2022

Inside the new middle school math crisis

December 30, 2022

While other grades recover, middle schoolers are still in freefall. Two Virginia schools are bucking the trend.

It was a Thursday morning in November, a few minutes into Ruby Voss’s and Amber Benson’s eighth-grade math class at Northside Middle School just outside Roanoke, a city of roughly 100,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thursdays are spent in review in preparation for tests each Friday. The teachers posted a question on-screen — “What’s the slope of the equation below?” — and gave students a few minutes to answer it. The room grew loud as students jostled into line to bring their completed graphs to the front, where Voss separated them into two groups: Those who got the right answer wrote their initials on a touch screen up front, and those who answered incorrectly went to Benson for additional help.

It was a public exercise, with the whole class watching. Each Monday, the class does something equally public: Teachers review test performances, with charts showing the group’s recent performance and that of each student. “The whole class will either go ‘yay’ or ‘ohhhh,’ depending on how the class did,” Voss said.

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