What Motivates Us
Math Nation works with amazing students, teachers, families, and school districts.
We celebrate their successes and triumphs, and the challenges they face are what drive us to continue developing resources to provide the education every student deserves.
Here are some of the issues keeping us up at night:
- In 2016, 23.5% of South Carolina students in eleventh grade met the ACT benchmarks for Mathematics. In a national study, 40% of South Carolina students attending four-year colleges (and 68% of SC students in two-year colleges) require remediation.
- In 2018, 24% of South Carolina graduates met the ACT Math College Readiness Benchmark. This compares to 25% and 39% of 2017 and 2014 graduates, respectively.
- A 2016 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that states that reformed their finance systems to send more money to low-income districts saw students’ performance rise over 10 years due to the increased spending. The gains were significant compared to student gains in states that did not increase funding to low-income districts.
- Civil Rights data show that states with less funding tend to have higher student/teacher ratios, while schools serving minority students have high rates of first-year teachers.
- A recent study shows that personalized math tutoring resulted in an average increase from a 1.77 GPA to a GPA of 2.35 (effectively a jump from a C- to a C+).
