Ohio recently joined states like North Carolina and Texas in adopting a math acceleration policy for high-performing students in the subject.
Beginning in 4th grade, these students will be placed in advanced math learning opportunities based on state test scores, starting with spring 2027 math scores. These will inform who will advance in the 2027-28 school year.
Schools can choose between placing students above grade level or providing differentiated instruction.
Math specialist Jodie Bailey, who works with 7th and 8th grade students at Weaver Middle School, part of Ohio's Hilliard City Schools located just west of Columbus, sees the legislation as a well-intended attempt to reduce bias in which students are moved ahead.
“But I always have concerns about using a single measure to identify students,” she said. “I would like to see the conversation continue to be around how we expand access and pathways, so we aren’t limiting students based on one test score.”
Kim Yoak, a professional development consultant for math teachers who has served as both president and executive director of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics, agreed that additional learning opportunities are often valuable, but how best to provide them is complicated.
“There is a lot of concern about the fact that one test score is not always enough to tell us if a student is ready to spend less time with grade-level content and more time with more sophisticated content,” she said.
Part of Bailey’s concerns are centered on equity, given the tendency for students from higher-income families to “test better,” lending “an implicit bias in who will score better in those tests to begin with.” She also noted that while 4th grade math focuses on multiplication, division and basic fractions, by 6th grade, students are learning proportional reasoning and building a foundation to upper-level math.
“Fourth grade feels early to make that identification for the remainder of their K-12 experience,” she said.
Yoak agreed that students from underrepresented groups tend not to score as well as their peers, which “doesn’t necessarily align with their potential or ability,” and she expressed concerns about how schools will handle the logistics of time, space, human resources and schedules involved in creating advanced math sections or differentiating instruction.
“Districts may only choose to serve the students who happened to score well at the advanced level on that single day,” she said. “Perhaps there’s another student who, on another day, might have scored as well. But if the school is trying to minimize issues with logistics, they could leave out students who might have otherwise qualified.”
Finding enough teachers with the experience and skill sets to teach students advanced math in the preteen years is still needed, Bailey said.
“If we are going down this path, how do we support teachers so we are not putting students in the position of memorizing and regurgitating information?” she said. “Are they really understanding the mathematics? We also need to be careful not to skip content or just teach it at a surface level. When you’re accelerating, you want to be careful to compact content rather than skip it.”
While the law requires the state to create an online learning module pilot for educators by December, many are concerned that those will resemble similar modules around the science of reading, because “we just constantly hear that teachers have not learned from those modules,” Yoak said. “When teachers have opportunities for high-quality professional learning … teachers learn how to structure mathematics lessons to create opportunities for extension [or] challenge within the lessons.”
