Nationally, graduation rates have rebounded from their dips during the height of the pandemic. But high school math proficiency is much lower.
That mismatch means schools are likely sending graduates out into college and the workforce without the math skills they need to succeed, argues a new analysis from the Collaborative for Student Success, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
“This is the type of thing that a lot of people intuitively understand,” said Chad Aldeman, an independent education analyst who authored the research.
“They know that graduation rates are doing well, maybe hitting highs in their state. There’s also been a lot of coverage of the math declines. This won’t shock people,” he said. “What will shock people, and what shocked me, was the size of the gap.”
While most states have graduation rates between 80-95%, math proficiency is most often below 50%. (There’s a wide range in how states measure high school math proficiency, with states relying on different tests taken in middle school, 9th, 10th, or 11th grades.)
Math test scores are only one signal of students’ readiness for post-secondary life. Most states require that students complete prescribed numbers of courses across a variety of subjects, with only six requiring that students pass state exit exams.
But the gap means that diplomas may be giving students false assurances about their readiness for higher education, Aldeman said. “For kids who are in the college-ready track or mean to be on the college-ready track, these scores really do matter,” he said.
The concern over math skills is “well-placed,” said Robert Balfanz, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and the director of the Everyone Graduates Center there.
National data have shown high school math scores continuing to fall below pandemic-era dips.
Still, graduating from high school has never been a standalone signal of college readiness, Balfanz said.
“We’re always going to have kids getting diplomas who just met the minimum requirements,” he said. “Unless we say we’re going to raise the minimum so that you can’t leave high school unless you’re college ready, we’re always going to have a gap.”
What should a high school diploma signal?
Math teachers say they feel this tension, between ensuring that their students are prepared for next steps and understanding that post-graduation pathways might look different for everyone.
“We’ve seen an explosion since the pandemic of lower numeracy, lower math skills,” said Sarah Murmann, a high school math teacher at Crystal Lake South High School in Crystal Lake, Ill.
Her current students were in 7th grade during COVID-era remote learning. Some of them are missing basic algebraic skills. They struggle to graph a line or explain what slope means.
Some of these students might not be “graduation-ready,” she said. But others have the math foundations they need to work toward filling these skill gaps, she said. “I still think they can be ready for the outside world.”
Even if students haven’t met a proficiency standard on an 11th grade math test, for example, a high school diploma still offers some important signals, Balfanz said. “You have the perseverance to take all of those classes and do passing work. That’s not nothing.”
This “academic consistency” is a predictor of success in postsecondary education, Balfanz said. Also key is some measure of academic ability, but that doesn’t have to be represented in state test scores, he said. It could look like success in an Advanced Placement course, he offered as an example.
Raising student math achievement is an important goal, but the solution isn’t to hold back all students who don’t meet a state’s proficiency benchmark, in Balfanz’s view. Graduating from high school provides real benefits, he said—adults with high school diplomas have better health and earn more on average than those without.
It’s a point Aldeman acknowledges. “Unlike other gaps, you wouldn’t necessarily want, as a policy, that this would be 0,” he said. “We want kids to graduate. And some states set the bar really high for math proficiency.”
In an essay for The 74, he outlined other options states could use to narrow the gap—measuring math proficiency through standardized end-of-course tests so that testing is aligned to what students learned during the year, or awarding different types of diplomas for students who are and are not college-ready.
The latter suggestion concerns Balfanz, who said that lower-scoring students are already often blocked from taking the kind of higher-level courses that could help them demonstrate readiness for college-level work. “If we start with differentiated diplomas, we’re just going to go back to the old tracking,” he said.
Ultimately, though, the problem doesn’t begin in high school, said Aldeman. States should aim to strengthen math instruction earlier in the pipeline, he said.
It’s already a growing focus, with at least 10 states passing legislation requiring or recommending early screening and intervention for math difficulties over the past four years.
In many states, Aldeman said, proficiency rates are highest in 3rd grade. “It’s not that kids are getting worse or forgetting math, it’s that the bar rises and they can’t meet it.”