Math disabilities impede learning for many students, but schools often don't test for them.

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Jackie Mader of the Hechinger Report

Kindergarten students practice math with educational materials in Boston Public Schools in 2016. Experts say all students, not just those with dyscalculia, can benefit from educational materials that help them visualize problems and graph paper to help them line up numbers. Photo by Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report via The Associated Press

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Laura Jackson became seriously concerned about her daughter and math when she was in third grade. While many of her classmates blazed through multiplication tests, Jackson’s daughter struggled to count on her fingers, tell a clock and would burst into tears when told to practice math flashcards at home.

At school, the nine-year-old had been receiving help from a mathematics specialist for two years but had made little progress.

“At one point she asked me, ‘Mom, am I stupid?'” Jackson recalled.

One day, while having lunch with a friend, Jackson heard about dyscalculia, a learning disability that affects children’s ability to process numbers and retain mathematical knowledge. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my kid,'” she said.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of students have trouble learning math because of disorders such as dyscalculia, a neurodevelopmental learning disorder caused by differences in the part of the brain involved in numbers and calculations. They often face barriers to accessing help.

American schools have long struggled to identify and support students with any kind of learning disability. Kids often suffer while waiting to get a diagnosis, families are forced to turn to private service providers to get them a diagnosis, and even when they do, some schools can’t provide the help kids need.

For some disabilities, the situation is slowly changing. Most states have passed laws requiring early elementary school students to be screened for dyslexia, the most common reading disability, and many school districts are training teachers to identify students who struggle with reading and writing. Meanwhile, parents and experts say students with math disabilities, such as dyscalculia, are being ignored in schools. Dyscalculia affects up to 7 percent of the population and often co-occurs with dyslexia.

“There’s not as much research on dyscalculia and dyscalculia as there is on reading disorders,” says Karen Wilson, a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in evaluating children with learning disabilities. “And the impact extends to schools.”

Math achievement in the United States has been stagnant for years and has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although some students’ learning difficulties may be due to dyscalculia or other math learning disabilities, few teachers report that their students have been screened for dyscalculia.

Experts say learning the most effective ways to teach students with math disabilities could improve math instruction for all students.

“If it works for students with the most severe disconnects and slow processing speeds, surely it can work for the ‘middle’ students who struggle with math,” says Sandra Elliott, a former special needs teacher and now chief academic officer at TouchMath, a multisensory math program.

The signs of dyscalculia can be evident from an early age if parents and educators know what to look for. Young children may have trouble recognizing numbers and patterns. In elementary school, children may have problems with mathematical functions such as addition and subtraction, word problems, counting money, and remembering directions.

Even after Jackson learned about his dyscalculia, Seattle-area public schools didn’t think the third-grader had a learning disability because he did well in other subjects, and his teachers encouraged him to spend more time studying math at home.

“A lot of parents think the school will tell them there’s a problem, but that’s not the case,” said Jackson, who eventually wrote a book about her family’s journey, “Discovering Dyscalculia.”

Lynn Fuchs, a professor of special education and human development at Vanderbilt University, said students with dyscalculia often need a more structured approach to learning math, including “systematic and explicit” instruction.

Part of the problem is that teachers don’t have the training they need to work with kids who have math disabilities. At least in Virginia, dyslexia awareness training is required for teacher certification renewal, but there’s no similar requirement for math disability training.

“Undergraduate and graduate-level courses that focus on math learning disabilities at the level of breadth, depth, quality and rigor are extremely rare,” said Amelia Malone, director of research and innovation at the National Center on Learning Disabilities.

A lack of widespread knowledge and support about dyscalculia has forced many parents to seek out specialists or private tutors on their own, which they say can be difficult and expensive, especially for math. In 2019, Jackson began pulling her daughter out of school every day to teach her math at home.

“I’m not a math teacher, but I was so desperate,” Jackson said. “Nobody knew anything, so we had to figure it out.”

Experts at the private tutoring group Maid for Math have found that children with dyscalculia need repeated learning, especially to understand math facts. Some students pay up to $1,000 a month for private tutoring up to four days a week.

“It’s difficult because the schools aren’t offering it, but the kids have a right to it,” said Heather Brand, the charity’s maths specialist and operations manager.

While there have been incremental efforts around the country to test children with math disabilities, there’s been “no movement” at the federal level and in most states, said Malone of the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

New York City is one school district that has prioritized screening for dyscalculia and early math instruction. In 2015 and 2016, the city spent $6 million to implement a math curriculum that includes games, building blocks, art projects, and songs. The district also implemented universal math and reading screeners to identify students who may be falling behind.

Experts say there are ways all schools can make math education more accessible. Elementary schools should make greater use of activities that involve more of the senses, such as full-body movements and songs to teach numbers and hands-on materials for math calculations.

Jackson said her daughter could have benefited from more diverse learning methods at school: After several years of homeschooling, she got an A in algebra when she returned to school for high school math classes.

“If you really understand what dyscalculia is, you can look around you and determine what it is that person needs to be successful,” Jackson said. “It’s not just, ‘I’m bad at math,’ and I need to try harder.”

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