Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Linda Darling-Hammond is an expert on education research and policy. This blog was updated on June 24, 2026 to clarify a statistic ...

Can you predict whether a passenger would have survived the sinking of the Titanic based on factors like gender and income? How do you know if a mushroom is poisonous or safe to eat? What separates a ...

Mathematicians love the certainty of proofs. This is how they verify that their intuition matches observable truth. This logical love of proofs is uniquely suited to opening up the black box of ...

That is where a strong mathematical foundation becomes critical. Those who understand numbers and mathematical relationships ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

Steve Holifield’s breathing was labored. A respected math teacher at a K-12 public charter school in Apple Valley, California, Holifield was in steep physical decline. His students had watched the ...

Earlier this week, I wrote about the history of progressive math education, the culture wars it has inspired over the past hundred years, and the controversy over the California Math Framework. Today, ...

It’s something that educators hear from students in classes, children express to caregivers as they start homework and even adults say to each other when it’s time to calculate the tip for lunch.

William Heard Kilpatrick, one of the most influential pedagogical figures of the early twentieth century, would have felt right at home in today’s educational culture wars. Back then, as now, the ...

How does a revolution start? Sometimes, it’s a simple question. For Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, the question was this math problem: ...