Lawmakers pass mandate to help California’s youngest students catch up in math

In a step toward giving math the attention early literacy has gotten, the Legislature on Monday approved a bill that would require schools to assess the math capabilities of all students in kindergarten through second grade each year, beginning in 2028-29. 

The bill would also require districts to provide math support, such as additional coaching for elementary teachers or group tutoring for students, to help children avoid falling behind and head off potentially irreversible achievement gaps emerging by third grade.  

The Assembly voted unanimously for Senate Bill 1067, which now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, despite opposition from the California Mathematics Council and school lobbies including the Association of California School Administrators and the California County Superintendents, along with the California Teachers Association.

In an Aug. 12 letter, the groups argued that requiring the assessments before the state has adequately invested in teacher training and extra help for students would be premature. “A mandated assessment is only as effective as the system that supports it,” they wrote.

But the bill’s author, Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson, D-San Diego, said California should not delay dealing with “a real and urgent math achievement crisis.”

“We also know that students who miss foundational math skills in grades K through 2 rarely catch up,” she said.

California fourth graders have scored lower than their peers in most states on a national test. On California’s 2025 state tests, only 37% of students were proficient in math, compared with 49% on the language arts test. The disparities among students are wide, with 26% of low-income students and 20% of Black students scoring proficient.

“Our state has not focused on math achievement,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group EdVoice, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The bill’s passage is a strong recognition by the Legislature that we must focus on students early with more support.”

Newsom has not indicated whether he will sign the bill. Tuck said the State Board of Education and administration advisers offered suggestions that were incorporated into a major revision of the bill.

All screeners are not alike

The new math assessment would come three years after Newsom pushed for an early literacy screener, which went into effect in 2025. But the early literacy screener and AB 1067 version are different. In fact, SB 1067 does not use the word “screener.” Weber and the sponsors swapped all references to “diagnostic assessment” to distinguish them.

The literacy screener is designed to identify students with potential reading difficulties, including dyslexia. The math counterpart, dyscalculia, is less prevalent and more difficult to diagnose. The diagnostic assessment’s purpose is “to assess pupils’ mathematics knowledge and learning needs and identify pupils in need of additional support,” not to diagnose a disability, SB 1067 states.

Under the bill, the State Board of Education would establish criteria and guidelines for the assessments by July 31, 2027, and the Department of Education would publish a list of approved assessments by Jan. 31, 2028, for districts to choose from and use the following school year.  Opponents have objected that the bill doesn’t spell out what the criteria will be. But many districts already use “formative” or diagnostic assessments to measure skills such as fluency, placeholder values and two-step problem-solving. As long as an assessment aligns with the California Math Framework and meets the criteria, a district can certify its own assessment, according to the bill. The assessments must be available in multiple languages.

The bill also seeks to prevent the assessments from being used to evaluate teachers, rate schools or identify students as gifted or having a disability. The assessment’s primary audience would be parents; they’d receive an explanation of the findings and support their child would receive. The bill does not call for reporting results to the state.

A funding imbalance

Over the past five years, when state funding through Proposition 98 was flush, Newsom and the Legislature appropriated $1 billion to hire and train reading coaches in the state’s lowest-income schools as part of a broader effort to improve how TK-3 reading is taught.

Math has received far less attention. In 2023, the State Board adopted a new math framework that emphasizes engaging students in classroom activities to build an understanding of math concepts, but most teachers have not undergone intensive training to teach it well. A study included in the 2026 research project Getting Down to Facts found that only one-quarter of district leaders say the framework drives their math lessons, and 30% say it is not at all a factor.

The Legislature has appropriated $100 million to develop a network of math trainers across all 58 counties. But Cole Samson, the project director and assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, questions whether the state will commit to training teachers once the initial funding runs out. That’s one reason he continues to oppose the new assessment mandate while acknowledging the improvements made to SB 1067.

“We can’t just put something in place and say teachers will magically know how to do X without the proper training and support,” he said. “What supports can we start putting in place right now so that school districts are ready for it when it gets here?”

Advocates of an early diagnostic assessment point to Alabama, the first state to adopt an early math screening, in 2022. According to the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, in 2024, it was the only state in which math scores exceeded pre-Covid pandemic results.

“Alabama is getting the results they’re getting, I would argue, because they put a math coach on every K-5 campus,” Samson said.

Tuck points out that districts do have immediate funding in the 2026-27 state budget. They could use their share of $737 million, the last installment of the $6.8 billion Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant, which is the state’s version of the federal Covid relief funding. There is also an unrestricted, multiyear, $5 billion block grant — $937 per student.

Two scholars, two views

Two authors of the math analysis for Getting Down to Facts, H. Alix Gallagher and Elizabeth Huffaker, disagree on the value of early-grade math screening. 

Gallagher, director of educational policy and outcomes for the research center Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), said the 40% student math proficiency rate underscores the need to integrate professional learning into elementary teachers’ workweek and “make major changes in teacher preparation as well.”

Few California elementary schools provide the intensive support for students struggling with math that they have created for literacy, and those schools that already administer diagnostic assessments, like iReady or STAR, “don’t seem to use these data effectively” to monitor overall instruction, she said.

An additional screening measure –- “especially if it isn’t valid” — probably won’t help and “could actually do harm,” she said.

But Huffaker, the lead author of the math study and an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, said that a diagnostic test for young students “is a good idea.”

Supports like high-impact tutoring to develop foundational numeracy skills in K-2 are important, she said, and “the universality helps ensure no students fall through the cracks.”  

While acknowledging adding further to the testing burden “is always a concern,” she said that, subject to the state’s adoption list, a new screener may not add a new test for schools that already administer them.

Compared with Alabama’s more prescriptive and better-funded approach, Huffaker said, California districts “will have more flexibility in implementing and responding to the screener but also less capacity support from the state.”

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This story was originally published by EdSource.