by Steven Yoder, The Hechinger Report
February 20, 2026
GREENVILLE, Ala. — Toward the end of a math lesson on a sunny Friday in October, fourth-grade teacher D’Atra Howard and math instructional coach LaVeda Gray ducked out of the classroom to huddle. Howard’s students at Greenville Elementary School were calculating remainders in division problems on worksheets, and Howard wanted to confer with Gray on which of them needed extra help.
Howard is in her second year of teaching. She’s working at the school, 45 miles south of Montgomery, Alabama, with an emergency certificate — a temporary license that allows someone without a professional teaching credential into the classroom. Gray, who works with a half dozen of the school’s 16 teachers, was observing Howard and stepping in to help as needed.
Alabama is betting that funneling more money into improving instruction, including hiring coaches like Gray, can overcome teacher inexperience and family poverty to raise student scores. State and national leaders praise the state’s gains to date.
But on the ground in poor schools, staff say they have far to go to close gaps with better-off parts of the state.
A Hechinger Report analysis of 15 of Alabama’s least-affluent districts — which represents about 10 percent of the state’s districts — shows that students there have gained ground since the pandemic and after the Alabama Numeracy Act passed in 2022. Only about 1 percent of students earned a proficient score on the state math test in the 2020-21 school year, but around 14 percent earned proficient scores in 2024-25.
However, the gap between the poorest districts and the state average is still wide. Statewide, around 24 percent of students scored proficient in 2020-21, compared to around 42 percent in 2024-25.
Greenville Elementary is an example of a school that has seen scores rebound. More than 80 percent of students at the school are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and more than 1 in 5 people live in poverty in Butler County, where it’s located. But the school’s proportion of fourth-graders scoring proficient on the state math test jumped from 7 percent in 2023 to 24 percent in 2024.
Part of that is due to the work of Gray, who said that Howard has sharpened her eye for students who stumble. “Starting out, it wasn’t always like that,” she said. “I had to point out, ‘Hey, this student, when we walked around, did you see that they didn’t have anything written down or had the wrong figures?’”
After a 10-minute discussion, Howard and Gray pinpointed several students who Howard would pull aside for individual work on the coming Monday. Then Howard hustled back to class.
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Research suggests elementary school math matters a lot to academic and life outcomes. Early math achievement predicts success in reading and science through eighth grade, a 2013 study found. Math skills also better predict future earnings than other factors like reading scores, parent-child relationships or children’s health, according to a 2024 Urban Institute report.
Alabama’s 2022 law reshaped math instruction at the elementary level by providing money for all schools to hire math coaches and by mandating that struggling schools use state-approved math curricula, among other changes. It also required university teacher preparation programs to include more math instruction courses. To help students who are behind, the state launched a summer math program to get low-scoring fourth- and fifth-graders up to grade level.
The politics of spending money on education in Alabama have flipped. On the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, the state ranked last in the proportion of fourth graders — 28 percent — scoring at or above proficient in math. At 28 elementary schools, not a single student scored proficient.
Legislators grasped the threat that this represented to the state’s economic ambitions, said Peter Jones, associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In a state trying to lure investors from biotech, finance and other sectors, better schools help companies recruit qualified workers and attract out-of-state employees with children, said Jones. The early success of the 2019 Alabama Literacy Act, which similarly revamped how schools in the state teach reading, made it easier to vote for a similarly styled bill targeting math, he said.
The result was that in a state where Republicans dominate government, Republicans shepherded the numeracy law through the Legislature, and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed it. The Legislature funded it at $15 million in its first year, which state lawmakers have since increased to $95 million.
The reform has won praise from national education experts. On June 3, the National Council on Teacher Quality released its assessment of elementary school math instruction policies in the 50 states. It rated most as weak or unacceptable and only one as strong — Alabama’s.
The most recent NAEP test results suggest the changes are delivering. In fourth-grade math proficiency, Alabama went from ranked last in 2019 to 35th in 2024. It was the only state to beat its 2019 fourth-grade proficiency rate. And it was one of 18 states where fourth-grade math scores among economically disadvantaged students grew between 2022 and 2024.
“Not all students are to the level that we want to see, but that growth is what we’re really focused on,” said Mark Dixon, president of A+ Education Partnership, an Alabama-based education advocacy group that backed passage of the Numeracy Act.
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Still, there are immense challenges in narrowing the gaps between Alabama’s poorest and richest districts. Almost 9 percent of the state’s teachers are working on emergency or provisional teaching certificates, the latest state data shows. But in Alabama’s 15 poorest districts, the percentage of teachers not fully certified is 20 percent. That disparity undercuts efforts to lift the quality of math instruction, say school leaders and staff.
