EdTech Institute

5 min read

The numbers are changing in Washington, D.C. Between 2003 and 2024, the percentage of fourth graders scoring at basic or above on the NAEP math assessment climbed from 36% to 67%. But beneath that upward trajectory lies something more revealing than test scores. It’s what happens when we admit that math failure was never about ability at all.

Washington, D.C. has spent two decades systematically rebuilding how classroom/”>edtechinstitute.com/2026/02/28/why-ai-doesnt-need-a-mind-to-matter/”>students experience mathematics, and the results are starting to show. According to K-12 Dive, the city’s 4th graders now perform just 3 points below the national average on NAEP math assessments and 3 points above the average for public schools in large U.S. cities. On the 2025 citywide math assessment, proficiency rates increased across all grade bands: from 28.4% to 31.2% in grades 3-5, from 22.4% to 26.4% in grades 6-8, and from 11.4% to 15% in grades 9-12.

Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education in D.C., attributes the gains to sustained investment in teacher salaries (now averaging $110,000), high-quality instructional materials, enhanced professional development, and the expansion of public charter schools that have enabled “all kinds of interesting innovations and collaborations.” The city also launched a $20 million public-private partnership called the Capital Math Collective, led by the DC Public Education Fund, with an ambitious goal: to make Washington the first urban school district where every student outperforms the national average in math by 2030.

What Does the D.C. Turnaround Actually Look Like?

The strategies extend beyond conventional interventions. Schools are organizing math field trips, facilitating collaborations among public, charter, and private schools, and making quick pivots when interventions don’t show results. At Center City Public Charter Schools’ Congress Heights campus, Principal Niya White emphasizes a foundational belief that all students are capable of high math achievement. Bulletin boards in stairwells prompt students to think about math solutions as they move between classes. These aren’t extras. They’re signals, sent continuously, that math is something students do rather than something that happens to them.

Kihn identifies one of the toughest challenges as shifting negative math mindsets. “Part of our work here is the mindset work to help everyone, teachers, parents and most importantly, students, understand that we are all math people,” he told K-12 Dive. The technical interventions matter, but what may matter more is confronting the internalized stories students tell themselves about who can and cannot do math. Two decades of progress suggest those stories can change, but changing them requires adults in the building, from principals to classroom teachers, to actively interrupt the narrative that some students were never meant to be good at this.

Identity Is the Hidden Variable

When a student says “I’m not a math person,” they’re not describing a skill deficit. They’re describing an identity boundary. And identity boundaries, once internalized, become self-fulfilling. The neuroscience backs this up: math anxiety activates the brain’s threat detection system, regions associated with physical pain light up, and the working memory needed for mathematical reasoning gets hijacked by emotional regulation. That anxiety isn’t inherent to math. It’s learned. It’s the residue of repeated experiences in which struggle was interpreted as evidence of fixed inadequacy rather than normal cognitive load.

What D.C. is doing, whether they name it this way or not, is trying to rewrite that script at scale. Bulletin boards in stairwells are environmental cues that math thinking is continuous, not confined to a single class period. Math field trips disrupt the spatial association students have built between “classroom” and “place where I fail.” When you change the environment, you create room for identity to shift.

For classroom teachers, this has practical weight. How struggle gets narrated in your room matters more than you might think. Whether you treat a wrong answer as information or as verdict shapes whether students stay in the game or mentally exit it. Small, repeated signals about who belongs in math accumulate into the story a student carries for years.

What Is the Gaps the Progress Can’t Cover?

The progress is real, but it’s uneven. On the 2024 NAEP, economically disadvantaged students scored 45 points lower than their peers. Black students’ average score fell 65 points below that of White students, a disparity that has not significantly narrowed since 2003. These gaps don’t point to a mindset problem. They point to structural barriers that teacher development and positive messaging alone cannot address.

Students are sophisticated observers of their environments. They notice whose struggles get framed as growth opportunities and whose get treated as confirmation of low expectations. They notice which schools get the $20 million partnership and which are told to do more with less. The risk in “mindset work” is that it locates the problem inside the student rather than inside the system. If structural inequities stay in place, “you’re a math person” can become a nicer version of the same old promise: believe in yourself and you’ll succeed. That promise only holds if the system actually supports everyone’s success. The 65-point gap between Black and White students requires structural change alongside instructional improvement, not instead of it.

What Does This Mean in Your Classroom?

Twenty years of steady gains in D.C. point to something teachers can hold onto: this work is possible, and it compounds over time. The willingness to pivot when interventions don’t work, to invest in teachers, to rebuild the emotional conditions in which learning happens rather than just swapping out curriculum, that approach produces real change. No single teacher can fix structural inequity alone, but every teacher controls the daily environment in which students decide whether they belong in math. That’s not a small thing.

It starts with how struggle is handled. It starts with whether a student who says “I’m not a math person” hears something different back. The premise of this piece is that math failure was never about ability at all. If that’s true, and D.C.’s numbers suggest it is, then the classroom is exactly where the story starts to change. Teachers have always known how to work with stories. This is just one more.

Related Reading

• Professors Are Quietly Reshaping Higher Education With AI, and We’re Just Starting to Understand How
• I’ve Seen Great Teaching Up Close. and Tech Isn’t What Makes It Happen
• Mandatory Media Literacy Meets the Reality of Unequal Access

Get weekly insights on teaching with technology, subscribe to the Bri Janelle newsletter.