State of Math Pathways 2026: The Most Complete National Picture Yet

Today, the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with WestEd, is releasing State of Math Pathways 2026, the most comprehensive national assessment yet of how states are building coherent math pathways from high school through postsecondary education and into careers.

Too many students never encounter a math pathway suited to their goals. In many schools, calculus is the only path forward; in the country's lowest-income communities, options can end at Algebra II. Students have the capacity to succeed in mathematics, but our systems need to be ready to create the conditions for that success. 

This is the challenge at the center of the Launch Years Initiative (LYI). Led by the Dana Center, LYI works with 26 states to expand high-quality mathematics learning opportunities for all students and to better align high school math with students' postsecondary and career goals. LYI states don't approach this work in isolation. The initiative connects state teams to one another, to research, and to technical assistance, so that structural reform is informed by what's working across the country, not just within one state's borders.

Explore the findings

State of Math Pathways 2026 picks up where our 2025 report, Charting the Course, left off. That report established a national baseline using six preliminary progress measures. This year's report and companion microsite expand the lens significantly: 29 structural indicators across nine key actions, assessed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It also goes deeper than any previous report in this space, drawing on a six-state data pilot conducted with Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Oregon, to examine what structural reform looks like in practice, and what today's data systems can (and cannot yet) tell us about student outcomes.

The findings point to five cross-cutting patterns that should shape how states prioritize their work over the next year:

• Pathway design is outpacing implementation support. States are approving new math courses and pathways faster than they're building the recurring funding, materials review, and staffing needed to sustain them.
• Postsecondary reform is outpacing secondary access. Higher education has created new gateway math courses and placement models, but they mean little if high school advising, course access, and admissions signals haven't caught up to meet students there.
• Data infrastructure is outpacing public reporting. States are building the systems to track students across secondary and postsecondary education, but linked data doesn't automatically translate into shared definitions, disaggregated reports, or public transparency.
• In-service learning is outpacing pre-service redesign. Professional development can be layered onto an existing system. Rebuilding educator preparation and faculty expectations requires deeper, slower institutional change.
• Institutionalization is the next phase of this work. Across nearly every state, the task ahead is connecting promising, isolated programs into a system that doesn't depend on individual champions or on students who happen to know how to navigate inconsistent rules.

All states and the District of Columbia have demonstrated varying levels of work on math pathways reform. But progress can be undermined when course access, advising, admissions, placement, transfer, funding, educator preparation, or reporting remains disconnected. 

The central question now is not whether mathematics pathways can be helpful. It is whether the math pathways being built are connected, supported, and visible enough to change what students experience.

We're grateful to our Launch Years Initiative state partners, and especially to our six deeper-review states, for the transparency and partnership that made this analysis possible. The work of building durable, connected math pathways is far from finished. Our hope is that State of Math Pathways 2026 gives the field a clearer, more honest picture of exactly where that work stands.