Arizona K-12 Math Introduction
How does K-12 math work in Arizona?
There are 369 core “math standards” provided by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) available at https://www.azed.gov/standards-practices/k-12standards/mathematics-standards. These outline the beginning and end of what teachers are supposed to teach.
How are courses structured?
While there is room for schools to accelerate and combine topics differently into different courses, in my experience, we can designate the most “traditional” progression in Arizona as the following:
The 369 standards mentioned above span from Kindergarten through Algebra 2 (here we are focusing on these as they are the courses that all students take; i.e., the “core” courses). As such, there are an average of around 31 standards covered per grade.
What else is helpful to know?
This graphic above gives us a starting point. It gives us a general sense of the outline of K-12 math. To go further, we’d normally be left visiting the ADE website and combing through the itemized math standards to get a more actionable sense of what’s going on.
And while that can be a worthwhile exercise, having spent many hours going line-by-line through all 369 standards, I’ve summarized them in the graphic below.
I think this is how most of us like to think of math anyhow – by topics. And these topics are meant to be, to reuse a phrase, “the beginning and end” of what students need to understand; i.e., the whole of K-12 math in one picture.
(For a more in depth look at what exact skills students need within each topic, see the filterable Standards Database).