Wisconsin Lawmakers Have Ideas To Improve Math Education; Teachers, Experts Are Skeptical

By Baylor Spears, Wisconsin Examiner

December 2, 2025

At a hearing on a Republican bill to improve math education, Wisconsin lawmakers were suddenly faced with a pop quiz.

“Let’s say I went to St. Vinnie’s [thrift store], got a bat, and a ball. Okay, $1.10 for both of them. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball,” said Mitchell Nathan, a math learning sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at a November public hearing before the Assembly Education Committee. “How much was each item?”

Nathan pushed them for responses. Some lawmakers murmured it would be $1 for the bat. One added that that’s only if there is no tax included. Others didn’t respond. It was Rep. Lindee Brill (R-Sheboygan Falls) who provided the correct answer of $1.05.

Nathan told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview that he wanted lawmakers to think more concretely about math education as they consider ways to improve it.

“[Brill] got it right because she actually did the math,” Nathan told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview. “She actually sat down and carefully thought it through, instead of just reacting and applying quick numeracy… It felt like a good opportunity to just have people experience what they were talking about, so it wasn’t just all abstract. I thought it was important for me as a learning scientist to clarify that what we might know and what we might take away from legislation on the science of reading doesn’t immediately map over to mathematics.”

Lawmakers are seeking to mirror the work that they did on reading education in 2023 under Act 20, which sought to ensure schools focus on teaching the “science of reading.” The new reading law used $50 million in funding to help with costs related to curriculum and literacy coaches and established an Office of Literacy within DPI.

Lawmakers’ proposal to improve math education is more modest than the literacy efforts.

Coauthored by Rep. Karen Hurd (R-Withee) and Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), AB 615 would require schools to implement three numeracy-based tests per year for students starting in kindergarten through eighth grade.

“The goal of this legislation is to identify students who are falling behind in math and to implement corrective measures to ensure these students stay on pace with their peers,” the lawmakers wrote in a cosponsorship memo.

The bill comes as Wisconsin, like much of the country, has not recovered to pre-pandemic performance levels on math assessments.

Lawmakers expressed concern that Wisconsin students’ performance in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a congressionally mandated assessment, has declined.

In 2019, 45% of Wisconsin fourth grade students scored a proficient level on the NAEP, and in 2024, 42% scored proficient. In 2019, 41% of eighth-grade students were proficient, and in 2024, 37% were considered proficient.

Wisconsin also has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation between Black and white students. In 2024, 5% of Black fourth-grade students in Wisconsin scored at or above the proficient level in math on the NAEP as compared to 51% for their white peers.

Under lawmakers’ proposal, screenings would need to be “valid, reliable, research-based, and predictive of future mathematics achievement” and be designed to identify students who are at risk of not meeting grade-level standards. An amendment to the bill would require DPI to maintain a list of recommended numeracy screening assessments on its website.

Schools would also need to implement personal mathematics plans for each student identified as at-risk on two consecutive tests. The plan would need to include “quality math tutoring.”

Math teachers and education experts and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), however, have expressed concerns that the bill would not have the intended effect of boosting achievement.

“Numeracy” testing to measure proficiency

Republican lawmakers and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative nonprofit legal organization which recently published a paper on reforming math education in Wisconsin, are focusing on “numeracy” — just as they focused on “the science of reading,” as a way to boost achievement.

In lieu of action from lawmakers, WILL has been encouraging local school districts to adopt a model policy that seeks to “foster numeracy across all schools in the District in an effort to increase mathematical proficiency in all students.” The organization has also worked with ExcelinEd, an national education reform nonprofit group founded by Republican Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, on the effort.

In the paper, WILL defines “numeracy” as “the ability to understand and work with numbers, including place value, arithmetic operations, and their real-world relevance.”

“When students are numerate, they are able to use math in everyday life, not just in the classroom,” a WILL memo states.

Eric Kuennen, a mathematics professor at UW-Oshkosh who spends time teaching future math teachers, said WILL is using a good definition of “numeracy.” He said it touches on ensuring students can “comprehend mathematical concepts, operations and relations” and are able to do “procedures flexibly and appropriately” as well as building “logical thought, reflection, explanation, critical thinking and problem solving” skills.

Kuennen said, however, he is concerned about whether everyone has the same interpretation of numeracy and cautioned against making comparisons between “numeracy” and the “science of reading.”

