That’s almost unheard of. In general, a one to three percentage-point increase is much more common.
Eighth-grade math proficiency is a common metric used to mark success, because eighth grade math skills are a milestone toward achieving in high school and college.
As Ohio’s educators realized their students were behind after the COVID pandemic, the first focus was on reading. That’s because reading is a fundamental skill. If a student is unable to read, it’s much harder to do math.
New Lebanon’s eighth-grade math teacher, Ronda Nisbet, is a big reason why the district has done so well. Nisbet was a fifth-grade teacher until two years ago, when she switched to eighth grade math. Many of her current students previously had her in fifth grade.
“She wakes up in the morning thinking about how she’s going to teach her kids math and loves every minute of it,” said New Lebanon Superintendent Greg Williams.
Williams and curriculum director Dena Shepard said that previous connection and students knowing what Nisbet will expect from them helped those students achieve.
Nisbet also uses a different strategy than many teachers. When I visited at the beginning of March, Nisbet had the students in small groups, working together on problems, rather than teaching students at the front of the classroom in a large group. Nisbet walked around and talked to each team of students, making sure they were understanding what was going on and staying on topic. (These are 14-year-olds, after all.)
Shepard said extensive teacher development, assessing data and closing skill gaps for individual students helped achieve these results, too.
“It’s not about changing the curriculum as much as, are we making sure we’re staying aligned,” Shepard said.
Why does this matter?
In 2023, soon after disappointing state test results came out, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced an initiative aimed at getting kids to read using science-backed methods. The state calls this “the science of reading,” though some experts I’ve talked to say that’s not exactly accurate. Basically, the “science of reading” is understanding how neurons in kids' brains help them translate the shape of letters to the sounds the words make.
The gradual reading rollout seems to have improved reading scores some. Statewide, though, kids are still behind where they were in the 2018-2019 school year. In 2018-2019, about 65% of kids were proficient in reading, while in 2023-2024, about 61% of all students were proficient in reading. But that’s still a big improvement over the immediate post-COVID 2020-2021 results, when 57% of Ohio kids were proficient in reading.
Now, the focus has turned to math. Both Ohio’s own test scores and scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) show Ohio students’ math scores are lower than they were before the pandemic hit.
Among all students, 61% were proficient in math in 2018-2019, compared to just 48.2% in 2020-2021 and 53.5% in 2023-2024, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.
It isn’t a coincidence that New Lebanon has seen such a big increase in math scores. Two years ago, DeWine profiled Northridge as a local district who had done a good job improving reading scores using the methods the state wanted to implement.
But every time I’ve talked to Northridge administrators and to teachers who have seen success implementing reading changes, they’re also constantly working with their coworkers, seeing a lot of support from their administrators and holding high expectations of their students – all things New Lebanon is doing, too.
And while there’s not a new, high-profile science-based method to teach kids math, as there is in reading, there are strategies the state has adopted. Zearn, a math-based learning tool the state offers to schools, is another way that New Lebanon has improved proficiency, Shepard said.
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