‘Data days’ and longer math classes: How one district is improving math
scores
Alabama’s Piedmont City schools added more time for math instruction and
began to gather teachers monthly to examine student math performance.
<a href="https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://hechingerreport.org/data-days-and-longer-math-casses-how-one-district-is-improving-math-scores/">link</a>
While the rest of the country’s schools were losing ground in math during the COVID pandemic, students in a small rural Alabama school district soared.
This story also appeared in AL.com and The Associated Press
Piedmont City schools landed in the top spot among all school districts nationwide in a comparison of math scores in 2019 and 2022.
Other Alabama school districts fared well, too, but Piedmont, a small, 1,100-student district where 7 out of 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, stood out. Nationwide, students are on average half a year behind in math, researchers say.
Schools nationwide are scrambling to find ways to recover unfinished learning over the past three years, using federal relief money to hire interventionists to work with students and placing students in high-dose tutoring sessions after school and during the summer.
Piedmont has pursued an approach it began before the pandemic: It focused on changing its regular school day and working with its current staff.
Superintendent Mike Hayes said two keys for success have been giving teachers more regular time to dig into student data and increasing instructional time where math teachers can focus on specific skills.
“We made a total transformation about five years ago,” he said, “where we decided that we were going to let data make every decision as far as instructional changes were concerned. And that we were going to involve the teachers, and that it was going to be a collaborative effort and we were going to drill down as minutely as we could.”
Math teacher Cheyenne Crider helps a seventh-grade student with a math problem at Piedmont Middle School in Piedmont, Ala., on Aug. 31, 2023. Credit: Trisha Powell Crain/ AL.com
Rebecca Dreyfus, with TNTP, a national nonprofit devoted to helping schools improve student learning, helps teachers apply best practices from research to the classroom.
Dreyfus said targeted instruction for small groups of students has years of research and evidence to back it up as an effective way for teachers to teach and students to learn. Pinpointing what skills need shoring up – and using systematic and explicit instruction, as backed up by the “science of math” – makes it even more effective.
“The short answer is that using data effectively and efficiently to plan and monitor instruction is always going to make instruction better for kids,” Dreyfus said.
Related: The science of reading swept reforms into classrooms. What about math?
Because math is a subject that builds on itself year after year, teachers need to make sure students, even those who are struggling, are keeping up with grade level learning.
The Math Problem
Sluggish growth in math scores for U.S. students began long before the pandemic, but the problem has snowballed into an education crisis. This back-to-school-season, the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, will be documenting the enormous challenge facing our schools and highlighting examples of progress. The three-year-old Reporting Collaborative includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
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“You’re not just pulling kids to teach them a skill that they should have had a few years ago that is not coming back,” she said. “We’re trying to teach them something that will ensure they have access to the grade-level rigor.”
“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction.”
Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math in Piedmont City schools
A look at math scores for spring 2022 shows the district ranked twelfth in the state on math proficiency, with 57 percent of students reaching proficiency. Statewide, 30 percent of students scored proficient in math.
That’s a lot of progress over the last five years; in 2017, when Hayes took over as superintendent, Piedmont students ranked 35th in math proficiency.
“Once we made that decision and stuck to it and made changes and allowed our teachers time to look at the data and dive into the data, it paid off,” Hayes said.
Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety
Hayes said his team knew that if they wanted teachers to use student data well they needed to give teachers more time to dig in and analyze the numbers.
So they made the school day longer and freed up enough full days to allow for “data days,” Hayes said.
Every four weeks, teachers get together to examine student data.
Piedmont Elementary School in Piedmont, Alabama. Aug. 31, 2023. Credit: Trisha Powell Crain/ AL.com
“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the wea
