After years of assigning the kind of homework she had done as a student and observing students’ disengagement with it, a teacher overhauled how she assigns math practice.

Utah tried to infuse data science into its math standards. That effort got caught up in a broader debate about rigor and what math high schoolers need.

Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our ...