DUNEDIN, New Zealand — When Principal Jen Rodgers took a 10-week sabbatical in 2021, she was on a mission to find a way to improve mathematics instruction at the primary school she leads here in one of the country’s oldest cities.
Rodgers, who has led the 420-student St. Clair School since 2016, is hardly alone in worrying about “maths.” Mathematics scores on international tests have been stagnating or falling for years in New Zealand and many other countries, with the exception of a few Asian nations, including Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
“As a sector, we are being bombarded with reports of our failings in the teaching of maths, which leaves teachers and principals across the country feeling uncertain of what to do, and how to teach maths effectively,” Rodgers wrote in a report to her school community at the end of the sabbatical. But her report also noted that educators have been let down before by various initiatives that failed to make a change in the country’s math achievement scores.
“Who or what do you trust now?” she wrote.
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In New Zealand, where schools operate far more independently than traditional public schools in the United States, it would be the job of principals like Rodgers to determine how best to teach the country’s math standards.
Not any more. Big changes are coming to New Zealand schools starting later this month, the beginning of the country’s four-term school year.
The country was already in the process of rolling out a new set of math standards; that work has now been accelerated.
The Ministry of Education is also telling educators how they must teach the curriculum, requiring a shift to “structured” instruction, Education Minister Erica Stanford said.
“Structured maths is based on the science of learning, which is overarching all of our curricular areas. And it’s really no different to structured literacy,” Stanford said in an interview last year with Newsroom, a New Zealand news outlet. “It’s explicit teaching, in a structured manner, mastering the basics before you move on, and then making sure we’re assessing along the way to make sure that they’re on track.”
The policy would apply to students in primary school, equivalent to kindergarten through seventh grade in the U.S.
In November, the ministry released a new curriculum guide that makes frequent reference to “explicit teaching,” described in part as content “broken down into manageable steps, each of which is clearly and concisely explained and modeled by the teacher.” Such teaching, the guide says, also includes “rich discussions” and “meaningful problem-solving.”
The country also plans to devote $20 million in professional development (a little over $11 million in U.S. dollars) to help teachers make the change. And in another policy shift, students who wish to enroll in a teacher training program in New Zealand colleges must come in with stronger math credentials than were previously required.
If the flurry of changes in New Zealand manages to move the needle on math achievement, its success is likely to reverberate far beyond its borders — even in the United States, which has 10 times as many children in public school (about 49 million) as New Zealand has people.
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Such influence has happened before: America has spent millions on Reading Recovery, a one-on-one reading program for first graders developed in New Zealand. (Reading Recovery was criticized for not providing enough explicit instruction in decoding words; New Zealand is set to end government funding of the program.)
The nation’s shift on mathematics comes with some controversy. The government made a rightward shift in 2023 to the National Party, ending six years of leadership under former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had an international profile.
The National Party campaigned on a back-to-basics approach for education, which, in addition to the changes in mathematics instruction, has included backing a move to “structured literacy,” banning cell phones in schools and requiring more testing to gauge students’ academic progress.
For some schools, the structured approach to mathematics described in the new curriculum will be a shift from the small group, project-based instruction now used to teach the subject. And, in a country where principals have the kind of autonomy superintendents do in the U.S. — each of New Zealand’s more than 2,500 government-funded schools has its own board that sets policy and manages budgets — the entire effort is a more top-down approach than educators are used to. Some school leaders have called the pace of the overhaul “insane.”
Rodgers said she’s glad that mathematics is a priority for the government, but worries “about the capacity for principals to manage this on top of all the other things they do. Some professionals may leave the workforce because of the pressure and added work.
“In saying that, though, we simply must do something different in the teaching of math,” said Rodgers, who is a member of the executive committee of the New Zealand Principals’ Federation, a national professional group for principals. “The status quo is not good enough across the sector, although most schools will say their students are achieving well.”
The Ministry of Education announced the changes to mathematics instruction soon after the August release of a national study that gave a sobering assessment of students’ math skills. The Curriculum Insights and Progress Study, much like the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the United States, tests a sample of students in different grades. It found that 22 percent of the country’s Year 8 students were at or above mathematics benchmarks.
The study’s authors said the scores were not significantly different from previous years, and did not show evidence of improvement or decline.
However, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the results a sign of a “total system failure.”
Other tests given in New Zealand have shown that students who are members of the country’s indigenous Māori population score lower than their Pākehā — white — or Asian peers in mathematics. The same is true for students who are Pasifika, the New Zealand term for people descended from indigenous groups in Samoa, Tonga and other nations in the Pacific Islands.
On the international stage, New Zealand’s status in mathematics is mixed. On the Program for International Student Assessment, for example, the country scores above the international average — and above the United States — but those scores have been slipping.
On another international mathematics test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, New Zealand ranks below the United States for fourth graders and about the same for eighth graders. The scores among 9- to 10-year-olds and 13- to 14-year-olds were relatively steady between 2019 and 2023, but New Zealand had one of the highest achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students on the mathematics portion of the test.
“We’re all really distressed about the outcomes of our system at the moment,” said Fiona Ell, a professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of Auckland, who also served on the government advisory panel about improving mathematics and literacy instruction. “We all want to fix it.”
But, “thrashing about, saying ‘this is good, this is bad,’ just swings the pendulum back and forth,” she said. “And on the way back, it just knocks over all the poor teachers.”
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The latest efforts aren’t the first time New Zealand has tried major mathematics teaching reforms.
