In DeKalb County, Ala., elementary school math classes have gotten noisy.
In a good way.
Instead of worksheets and textbooks, children practice adding and subtracting with tiny toy bears. They multiply with plastic blocks and learn fractions using multi-colored magnetic tiles.
Here, math fits in the palm of your hand – just one sign of a countywide re-imagining of elementary school math instruction that has led to dramatic student improvement between 2019 and 2024. Which is all the more remarkable considering five years ago, the pandemic brought education in the U.S. to a grinding halt and, in many places, achievement still hasn't rebounded.
Today, DeKalb is part of a statewide success story in math: Alabama is the only state where 4th-grade math scores are higher now than they were in 2019, before the pandemic.
At a time when President Donald Trump is working to close the U.S. Department of Education in order "to move education into the states," Alabama's math turnaround shows states already have control of their educational destinies.
"A model for how districts can accelerate student learning in math"
DeKalb County sits in the northeast corner of Alabama. It's rural, tucked into the shadow of Lookout Mountain, with a majority of students living in lower-income households and 1 in 4 are English language learners.
The county's claim to fame: It's home to the country music band Alabama and James Dean. Not the 1950s era actor – the one who created the children's book star Pete the Cat.
"You know, we have a high poverty rate, but we have high pride," says DeKalb County Schools Superintendent Wayne Lyles. And the school district has a lot to be proud of.
While many districts across the country saw math achievement tumble during the pandemic, scores in DeKalb County improved by the equivalent of nearly a full grade –its highest since at least 2009, according to the recent Education Recovery Scorecard, a joint venture between researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities.
In fact, the Scorecard's authors were so impressed, they highlighted DeKalb in their national report, saying the county "has become a model for how districts can accelerate student learning in math and recover from pandemic learning loss."
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The first and easiest explanation for DeKalb's success is that students returned for in-person learning in the fall of 2020, well ahead of schools in most places across the country. Research has found larger learning gaps for students who spent more time learning remotely.
But, if you ask DeKalb school leaders, they have another theory:
"We wanted to bring math alive," says Julie West, who was hired during the tumult of the pandemic to lead a districtwide math makeover.
A new roadmap for teachers, along with some toys
West grew up in Dekalb County. She went to school here. Taught math and became a principal here. Married and is raising two daughters here. A few years ago, Superintendent Wayne Lyles, worried about falling math scores, gave West her toughest job yet: Re-imagine how the district teaches math to its youngest learners.
West started by pulling together a group of district math teachers to quickly carve up their math textbooks to be more aligned with the states' math standards.
West says those early meetings included a lot of "this lesson doesn't meet our standards, this chapter's no good, this is better." And together, they built a curriculum "roadmap" for the district's teachers to lean on, complete with links to helpful videos and model lessons.
West then turned to what was happening inside classrooms. She worried that too many teachers in the early grades were turning too quickly to pencil-and-paper worksheets or rote memorization in their efforts to teach math.
Children are commonly taught to add, subtract and even multiply two numbers by stacking them, one on top of the other. Maybe they'll need to borrow, or carry the 1. This is called using the standard algorithm, and West believes it's too abstract for young learners.
"Instead of working out problems and models on the page," West says, "let's get 'em out and let the kids touch them. Hold them. Manipulate them."
So, West says, the district used some of its COVID relief funding from the federal government to buy a spectrum of math tools and toys for its early-grade classrooms – from counting bears and fraction tiles to rainbow-colored measuring sticks – all so kids can feel the math.
Learning to speak fluent math
The idea behind making math concrete for early learners is that it helps build a strong foundation for later math fluency, treating math like a language.
That fluency was on full display recently in Ms. Tracy Butts' third-grade classroom.
Butts led her kids to the back of the room, where they sat on the floor, criss-cross applesauce. On the wall, on a giant sheet of paper, she'd written: "12 x 9."
The kids didn't have pencils or scratch paper. There would be no stacking or carrying the 1.
Instead, Butts told the children to put their fists on their chests and quietly raise a finger for every way they could think of to solve the problem, in their heads.
After half a minute, fingers suddenly began popping up. The kids buzzed with excitement, as did Butts: "I saw some of you found three ways!"
One child quickly interrupted: They'd found five ways! The class murmured, impressed.
One girl told Butts she'd counted by nines – 9, 18, 27 – until she'd done it 12 times and found herself at 108, the correct answer.
Another student took a different route: "I broke the 12 apart into 10 and 2."
Which means, instead of multiplying 12 x 9, they multiplied 10 x 9 and 2 x 9, both a little more manageable, then added the answers together. Once again: 108.
