2024–25 Program Summary

The Math Agency is a non-profit dedicated to closing educational gaps in public schools. Shameless plug: if you are interested in supporting students as an academic coach, we’d love to hear from you!

In June we wrapped up our 2024–25 academic coaching programs, and it was our biggest year yet. We served over 270 students across 17 classes at 7 different schools in 2 school districts. For reference, the year before we served roughly 190 students. We learned a lot from the expansion, including how to ramp up four brand-new site directors. A big thanks to Tim, Naomi, Gaby, and Scarlett for helping us figure it out!

The great news is that along with the increase in the number of students served, the year was a big success for student learning. Similar to last year, students in our program doubled their academic growth. The top-line metrics:

• Students went from learning math at a rate of 0.8 grades/year to 1.6 grades/year (as measured on IXL). An increase of +0.8 grades/year is our highest student impact so far.
• Students averaged over 140% of expected growth on district assessments (MAP and STAR).

If you are interested in the details, keep reading!

Program Summary

This year we ran our core program in a wide range of formats, including:

• During the school day (both pull-out and push-in)
• After school
• In-person and remote (via Zoom).

We partnered with five schools in Seattle, two in Bellevue, and worked with students in grades 2–5. One key takeaway: our type of personalized academic coaching can be effective across a wide range of formats.

At some point it becomes overwhelming to show individual results for all of our different schools, and I think we are rapidly approaching that point. However, district assessment data for each school in our 2024–25 cohort is shown below in Figure 1.

We plot the results as a percent of expected growth, where 100% corresponds to a student making expected progress. Note that “expected” in this context means relative to actual growth from similar students. The MAP assessment from NWEA (used by Seattle Public Schools) provides this output directly. For the STAR assessment from Renaissance Learning, used by the Bellevue School District, we calculate the expected growth by comparing each student’s raw growth to national averages.

There are a few things we can take away from the data. On average, students in the Math Agency averaged over 140% of expected growth. This matches what we’ve seen in previous years. However, this year we saw a bit more variability across our sites. We attribute this to having four new site-directors with a range of experience and skills. We see some clear ways to improve this via adjustments to our hiring and training process. Finally, we see that classmates of Math Agency students (but who weren’t enrolled in the program themselves) also did better than expected, averaging 125% of expected growth.

Figure 1. Results from district assessments for our 2024–25 cohort. The analysis includes over 250 Math Agency students and over 470 of their classmates.

Classroom Spillover Effects

Over the last few years we’ve noticed a consistent trend: classmates of Math Agency students often show higher than expected growth. This year we were able to dig deeper by looking at district assessment data from one of our partners. The results are shown below in Figure 2.

We see a clear trend:

1. Students in the Math Agency show the highest growth, even though they came from the two highest poverty schools in the district.
2. Their classmates have slightly lower growth, but still significantly higher than expected, despite also coming from the two highest poverty schools in the district.
3. Students with no connection to the program have the lowest growth.

At this point we can only speculate on what could cause a “spillover” effect like this, but a few candidates stick out. For example, our in-school programs typically serve a large number of struggling students in each classroom. When these students are working with our coaches, their teachers are able to serve a smaller number of students who are all closer to grade level. And even for classes served by our after-school programs, having a large fraction of students more prepared and motivated ought to improve the overall classroom learning environment. However, we should also note the potential for selection bias. We’ve been fortunate to work with some great teachers; and it could be that classrooms that work with us tend to have more effective teachers than average.

Figure 2. Growth on the STAR math assessment forthree different groups of students. The analysis includes over 3.8k students in the “No Math Agency” category, 230 “Classmates of Math Agency Students”, and 90 “Math Agency Students”.

Looking Ahead

While we’re thrilled with these results, we still see room to improve our impact. The average growth rate for student enrolled in our program was 1.6 grades/year, but roughly one third of our students still had growth rates of 1.0 grades/year or less, similar to last year. In 2025–26 we’ll work on finding ways to boost the growth of these students in particular.

Summary

For the fourth year in a row, students in our program doubled their academic growth rates, going from 0.8 grades/year to 1.6 grades/year. This growth came despite scaling the program and adding an entirely new team of site-directors. The large growth rates are visible in both our internal growth metrics and in district-level standardized tests. Finally, a big thank you to the volunteer coaches who made this happen!

We’re grateful to the principals and teachers who collaborate with us to support student success. Special thanks to School’s Out Washington: Best Starts for Kids Expanded Learning Program for their support of the after-school program at James Baldwin Elementary (in partnership with Seattle Parks and Recreation).