Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) plans to address lack of growth in students’ math skills by holding continuing training for teachers, district staff told the county school board Thursday.
“We know we have work to do,” Peggy Pugh, MCPS chief academic officer, said during the board’s meeting at MCPS headquarters in Rockville.
According to several state tests, MCPS students made marginal gains in math skills last school year, and the district continues to face demographic disparities. While sixth graders and students taking Algebra 1 made small increases in their Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) math test scores from the 2022-2023 school year, third graders’ math scores decreased by roughly 3 percentage points, according to information presented by MCPS staff on Thursday.
According to the staff presentation, the district set a goal to have 81.4% of students meet Evidence of Learning attainment in math for the 2023-2024 school year. The Evidence of Learning framework utilizes several measures, including state testing, district progress tests and report card grades to determine student success, according to the MCPS website. If students meet two out of the three measurement categories, they are ready for the next grade level.
Only 60.7% of Montgomery County Public School students met Evidence of Learning requirements for the prior school year. Demographic disparities continue, with Asian and white students earning Evidence of Learning scores in the 80% range, while 50.9% of Black or African American students and 41.7% of Hispanic/Latino students met the Evidence of Learning expectations.
Sheila Berlinger, supervisor of elementary math for MCPS, said improvement is about knowing the math and knowing the students.
“How we learned math is different from how we’re expecting students to learn math,” Berlinger said. “So not only do we have to, as adults, learn how to teach it differently, we then have to hold students accountable for it.”
To make an impact on math scores, Jennifer Loznak, MCPS supervisor of secondary math, said the district has been providing more professional learning opportunities for teachers and administrators.
The district offered professional learning for school administrators last summer so they can better understand the curriculum and how to monitor progress within their schools, Loznak said. The district also has 12 math coaches to help teachers understand the teaching methods.
Schools have also been utilizing instructional materials such as Eureka Math and Illustrative Math, Loznak said.
Berlinger said improvements “rest on the adults [who] are in the classroom,” so the district needs to provide them with tools to be successful.
Some schools, such as Flower Hill Elementary School in Gaithersburg, have seen some improvements. Flower Hill Principal Joshua Fine said the school utilized an elementary math coach and summer curriculum training to help teachers and administrators with planning protocols, which led to some student growth in math in their MCAP scores last year.
Several board members noted that parents are struggling to help their children with math because they also learned how to do math differently than the way it is currently taught.
The staff members said some of the resources that students use also provide instructions for parents. For younger children, Pugh said talking about numbers in everyday life can help build mathematical thinking. Loznak encouraged parents of older students to ask their children how far they can get into solving problems by using the method their teacher taught them and then see if there’s a connection to the way the parent learned it.
“Parents if you can talk about the why and the how of your method, I think it would help students,” Loznak said. “It might not be directly how they’re learning it, but eventually the teacher is coming around to different ways to solve problems, and that will be one of them.”
