How Alabama students went from last place to rising stars in math

$Math teacher Diane Laney hard at work in her third-grade classroom at Ider High school, which serves grades K-12. Students use counters to help model multiplication.$

Alabama is the only state where 4th-grade math scores are higher now than they were in 2019, before the pandemic. This is the story of how the state pulled it off.

(Image credit: Charity Rachelle for NPR)