Proposed changes to North Carolina’s math standards would shake up requirements for upperclassmen in the state’s public high schools and emphasize real-world problem-solving in all grade levels.
The changes are designed to make more advanced math seem more interesting and relevant to students’ lives and to better set them up for their plans after high school. To do that, leaders want to give students the choice of their final two required math classes — picking from electives including Applied Statistics and Data Science, Applied Logic and Reasoning, and more.
The revisions would eliminate two existing required classes — known simply as Math 3 and Math 4 — and require students to take the two electives instead. Math 3 covers elements of algebra, geometry and some pre-calculus. And Math 4 is focused on in part on algebraic functions and more heavily on probability and statistics. Those topics would be covered in some of the new electives.
With the proposed changes, North Carolina would still require four math classes at the high school level, keeping it among the minority of states that require four math classes in high school.
The proposal would also require lessons at all grade levels to include more real-world applications, something that’s especially critical as students age. As students advance in school, math becomes more complex and abstract, and its use becomes less intertwined with students’ everyday lives.
It’s part of a large push among more than 20 states, including North Carolina, to revamp math education as the nation lags behind dozens of other developed nations in the subject area.
The latest scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment — the global measuring stick for countries’ educational progress — show the U.S. performing far worse in math than in reading or science. The U.S. ranked lower than 25 other countries — out of 80 — ranking similarly to 111 others, including Malta and Slovak Republic.
According to the 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress, North Carolina’s math scores are about average with the rest of the nation, and scores nationally have been dropping for years.
Since 2022, North Carolina has been working with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as a part of the Launch Years Initiative. That initiative promotes math pathways for high school students and real-world applications of mathematical skills.
In a 2025 national survey, about half of middle and high school students reported losing interest during their math lessons about half or more of the time, according to the RAND Institute, a policy thinktank. Students largely said they would prefer fewer online activities and more real-world problem-solving.
Too often, people dismiss math by thinking it’s not relevant or that it’s boring, educators and analysts say. They study math, but they don’t apply it, and they think they’re “not a math person,” said Charles Aiken, a state department of Public Instruction section chief who oversees math education.
“We don’t allow people to say that when it comes to reading,” Aiken said.
Math is often taught using real-world applications in many other countries where students are scoring higher in math, said Heather Price, a principal researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, which advocates for math reform nationwide. Other countries also see success with focusing on differing methods to problem-solve, emphasizing the method over speed, and having students collaborate to solve math problems.
Rather than a test consisting of 100 functions to solve, she said, it might have five problems using real-life scenarios that take the whole class period to solve.
Students are often more engaged when the real-world application involves a job, Price said. That could include setting up students to figure out how much wire or voltage they need for a theoretical project that requires electricity.
The lack of interest or understanding of math’s relevance can hold back students from math-related careers, as certain math skills only grow in demand, Price and Aiken said.
“We hear from our employers,” Aiken said. “They say that they need students who can do the math, who can be analytical and work with large data sets and be able to communicate what they’re learning from the data sets.”
More changes to North Carolina’s proposed math standards could come next year before any new standards would be adopted. The team writing the revised standards plans to issue a second draft early next year, based on feedback on the first draft released in November.
The changes are proposed by a 48-member Standards Writing Team consisting of educators at high school and college levels across the state and inspired in part by data collected from public schools, including roughly 5,700 survey responses on the state’s more than 700 individual math standards.
“Not everyone sees math as something they can use,” Aiken told the State Board of Education during a planning meeting last month. Teachers tell DPI they see a drop in students’ interest in math as they get older, coinciding with a drop in math performance, Aiken said.
“In the end, the challenge became for us, ‘How do we make math more meaningful for all of our students?’… The climate around math needs to change,” he said.
Part of that, beyond giving students more choices in math classes, is making the problems they’re asked to solve apply to real-life scenarios, Aiken said. Too often, problems are isolated tasks that rely on procedural knowledge, he said.
Math education is rooted in old ways of doing things, Aiken and Price said.
