner.
Are state math standards designed for failure? I don’t think the people who wrote them set out to make kids fail. They wanted higher expectations for all kids, which is a good goal. But the current structure of too many skills, no room for flexibility, and a test system that rewards convoluted questions over actual mastery sets too many kids up to leave math class thinking they’re bad at it, even when they know what they need to know.
Policy changes move slow, and nothing has shifted much in my classroom in the last decade. For now, we just keep focusing on what actually matters, one skill at a time. Mia still gets nervous before big tests, but she doesn’t pick at that loose thread on her hoodie half as much when we go over work now. We’ll see how she does on the state test in spring, but right now, she knows she can do math. That’s enough for me.
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