Recalling her 8th-grade math class, 15-year-old Samantha, now a sophomore at a North Side public high school, shakes her head with exasperation. “The first half of the year was nothing but fractions.

Jami Jorgensen is the human jukebox of quadratic equations. “Anything that’s an algorithm, I have a song for it,” said the energetic middle-school math teacher in Hayward Unified, in the east Bay Area ...

Students are barely beginning to recover from a historic decline in math performance. Across every grade and region of the country, students in every racial, income, and disability group have ...