Is There a Better Solution to Our Public Schools’ Math Problem?

This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Texas Monthly as part of our public-education feature, “What Our Schools Actually Need.” Humans have been learning math for thousands of years. As long ago as the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian scribes-in-training practiced calculation and geometry by etching numbers into clay tablets. Measuring, accounting, computing totals, divvying up resources: One generation has taught these techniques to the next—and the next and the next—for a dizzyingly long time, a lineage that indirectly connects the scribes of old Babylon to the kids in room 413 at Kealing Middle School, in Austin, where I volunteer in a class on Wednesdays. Some 1,200 kids fill Kealing’s campus during school hours. Between periods a river of bodies churns through the halls, and shortly…

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