For example, between 2000 and 2009, the government promoted the Numeracy Development Project, intended to help teachers give students a conceptual understanding of math. Critics said it slowed down instruction in techniques such as adding and subtracting numbers in columns.
“At the time we thought that would be the silver bullet that solved all the problems of maths, and we know 20 years later that it didn’t,” said Rodgers, the St. Clair principal, who helped provide professional development to teachers during the Numeracy Project years.
School leaders are also creating their own paths to math success, many focusing on processes in which teachers serve as guides to student learning and collaboration.
Rodgers, for example, encouraged her staff to adopt practices described in “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” by Canadian math professor Peter Liljedahl.
The book’s themes resonated with her, she said. Liljedahl describes a “thinking classroom” as one where children collaborate in small groups and work on surfaces that can be easily erased, such as whiteboards with markers, so that they won’t be afraid of showing their work or making mistakes.
A recent visit to Rodgers’ school showed these techniques in action. Like many school buildings in New Zealand, St. Clair is open-concept, or what the country calls a “modern learning environment,” built with classrooms facing an airy central atrium. Sliding glass panels can be used to separate classrooms from one another, or opened up to allow large groups of students to work together. (Like other school reforms, modern learning environments have their own detractors; some schools are adding walls to create more traditional spaces that are considered less noisy and distracting.)
Brigid Fyfe, who teaches Years 3 and 4, equivalent to second and third grade in the U.S., started her class’s math lesson with the “Big Numbers” song on YouTube to introduce children to numbers from 1 to a trillion.
Students then worked on multiplication tables before splitting off into groups to work out problems on the floor-to-ceiling classroom windows with special markers that can be wiped off with a finger. Asked what she liked about mathematics, one student replied, “Everything.”
“One of the bedrocks of what we do is learner agency,” Rodgers said. “Our children are invested in the learning for themselves.”
Other schools have embraced “culturally responsive” mathematics instruction in efforts to boost the achievement of Māori and Pasifika students.
In the Auckland suburb of Mount Roskill, nearly 900 miles north of Dunedin, Ulrike Matthews’ mixed classroom of Years 3 and 4 students at May Road School tackled fractions using a curriculum called Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities, or DMIC, used in more than 100 schools around the country. Around 70 percent of May Road’s 190 students identify as Pasifika and 22 percent as Māori (students may identify in one or more race or ethnic group).
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The math curriculum the school uses keeps them engaged and unafraid to ask questions and make mistakes, said Arina Kumar, who teaches 5- and 6-year-olds.
“We get them into groups and we show there’s not only one way of solving the problem — there’s many ways,” Kumar said. “We support them, we talk to them, we have seen what they can do.”
At Beach Haven Primary School, located in a park-filled northwestern suburb of Auckland, teachers also use the DMIC curriculum for math instruction.
“They still do learn the facts, but it’s done in a fun way,” said Anoushka Dallow, the deputy principal. “You don’t hear, ‘I hate maths.”
Jodie Hunter, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University and a co-leader of the DMIC project, thinks the current nudge towards structured instruction seems “ridiculous” when children need a variety of teaching methods to learn mathematics.
Hunter has her own experience with reports meant to guide government action: She was a member of the 2021 independent panel that recommended sweeping changes in how mathematics should be taught in the country. That panel advocated for better teacher training and high-quality materials, among other ideas.
“We’ve had a lack of support from successive governments in supporting teachers,” Hunter said. “Teachers are not treated like professionals, when they’re one of our best resources.”
But the curriculum and methods that New Zealand has used to teach math in the past have failed, and the proof is in the test scores, said Tanya Evans, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland in the Department of Mathematics. Since 2017, Evans has led a special interest section of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Education Group focused on improving math teaching.
She said the profession has been captured by the ideas that teachers should be guides to students as they discover mathematical principles. In contrast, she believes students should practice until fundamental knowledge is automatic before taking on more complex questions.
“This desire to bring inquiry as the first thing you do in the classroom and everything falls into place — what’s the evidence for that?” she said.
The new curriculum requirements, on the other hand, represent a dramatic shift for the better, she said.
“This is a significant victory for the Science of Learning, and I can hardly believe that this has been accomplished in such a short timeframe. I genuinely thought it would take a decade or two to shift the pendulum back toward sanity,” Evans said in an email.
In follow-up interviews after the Ministry of Education released its plans to change instructional methods, several school leaders said they did not plan to deviate from what they assert is already working well for their students.
“This is an example of politics reaching into our classrooms. We have long advocated that education should not be treated like a political football with the swings from one ideology to another. It is disruptive for the sector and does not benefit our children,” said Lynda Stuart, the principal of May Road School.
The culturally responsive curriculum the school has been using “works for our children,” Stuart added. “I am not planning on making changes to the way that we work.”
For Stephanie Thompson, the principal at Beach Haven, one question is how the government plans to support all the changes that it has in place, through practices such as ongoing professional development, math coaching for teachers, and data analysis to see where students are struggling. Her school already has those practices in place, she said.
“I don’t care who’s in government, if the policy they chase doesn’t incorporate these things then it’s not going to be the silver bullet they profess it to be,” Thompson said in an email.
Ell, the University of Auckland professor, said teachers are still likely to use a variety of techniques based on the children that they have in front of them and the knowledge that they want students to take away from a particular lesson. Even in a small country, individual teachers and their choices are key, she said.
“People think ‘balance’ is a real copout,” Ell said. “But we’re much better off building a view of teachers as professional decision-makers who can be trusted.”
Contact Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or [email protected]
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
This story about New Zealand mathematics was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
