Last week we got bad news about how COVID affected children in school. The results came out for the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress — a standardized test given to fourth and eighth graders, of both math and reading. The federal government has been doing this test since the 1990s; it’s sometimes called “the nation’s report card”.

The new report card wasn’t great. Reading scores declined in about half the states; none showed a significant improvement.

But math was the real nightmare. Under COVID, kids really collapsed in math. As Sarah Mervosh and Ashley Wu wrote in the New York Times …

… math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019.

Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent. [snip]

In eighth-grade math, the average score fell in all but one state. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia experienced double-digit drops, including higher-performing states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and lower-performing states like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Utah was the only state where the eighth-grade math declines were not deemed statistically significant.

What caused such terrible declines in math? Well, COVID, obviously. But the specific mechanisms of how the pandemic hurt kids isn’t as clear as one might expect. You might figure that whichever state kept its schools closed the longest did the worst, but that isn’t quite what happened. Some states that reopened schools more quickly, like Texas, crashed in math just as bad as the national average. On top of school closings, COVID presented a lot of other shocks to kids’ systems, including the anxiety and trauma of having family and community members fall seriously ill or die. Income and wealth heavily affect these outcomes, too, as you might expect.

But the Times writers made another offhand note that’s really illuminating, though:

Reading was less affected, perhaps, in part, because students received more help from parents during the pandemic.

This is bang-on. Researchers who’ve studied why kids flounder at math have long noted a problem: Often, their parents don’t like math either.

Parents have less of a problem with reading. Indeed, kids sometimes get help from their parents in reading — ranging from formal help (i.e. assisting a child in decoding a passage) to informal (if parents have their own books or magazines lying around the house, it makes reading seem normal and pleasant).

But with math? Far fewer parents are into math; indeed, many openly express dislike of it. One study of 1,000 students — conducted by Research Now Group and Texas Instruments — found that 75% of students had heard a parent or another adult speak negatively about math, and 44% had heard adults say “I hate math.”

Parents who are anxious about math — and consider themselves to be bad at it — pass the anxiety on to their kids, as this research found, if they interact with their kids’ math homework. As one of the researchers noted …

“We often don’t think about how important parents’ own attitudes are in determining their children’s academic achievement. But our work suggests that if a parent is walking around saying ‘Oh, I don’t like math’ or ‘This stuff makes me nervous,’ kids pick up on this messaging and it affects their success,” explained Beilock, professor in psychology.

These parents not only can’t offer the formal help they might be able to offer with reading. They also can’t offer any of the (possibly more crucial) informal encouragement: They never visibly take joy in contemplating math, or pointing its prevalence in in everyday life.

So if a pandemic comes along that gets kids stuck at home — and relying more than normal on their parents — this is what we’d see, right? A collapse in math much more severe than the one in reading.

America’s math problems are, in a very real way, multi-generational.

You can’t blame the parents, though. Most of them were probably taught math terribly.

The problems begin in elementary school, where fully 25% of the teachers don’t like math and are anxious about it themselves. (One study found that “undergraduates who study elementary education have the highest math anxiety of any college major”.) So they’re passing on math anxiety in the same way parents are. It doesn’t help that typical ways of teaching math — like timed tests — are, as research finds, custom-designed to exacerbate math anxiety. By the time high school gets cranking away at the higher forms of math, like algebra and trigonometry and calculus, you’ve got a big chunk of kids who violently dislike the entire field, and who as adults will pass those views on to the children around them.

I don’t have any easy answer here.

There are math-reformists like Andrew Hacker who argue that algebra should not be required to graduate high school. Algebra isn’t regularly a job requirement; as Hacker notes, work by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce figures that only about 5 percent of entry-level workers need to be proficient in algebra or above.

Others say the whole algebra-then-geometry-then-calculus route should be replaced by math that focuses on manipulating and understanding data. Some say algebra is still crucial — you need it for statistics, which is a subject much more seriously useful for students (and even so, simple stats doesn’t need a ton of algebra).

In the interim, there’s plenty of advice out there for parents who dislike math and don’t want to pass it on to their kids. (I almost hesitate to link to this stuff because I don’t like blaming math-fearing parents for their math fear; it’s generally not their fault.)

Either way, it seems pretty clear that preventing America’s slide in math is a heck of a complex task. It’s not just what happens in the classroom that matters, as COVID amply showed.