“With a more narrow focus, [numeracy] can be more concerned [with] just knowing about facts — knowing your addition tables… or being able to do a procedure,” Kuennen said. He also said that “mathematical reasoning and reading literacy are very different things, and our math education experts are aware of that.”

“What may work well for reading and literacy is not what is necessarily going to work well for mathematical literacy or numeracy,” he said.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction identified a similar concern in opposing the bill.

“We do not believe the answer to improving math outcomes lies in creating state laws in a construct that is like 2023 Wisconsin Act 20. The body of research around improving math, and existing state actions around math improvement, are not the same as state-led efforts to improve reading,” the agency stated.

The current DPI math standards were adopted in 2021 with the input of teachers and other stakeholders to provide a teaching framework centered on reasoning, procedural fluency and conceptual understanding, according to the agency.

The bill would require elementary and middle school students through the eighth grade to take three additional tests a year including one before day 30 of the school term, one in the middle of the term and one no later than 45 days before the last day of school. Those tests would need to focus on numeracy.

Kuennen said testing is a “double-edged sword” that is needed to assess learning but can get in the way of learning as students and teachers may feel more pressure to train for performance on tests rather than focus on learning.

Nathan of UW-Madison said the approach in the bill is worrying to him because a legal emphasis on numeracy could hinder students’ math education. He said there needs to be a balance.

“I think we would be in terrible error as a state if we said we’re not going to let kids study other more advanced ideas until they achieve some mastery level numeracy,” Nathan said, adding that the state should not act as a “gatekeeper” of other math like trigonometry and calculus.

Nathan, who noted his comments are his personal views based on his research and experience and not the positions of UW-Madison, told the Examiner that numeracy is a “core building block” of math education and that Wisconsin schools are “absolutely” already teaching it.

“We are doing numeracy, and we do a pretty good job with numeracy,” Nathan said. “Why we have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels is not a simple thing to answer, and it’s almost certainly not going to go away or turn around the other direction just because we do more assessing.”

Funding pressures

Several math education experts and teachers expressed gratitude that lawmakers are discussing the issue, but said they are concerned that lawmakers are just giving schools an unfunded mandate that will do little to advance math education.

Kuennen said he was surprised by the content of the bill. Having read WILL’s paper, he said the organization presented “great information” and “really good recommendations,” but the proposed bill leaves a big gap between the two.

In addition to early screening, WILL has recommended that schools implement more targeted teacher training, flexible coaching models to support math instruction and regular reporting of math achievement.

“There’s nothing in [the bill] about supporting teacher professional development. There’s nothing in there about funding teacher professional development, or funding having math coaches in elementary school,” Kuennen said. “This bill seems like it’s just an unfunded mandate for schools to implement additional testing. The irony is that the motivation for this bill is that our students are testing poorly, so our recommendation is to do more student testing. We already know the problems and we know the solutions, but I think the real issue is the solutions that work costs money.”

Republican lawmakers and supporters of the bill have cited successes in other states as they urge Wisconsin to take action, including by advancing the bill. At least seven states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia and West Virginia, have implemented new laws related to numeracy and math education.

Alabama has seen the most growth in the nation for math scores in recent years. Its growth comes after years of low NAEP results, including a ranking of 52 — at the bottom of U.S. states and territories — in fourth-grade math in 2019. The state passed a law in 2022 that overhauled its math education. In recent years it has jumped up rankings to 32nd, with students nearing national averages. Alabama is the only state whose math scores have reached its pre-pandemic levels.

Wisconsin’s fourth-grade students were above the national average for math proficiency and its eighth-grade students ranked third on the NAEP in 2024.

Nathan said the legislators’ use of the Alabama/Wisconsin comparison was a great example of the need to dive deeper into the math concepts they are considering.

“If you’re really low to start, you have a lot of room to move up, and if you’re scoring quite high, you don’t have a lot of room to move up, so those are important contexts in which to interpret these numbers” Nathan said. He added that “what Alabama is doing — which is seemingly helping Alabama a great deal — is backed by a lot of money.”

Alabama’s Numeracy Act adopted in 2022 was expansive — replacing the state standards, establishing an Office of Mathematics Improvement, providing new instructional materials, implementing professional development for teachers and hiring elementary math coaches as well as monitoring student progress and offering summer school to struggling students. As of 2025, Alabama’s increased its investment in its initiative by $27 million, bringing its overall investment to $95 million.

