How System Leaders Can Intentionally Design to Build Math Identity

By: Beth Davis-Dillard

The United States is navigating a math crisis. In 2024, only 39% of fourth graders and 28% of eighth graders were proficient in math on the NAEP. While these figures are influenced by multiple socioeconomic and institutional factors, they highlight a persistent tension in American classrooms: a tendency to prioritize speed and correctness over deep conceptual understanding. After decades of reform churn—from rote memorization to the Math Wars—today’s math education landscape requires a coherent, system-wide strategy to create a sustainable path forward.

In my work with district leaders, I’ve found that coherence involves much more than aligning pacing guides or purchasing a new curriculum. It also often involves a gap between the way we teach and the way a student sees themselves as a mathematical thinker. To move forward, we must ensure our instructional design prioritizes a student’s math identity as much as their test scores.

The Invisible Barrier: One Reason Why Math Gaps Persist

We hold fundamentally different expectations for how children acquire literacy versus how they master math. In literacy, adults rarely admit to struggling with reading. And we try to mitigate any potential struggle through early engagement, from singing to bedtime stories. Math, however, is treated differently. When a child struggles with math, the response is often that it is okay because “some people just aren’t math people.”  This sends an incredibly damaging message: that math ability is a fixed trait, rather than something that can be built through effective instruction and application opportunities. If we want to change student outcomes, we must start by shifting the mindsets of the adults.

Reframing the Educator’s Role

Instructional shifts begin with the teacher’s own math identity. A teacher’s comfort level with the material dictates the level of inquiry they allow in the classroom. When a teacher understands the logic behind the math, they move beyond a procedural script and lead instruction from a place of confidence and expertise.

This shift helps normalize the idea that struggle is a natural part of learning math. Even professional mathematicians make mistakes as they work through new ideas, and in a high-functioning classroom, mistakes should be treated as assets to learn from and discuss rather than something to hide.

Designing for Intellectual Preparation and Accessibility

System leaders should provide the space for teachers to engage in intellectual preparation. This differs from traditional lesson planning; it requires teachers to solve the problems themselves to anticipate where students might struggle and where the conceptual breakthroughs will happen.

Take a problem like 36 + 59. There are a variety of ways this problem can be solved using mental math or algorithms. When teachers anticipate the different ways students might solve this, they can move beyond just ‘checking for the right answer.’ They become facilitators of learning, prepared with the right questions to push the whole class’s thinking forward.

This level of preparation is what makes low floor, high ceiling tasks possible. It ensures every student can enter the work, regardless of their starting point. We see this in practice through:

• Multiple entry points: Imagine a middle school class analyzing a lava flow traveling 1.25 meters every 5 seconds. To calculate evacuation times, some students might start by estimating, while others build complex ratio tables. Both are doing the real work of proportional reasoning—just from different starting points. This approach allows a student using physical manipulatives to work right alongside a peer using a complex algorithm, with both contributing to the same mathematical goal.
• Visible thinking: In one early-grade classroom, students solved 36 + 59. One student counted by tens; another decomposed the numbers (30 + 50 and 6 + 9) to find 95. The teacher used these different paths to show the class how numbers can be flexibly broken apart. Belonging was built through shared ownership of the “how,” not just the “what.”
• Peer learning: When students explain their thinking, they learn that their peers’ strategies are as valuable as the teacher’s “official” method. This builds a classroom culture where the authority of knowledge is shared.

Assessment as a Diagnostic Tool

A system designed for math identity requires us to rethink how we assess student understanding. Traditional tests often check only for right or wrong at a single point in time. To foster growth, we need formative assessments that examine how a student’s understanding is evolving.

This happens when teachers ask questions like, ‘Can you show me how you counted?’ or ‘Where do you see that in your drawing? Prompting students to label their work (e.g., identifying tens and ones) signals that we value their reasoning as much as the result. This allows teachers to catch and address misconceptions before they turn into long-term frustrations. 

Moving Toward Systemic Coherence

True proficiency is defined by five interconnected strands: conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and a productive mindset. Building this requires a coherent ecosystem that includes:

• Shared visions: District leaders, coaches, and teachers must align on what high-quality math actually looks like in the classroom.
• Sustained coaching: Investing in job-embedded training where teachers can rehearse lessons and analyze student work together.
• Logical progressions: Mapping concepts so that a misunderstanding in third grade doesn’t become a roadblock in eighth.

The math crisis is a design problem. By building systems that prioritize identity and reasoning alongside fluency, we can ensure every student leaves school as a confident, capable thinker. The solution lies in creating a coherent ecosystem where every student has the evidence they need to believe they are a math person.

Beth Davis-Dillard is Senior Director of Curriculum at Lavania Group, a division of K12 Coalition. With nearly two decades in education, she has served as a teacher, principal, and network leader across charter and district schools in New York City and Los Angeles.