National Study Shows W.Va. Students Making Strides In Math Ability  

One in five students in West Virginia has better math scores on standardized tests than in 2019. That’s good enough to give West Virginia the sixth best math achievement growth in the country according to the Education Scorecard.  

The scorecard, a collaboration between researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth Universities, normalizes disparate testing data from across the country.    

While every state makes its students take standardized tests, every exam is different, even from year to year. That makes it challenging to compare states or even to know if differences in test scores from one year to the next are real or just a result of the test changing.  

To address this problem, Harvard’s Tom Kane and Stanford’s Sean Reardon converted state test scores for third to eighth graders in every state into a common metric known as a grade-level equivalent. They created an apples-to-apples comparison by using scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal test, as a benchmark.  

West Virginia students are still testing a full grade level below the national average in mathematics, but that gap has been closing over the past seven years.  

Upshur County was profiled in the study as a “District on the Rise” due to its students gaining almost a full grade level in math between 2019 and 2025. Superintendent Christy Miller credits improvements to community support. 

“One of the biggest strengths that we have in the community is the support from our families, and that the community values education,” she told researchers. “There’s a concentrated effort and working together is what really makes the difference.” 

Miller also noted better coordination with the state’s Department of Education and a focus on practical maths via the state’s math4life initiative.  

“In West Virginia, we have numeracy coordinators who work at the district level. They’re provided by the state’s Department of Education and come in and share good practices,” she said. “They provide the district with information collected from classroom observations on what is going on in math instruction and we use this information to target professional development opportunities for our classroom teachers to strengthen their instruction with all of our students.” 

A notable reduction in chronic absenteeism has also helped.  West Virginia’s absenteeism rates have dropped from a 2022 high of 29% to 22.7% in 2025. However, chronic absence rates still remain four percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.