Unlike the literacy overhaul, the current math proposal from Wisconsin lawmakers doesn’t include any funding.

A Department of Public Instruction fiscal estimate warned the bill would create ongoing fiscal pressures for local school districts and the state agency.

“Because the bill lacks dedicated funding or reimbursement mechanisms, implementation would rely on existing budgets to be absorbed within existing resources,” the estimate stated. “While the precise financial effect is indeterminate, the bill’s long-range fiscal implications include sustained cost growth, resource diversion and possible equity challenges across districts.”

Local school districts would incur costs related to screening administration, data management, tutoring provision and plan development, and those districts with lower proficiency rates would face added costs for creating math achievement plans.

DPI would have to handle recurring costs to develop, update and maintain the tutoring provider database, public reporting systems, and model achievement plan as well as to provide professional development and technical assistance.

Republican lawmakers and Will Flanders, WILL’s education research director, have acknowledged that the bill would not be as expansive as the literacy law.

“Folks are questioning whether this is sufficient enough intervention,” Flanders said at the public hearing. “There is wisdom in starting with a little bit of a lighter hand because we’re not quite as bad in math as we are in reading.”

However, math education stakeholders are skeptical that implementing more testing will do much for teachers and students.

“If this is the first step, I don’t think it’s the right first step. It’s telling us things we already know,” Kuennen said. “I think a good first step would be to ask the DPI, what’s really needed, and ask the teachers and schools in Wisconsin what’s needed.”

Kuennen said the math education crisis is not new in the U.S. and that the state “shouldn’t panic and do something just to do something” and that Wisconsin has an active community of mathematicians, educators and professional organizations, all who are concerned with math education in the state.

From his perspective, the state needs a “balanced, measured approach that listens to all the experts we have in our state and the needs of the teachers — talk to the teachers, talk to the districts, see what they need and then work to change the priorities, the funding priorities of the state.” Specifically, Kuennen said schools need more time and more money.

“We need it to be a higher paying job so we can recruit and retain more high-quality teachers. They need time to plan during the school day. They need time to meet with their fellow teachers to collaborate. They need time to meet with students one on one. They need more time to have dedicated to math lessons,” Kuennen said. “The real solutions are more time and more money.”

Jennifer Lawler, coordinator of secondary mathematics and science for Kenosha Unified School District and president-elect of Wisconsin Mathematics Council, noted in written testimony that 71% of school districts lost state funding in the 2025-26 school year and the requirements in the bill would further stretch budgets and time constraints.

“While some students require additional time and support to achieve at grade level, the provisions for ‘quality math tutoring’ are vague and appear to be an effort to funnel taxpayer money into private, unregulated tutoring companies and/or unproven Al tutoring programs which school districts can ill afford,” Lawler wrote. “The additional testing requirements and the required time for tutoring would also further reduce students’ opportunity to learn science and social studies, as well as engage in fine arts and physical education.”

Nathan said there are many reasons why performance has not rebounded to what it was before the pandemic. One key concern he identified is the turnover of teachers during and after the pandemic.

“We’ve lost a lot of teachers who had a lot of experience,” Nathan said. “As a state, we have made it less appealing to be a public education teacher than used to be the case. We’ve taken away a lot of rights and benefits and also just publicly come out, blaming teachers for a lot of problems.”

Kuennen said there will not be a “quick fix” to the state’s math education troubles. He pointed to the efforts of Winskill Elementary School, which saw over 80% of students who were advanced or meeting expectations in math in 2025 after bringing in math coaches and taking other steps to help improve math education. Along with local districts that are taking their own step, DPI has said it is working to improve math education in the state.

DPI has said it is working on a statewide plan to provide guidance to school districts on math that will include recommendations for elevating number sense and operation sense, implementing high quality math instructional materials, providing interventions and more learning opportunities, implementing systems to track student progress and building math identities for students and elementary educators.

“You can’t just do one thing. You can’t just say, ‘OK, what’s missing is this numeracy screening or what’s missing is this particular book or anything,” Kuennen said. “It’s really a cultural shift in how elementary school teaching is structured.”

The Wisconsin Examiner, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site, offers a fresh perspective on state politics and policy through investigative reporting and daily coverage dedicated to the public interest. The Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and a coalition of donors and readers.