“There is sort of a national conversation about some long held practices that we’ve been doing for over a century, of a sort of a singular approach that we there’s a set of math concepts we think every student should learn, and you don’t really have any choice, and you’re gonna go through this, whether you see yourselves ever using some of this math or not,” Aiken said. “One of those things that you sort of do it because you’ve always done it. And we had a lot of feedback that — ‘Why do I need my students to learn these things?’”
Improvement won’t happen overnight. Teachers need training on new ways to engage students, and parents need to be brought in to understand the changes and different things their children might be doing, Price said.
‘Math instruction and career pathways’
The changes appear to meet the desires of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, which hears from industry leaders that they need students with math and data skills and the ability to think critically and apply those skills to the workplace. The group says North Carolina needs rigorous but practical math standards.
“The proposed revisions under consideration by NCDPI appear to move in this direction by strengthening connections between math instruction and career pathways,” the business advocacy group said in a statement to WRAL News. “As the workplace evolves with the rapid adoption of AI and digital tools, math proficiency is becoming even more important—not less. Students need comfort with numbers, logic, and data to use these technologies effectively, make informed decisions, and adapt to new roles.”
The changes will make North Carolina graduates more competitive in the workforce, the group says.
The eight elective classes would be Mathematical and Statistical Modeling, Applied Statistics and Data Science, Applied Logic and Reasoning (the proposed new name for Discrete Math), AP Precalculus, AP Statistics, AP Calculus, and an approved International Baccalaureate or college math course.
Two of those classes would be new, essentially replacing the currently required Math 3 and Math 4. Applied Statistics and Data Science would focus on using data to solve problems and communicate conclusions. Mathematical and Statistical Modeling would combine statistics and applied mathematics and include research, requiring students to use reasoning and math skills to evaluate choices based on data.
Math 1 and Math 2, typically taken in early high school years, would also be significantly revised to focus on applying math to real-life uses and integrating more technology into classwork, including graphing calculators and artificial intelligence. The use of those technologies would align with current industry expectations and practices. Math 1 includes algebra and Math 2 includes geometry.
Administrators or students would then consult the standards to determine a pathway for students — suggesting the math electives — based on the students’ stated career interests and plans. For example, a student interested in biological and physical sciences would likely be encouraged to take the pairing or AP Precalculus and AP Calculus or the pairing of Mathematical and Statistical Modeling and AP Precalculus.
Students need to be carefully guided toward the right pathway, or they risk reinforcing disparities among groups in certain careers, Price said.
Women are underrepresented in science, technology and math-based fields, for which calculus could be more valuable, for example.
The draft also suggests replacing the state’s precalculus standards with Advanced Placement program standards for precalculus. The state has placed a greater emphasis on enrolling students in AP classes and having them take the AP tests, which are currently paid for by the state, for college credit. Last month, Alamance-Burlington Schools cited replacing its honors precalculus with AP precalculus for getting more students in AP classes and taking and passing the exam.
The class currently known as Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science would be renamed Applied Logic and Reasoning and would be revised to better emphasize reasoning skills.
Some state lawmakers have tried to lower math requirements recently to replace them with other courses. House Bill 415, a bill filed this year in the state legislature, seeks to remove the Math 3 requirement and replace it with a computer science class. The bill passed the House 69-43 but it hasn’t been taken up by the Senate. Lawmakers don’t plan to return to session this year. A 2023 bill, which did become law, requires high school students to take a computer science class to graduate, in place of one elective requirement.
No artificial intelligence
One thing not noted in the proposed standards is artificial intelligence usage, despite it being a fast-growing tool in the education world, and one that could be used to complete math problems.
Aiken said that’s because students still need to know the foundational skills of math and critical thinking skills to do the best work. Even if they use artificial intelligence, he said, they still need to know what questions to ask it, and what the artificial intelligence is doing to come up with its answers.
Leaders want students to be able to sense whether the technology interpreted the prompt in an unexpected way or made an unexpected assumption.
“We want students to be smart enough to be able to think through that and go, ‘OK, well, actually, when I crunch the numbers, I don’t get that.”