Two hours north of Greenville is Glen Oaks Intermediate School in Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham. Ringed by a canopy of tall southern pines and live oaks, it sits in the middle of a neighborhood of newer brick split-level and ranch homes with trim bushes and neat lawns.
But nearly a third of Fairfield residents live below the poverty line, and 93 percent of Glen Oaks’ children qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, making it one of the state’s most economically disadvantaged schools. Of its teachers, more than a third weren’t fully certified in 2024, according to state data.
School math instructional coach Shenea Robinson said she devotes most of her time to working with those teachers. “It’s just going like, ‘A, do this, B, do this.’ I feel like I’m taking them through a crash course in a teacher education program,” she said. “It’s fast-paced. We’ve had a lot of tears.”
One day in October, one of the teachers with emergency certificates, Ellanise Hines, worked with 17 fifth graders on calculating the volume of solid shapes. While one group of students worked on a computer, a second group measured Amazon Prime boxes that Hines was using as hands-on models. A third group sat with Hines around a table doing volume calculations on worksheets.
Hines has been in the classroom for two years and is working toward getting certified. Two days before this class she’d sat with Robinson to go over the best way to teach this lesson and then taught it to Robinson as she would her students. They talked through strategies to help students having trouble.
Fifth grader Haleigh Jackson said that because of Hines she finally can calculate volumes and decimals this year after not getting them in fourth grade. “She broke them down and explained how they worked until I got it,” said Jackson.
State education advocates said coaches and the use of high-quality curricula are especially important for teachers like Hines who are still working towards certification. “If you didn’t have that coaching and you had that inexperienced teacher coming into the classroom with zero support, you’d continue to see the poor results we’ve seen before,” said Dixon, with the Alabama education advocacy group.
But Robinson said that for all the gains she makes with inexperienced teachers, many don’t return. “Having to start the process back over with brand new people every year is hard,” she said.
Unlike at Greenville, proficiency among Glen Oaks’ fourth graders has been flat, with just 6 percent scoring proficient in both 2023 and 2024 on the state test, well below the state 2024 average of 38 percent. “We’re at 90 to 95 percent in academic growth, so we’re making a difference,” said Robinson. But the majority of the school’s third through fifth graders are performing at kindergarten to second-grade level, she said.
“A student in fifth grade who was on kindergarten level may have moved to third grade, but they still are so far away from proficient,” she said.
Education advocates praise Alabama for doubling down on elementary math teaching. In May, Ivey signed an education budget that included $27 million to hire an additional 220 math coaches. “Many states are not investing in improving math instruction,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “So Alabama is quite a leader.”
States’ willingness to spend on teacher training could be especially important in coming years. The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget calls for eliminating more than $2 billion in dedicated federal funding for improved teacher effectiveness, part of an administration proposal to turn dedicated education funding streams into state block grants.
Whether gains among the state’s least well-off fourth graders will hold remains to be seen. The improvement in Alabama’s poorest districts since 2021-22 might reflect that they’re making up for losing more ground during the pandemic. Among the state’s 15 poorest districts, the decline in scores from the 2018-19 school year to 2020-21 was greater than the state average.
Some frontline staff would like to see improvements to keep the momentum going. Student attendance is optional at the summer math programs designed to help struggling fourth and fifth graders, and a report by the state education department found that in 2024 just 1 percent of eligible fourth and fifth graders showed up. At Glen Oaks, less than half of eligible students enrolled in summer math even though the school offered transportation and meals, said Robinson, and she’d like attendance to be mandatory.
Lisa Adair, an assistant superintendent at the Butler County district, said she’d like to see the Legislature fund math interventionists — specialists who work with individual students.
“During the legislative session last year, we were trying to explain to legislators the difference between coaches and interventionists,” Adair said. “In their heads, coaches are doing the same thing.” In the end, a proposal to fund interventionists didn’t advance, she said.
Adair hopes the state’s math push opens up opportunities for Butler County students. Many of their parents work in local factories in difficult conditions and get home exhausted after being on their feet all day, she said.
Recently, a workforce development group invited district leaders and a few teachers to tour some of those plants to help school staff learn about the skills their students will need to get jobs there. Manufacturers had been telling the district that some graduates couldn’t do basic math and were struggling in their factory jobs.
Adair left with an additional message, one that gives more urgency to the district’s efforts to improve math instruction.
“It was a wake-up call,” she said. “I’m thankful for our workforce development, don’t get me wrong. But for me, it was reaffirmation that I don’t want my kids to be part of the working poor. I want more for them.”
Data intern Kristen Shen contributed to this report.
This story about elementary school math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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