This exchange, known in the district as a number talk, is a judgment-free zone, where kids are encouraged to find their own way to the same answer – and seem genuinely excited doing it.
It's also what math fluency sounds like.
Investing in teachers and keeping an eye on the data
West says a big part of the math makeover in DeKalb schools was about coaching – not the students, but their teachers.
Many early-grade teachers don't get a lot of training in math – and maybe don't feel comfortable teaching it. So the district hired several math coaches to help support and elevate its teachers.
They created small learning communities, where teachers could collaborate with their peers, try out new lesson ideas and compare notes on areas of concern.
They also went all-in on Julie West's favorite four-letter word: data. (She has a t-shirt that proclaims, "data or it didn't happen.") The district has made clear: Everyone – from teachers to administrators – should be looking at student data constantly.
"When we know better, we do better. That's my favorite saying," assistant principal Lydia Peek told a small gathering of early-grade math teachers at her DeKalb school on a recent Wednesday.
The teachers sat at two long tables, picking at an assortment of candy, while Peek pulled up a trove of data from one recent math quiz. She zoomed in on the results for one 4th-grader:
"He got this one right. Then he got this one wrong," Peek told the team. "It even gives you why they might have missed it."
The district is now using data to track not only individual student performance – and to better understand when a student is struggling – but to also pick out room- and school-based patterns in student struggles. Perhaps a teacher was sick and a day of difficult fractions instruction fell to a substitute. Maybe a whole school missed two days of shape-recognition because of icy weather.
The mantra behind DeKalb's data devotion is: You can't fix a problem you don't know exists.
DeKalb teacher Tanya Ford says she appreciates the district changes.
"We've not always had that kind of support from our administrators," she says. "I mean, we didn't used to have a math coach."
Now, Ford's school has its very own math coach. "We're able to swim through it altogether," Ford says, "instead of just feeling like you're out there by yourself."
Alabama takes the math cause statewide
At roughly the same time DeKalb County began its sweeping math makeover, Alabama state leaders were also exploring some of the same ideas. In 2022, lawmakers passed the Alabama Numeracy Act, a law meant to improve mathematics profficiency among the state's elementary schoolers.
"Math, when it is properly applied, is not about just solving math problems," says the state's superintendent of education, Eric Mackey, who was a driving force behind the Numeracy Act. "Math is a way of thinking about the world. It really is the language of philosophy."
Mackey, a former science teacher, hopes to use this law to put a math coach, like Julie West, in every elementary school in the state – to support and grow great math teachers.
Several of these new, state-funded math coaches are now in place in DeKalb County, further bolstering the work the district's schools were already doing.
Mackey says he pushed Alabama lawmakers to embrace this kind of statewide math makeover because of how poorly the state ranked in math achievement. According to The Nation's Report Card, in 2019, Alabama's average score in 4th-grade math landed it in last place among all states. Now it's risen to the middle of the pack.
Karen Anderson played a big role in that. In 2022, after the Numeracy Act passed, Mackey tapped Anderson to lead the state's new Office of Math Improvement, and she began building a kind of central nervous system for this statewide makeover, including assigning a math coordinator to every region of the state.
These coordinators oversee the growing corps of state-funded math coaches who have been deploying across the state. One of Anderson's earliest challenges, she says, was convincing some local educators and administrators to change the way they think about math.
"There is just such a negative stigma about mathematics," Anderson says, "it's hard to impact anything if you know people don't like it."
Kicking off a statewide math initiative, she says, was a bit like trying to sell "a liver initiative. We've got to have you like liver and to have it be the best thing going."
One recent Friday in Birmingham, Anderson gathered in a boardroom with her entire team – a couple dozen regional math coordinators – to share and learn from their successes and failures so far.
Coordinators shared stories both inspiring and dispiriting, of students and teachers excitedly embracing this more tactile, less judgmental kind of math – and of some administrators who still see math as liver and have resisted the state's efforts to convince them otherwise.
At one point, at the end of the gathering, Anderson shifted effortlessly from top boss to cheerleader. They knew implementing the Numeracy Act would be hard, she said.
"I want to be sure that you all feel confident…" Anderson told the room, "no matter where you're going, because we're in rural districts and urban districts. We're in districts that are gonna kick up a fuss no matter what you say, and we're in districts that are going to say, 'Just tell me what to do!' "
But this is the work, Anderson told them. And the math is worth it.
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: Mhari Shaw
Audio story produced by: Janet Woojeong Lee
Copyright 2025 NPR
