New Report Looks to Move Beyond ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’ in the Math Wars
The Center on Reinventing Public Education says educators should look critically at all research, calls for huge new study on best teaching practices.
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Educators seeking to improve their schools’ math offerings should look critically at state and other recommendations to determine what works — and what doesn’t — inside their own classrooms, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
The group also calls for a massive study of existing research to help identify best practices, noting the last such effort was undertaken 20 years ago.
ʷ’s , released today, tracks the traditional teacher-centered approach and the reform movement, which calls for student-led learning.
The research organization does not choose a side, but it does note that recent efforts to retool math education often call for a mix of the two. It also pays particular attention to the “science of math,” which gained traction in the early 2020s and argues that math instruction should be guided by empirical research and cognitive science while relying more on orderly, explicit classroom instruction.
Mathematics has been a major educational concern for years with renewed attention after the pandemic. American students have , a trend that only worsened after COVID shutdowns.
“This is a national priority that needs to be answered,” said Alexander Kurz, a senior fellow at CRPE and the report’s author. “In the absence of consensus, the guide urges educators to evaluate competing claims as they arrive at their schools and to anchor decisions in a clear-eyed look at what’s actually happening in their classrooms.”
The report comes as more than a dozen states have passed legislation aimed at improving math education, in some ways following the state-driven initiatives that were built around the science of reading.
Some, like New York, are calling for of the way math is taught — with little explanation of what might change — while others have already chosen a pathway forward.
California approved a revised math framework three years ago and in November 2025 adopted 64 programs at the K-8 level to help students reach those goals.
recently adopted new math standards for the first time in 15 years while is in the process of revamping its K-12 efforts to ensure more coherence across grades.
last fall and to gauge how they want to boost student proficiency.
As state-level plans unfold, individual cities are taking their own steps to strengthen student performance, meeting with mixed success.
New York City’s efforts have proved cumbersome, with the new administration . Boston is trying its own approach with while are using traditional and non-traditional means — including math field trips — to improve student engagement.
CRPE urges educators looking for new ideas to consider related studies critically, noting they often do not encompass a wide student group. As a result, their recommendations might not work in all cases.
“We should always approach these studies with a healthy skepticism,” said Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, who helped craft some of the CRPE report’s recommendations. “Something that might work with a particular group of students in a particular context may not work in another situation.”
Some groups, among them, have fallen even further behind their peers in math in recent years.
An cites that on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students widened significantly after 2017. Higher-scoring kids started to rebound after the pandemic in 2024, but those in the 10th and 25th percentiles suffered steep and lasting losses.
CRPE points out that the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, composed of 24 expert members who reviewed more than 16,000 research publications and policy reports, marked the last nationwide effort to improve student performance in the subject as detailed in its
“Addressing core Math Wars debates, the NMAP deemed the conflict between conceptual understanding and procedural fluency ‘misguided’, concluding that the two are mutually supportive,” the report found. “The panel also explicitly stated that high-quality research does not support exclusive reliance on either ‘teacher-directed’ or ‘student-centered’ instruction.”
CRPE argues now is the time for an updated look at this high-stakes question.
“A new national mathematics advisory effort could revisit the earlier panel’s questions while incorporating nearly two decades of new developments in mathematics education, special education, cognitive psychology, developmental science, and the learning sciences,” the report states.
“Its aim should not be to declare winners and losers in the Math Wars, but to produce clearer, more transparent guidance on what is known, what remains open to further inquiry, and where practitioners can implement confidently.”
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