More than 55% of Pennsylvania math students are not meeting the state's proficiency standards, and one northwestern Pennsylvania lawmaker says she has had enough of watching students struggle under a curriculum she considers needlessly complicated. State Senator Michele Brooks, who represents Greenville, is now circulating a co-sponsorship memorandum for legislation that would push Pennsylvania classrooms toward what she calls everyday, daily-use math skills — the kind of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing people do without reaching for a calculator.
Brooks is circulating a co-sponsorship memorandum for the draft legislation, according to Times Observer, formally titled Getting “Back to Basics” With Math and circulated on August 28, per PAlegis.us. Brooks has said the state's Common Core-based math changes were intended to teach critical thinking, but that the current approach represents an overly complicated way to learn math. She has framed her proposal as something other than an attempt to lower academic standards, telling colleagues it is instead about ensuring students master the basic math skills used most in everyday life.
Frustration From Parents and Teachers
According to Brooks, parents and teachers have shared frustrations about students' classroom experiences under the current curriculum, and she has said that frustration is hindering students' day-to-day math skills. She wants Pennsylvania math instruction to keep algebra, trigonometry and calculus in the mix, but with more emphasis placed on everyday computational skills alongside them. Brooks has said basic math skills are essential no matter what path a student takes after graduation, and that the state's current approach is not improving educational outcomes or preparing students for life after high school.
The numbers Brooks is working from show incremental movement at best. The Pennsylvania Department of Education reported that PSSA math proficiency rose from 40.2% in 2024 to 41.7% in 2025, while Keystone Algebra proficiency climbed from 41.6% to 44.3% over the same period, per the Times Observer's reporting on state figures. Those modest gains sit alongside a starker statewide picture: separate Pennsylvania Department of Education data examined by the Commonwealth Foundation found that 58.3% of public school students scored at basic or below basic on PSSA math assessments during the 2024-2025 school year. Nationally, the picture is not much brighter — 2024 NAEP results reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed 69% of Pennsylvania eighth-graders failed to reach math proficiency on the federal assessment.
Looking to Virginia as a Model
Brooks has pointed to Virginia as the model she wants Pennsylvania to follow. Per Brooks, Virginia math proficiency has increased by 19% in recent years, and the commonwealth now has a math proficiency rate of 68%, figures she has cited directly. She has tied that improvement to changes then-Governor Glenn Youngkin implemented in 2023, which emphasized applying math in real-world contexts, and to House Bill 2686, which Youngkin signed into law in 2025.
That law mandates that local Virginia school boards create policies to automatically enroll eligible middle school students in accelerated math courses such as Algebra I and geometry, using standardized test scores as a primary readiness indicator, according to FastDemocracy. School boards are required to notify parents about a child's accelerated-math placement, and parents can opt out. The University of Virginia has reported that early access to rigorous coursework can significantly improve long-term student outcomes, a rationale Brooks has cited in pushing students toward advanced math at earlier ages.
What Brooks' framing does not fully capture is that Virginia's gains came from a two-part strategy, not curriculum change alone. The Virginia Board of Education voted in September 2025 to raise minimum proficiency cut scores on statewide Standards of Learning exams in reading and math, phasing in tougher standards starting with the 2026-2027 school year, according to the Virginia Department of Education. Official results released by the agency in August showed a statewide math pass rate of 68% for the 2025-2026 school year — just a 0.4 percentage point gain over the prior year, and a rate achieved under the old, lower cut scores before the tougher standards even phase in.
A Decade-Old Standards Debate
The framework Brooks is challenging dates back more than a decade. The Pennsylvania State Board of Education adopted the PA Core Standards for Mathematics in March 2014, aligning the state with national Common Core standards and emphasizing abstract reasoning and problem-solving strategies over rote computation, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Brooks represents the 50th Senate District, covering Crawford, Mercer, Lawrence and Warren counties, and chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Committee; she previously served in the state House and as a Mercer County commissioner before joining the Senate.
The debate over foundational math skills extends well beyond Harrisburg. A 2026 UC San Diego study cited in earlier Hoodline coverage of math pathway concerns found a sharp rise in incoming college freshmen assigned to remedial math because they lack elementary- and middle-school arithmetic foundations. Higher education institutions have reported that students trained under conceptual math pathways frequently lack basic computational fluency, adding pressure on state lawmakers like Brooks to reconsider how math is taught before students ever reach a college classroom.
For now, Brooks' push remains in its earliest legislative stage. Her office has circulated only the co-sponsorship memorandum, meaning formal bill text has not yet been drafted or assigned a bill number under Pennsylvania's legislative process. Complicating any near-term comparison of state test data, Pennsylvania's spring 2026 rollout of a fully online PSSA faced widespread technical failures, prompting the state Department of Education to delay verification of finalized statewide testing data, as Hoodline reported in its account of families facing a blind school application season. Brooks wants Pennsylvania to consider broader changes to how math is taught statewide, but with legislative text still unwritten and state data still catching up, the shape of any actual reform remains an open question.
