Deborah Loewenberg Ball is quoted in a September 12, 2022, Detroit News article on the decline in math proficiency scores for Detroit students. According to data from the 2022 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as M-STEP, only 10% of the Detroit district’s third-grade students were proficient or higher on the exam, down from pre-pandemic levels of 16% in 2018–2019. For seventh-graders, the percentage dropped from 8.8% to 7.2%. Statewide math scores on Michigan’s state standardized test were also down this year for every grade level compared with scores in 2019 before the pandemic hit.
But Loewenberg Ball pushes back against the narrative that lower test scores mean students have had learning loss in math. “They’ve lost school math,” Loewenberg Ball told The Detroit News. “School has a very narrow view of math. It comes down to what we test. It’s not what kids would be doing at home with families,” Loewenberg Ball said. “We don’t know very much about what kids were doing (at home) that is mathematical. We value what is done in school. This is a larger question about what we want kids to do in math.”
Rather than attempting to teach a full year of remedial work, Loewenberg Ball says teachers need real support to truly help students overcome gaps in knowledge. “You can bundle in layers. Math is taught in a linear way,” Loewenberg Ball said. “It’s going to be helping (teachers) see how they can fill in missed opportunities in a more expedient way…It is time to rethink this. We need to pivot. We can’t do the same things we did before.”
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