As teacher David Ramirez strode around his 7th-grade classroom at Oakland’s Urban Promise Academy, he was taking on a central challenge of the new Common Core standards: how to ensure that students ...

In math, Algebra 1 is a make-or-break course. The class is the gateway to high school math, and struggling to complete it can close off those higher-level pathways—and even jeopardize students’ ...

Corrected: An earlier version of this story misspelled two names. J. Shipley Newlin Jr. is the director of physical sciences, engineering, and math at the museum; Justin Burgher is a 7th grader who ...