In DeKalb County, Alabama, elementary school math classes have gotten noisy. In a good way. Instead of worksheets and textbooks, children practice adding and subtracting with tiny toy bears. They multiply with plastic blocks and learn fractions using multi-colored magnetic tiles.
Five years since COVID, Louisiana’s readers are thriving. This is their secret.
Here, math fits in the palm of your hand—just one sign of a countywide re-imagining of elementary school math instruction that has led to dramatic student improvement between 2019 and 2024. Which is all the more remarkable considering five years ago, the pandemic brought education in the U.S. to a grinding halt and, in many places, achievement still hasn’t rebounded.
Today, DeKalb is part of a statewide success story in math: Alabama is the only state where 4th-grade math scores are higher now than they were in 2019, before the pandemic.
Read more at NPR.
