Louisiana Numeracy Screener Guide | Times Tables Software

Following the 'science of reading' reforms that swept US education over the last few years, several states are now applying the same rigour to mathematics. Louisiana and New Mexico have led the way, enacting comprehensive numeracy legislation that mandates structured screening for all K-3 students and requires schools to deploy specific, evidence-based interventions for students who are flagged. This is not a recommendation or a best-practice guide. It is a compliance requirement.

When I looked into the specifics of Louisiana's approach, what stood out to me immediately was the focus on *foundational fluency*. The screeners are not just checking whether a child understands broad mathematical concepts. They are assessing whether students have genuinely internalised core number facts, specifically the kind of automatic recall that underpins every subsequent stage of mathematical learning. That is a meaningful and important distinction.

For school administrators and curriculum leads, this creates a very real operational challenge. You need a screener workflow, a tiered response plan, and intervention tools that can demonstrate evidence of impact. All of that needs to be in place before the mandates take effect.

Here is what I keep seeing when I read the research and speak to educators about early math struggles: the gap is almost never about a child lacking intelligence or effort. It is almost always about fluency. When a student has not consolidated their times tables or basic number bonds to the point of automatic recall, every single maths lesson becomes a cognitive obstacle course. They are spending working memory on retrieval that should be effortless, which means they have nothing left for reasoning, problem-solving or new concepts.

The single biggest factor holding struggling K-3 students back is not a gap in understanding. It is a gap in fluency.

And yet, so many intervention programmes lead with more explanation, more worksheets, more of the same approach that already was not working. They do not address the anxiety that builds up around repeated failure, and they do not create the kind of low-pressure, repetition-rich environment that actually moves the needle on fluency.

This is exactly the gap that the new state mandates are trying to close. They are not asking schools to just "do more maths". They are asking for evidence-based tools that specifically build foundational fluency in a way that can be documented and measured.

Here is the part of this conversation that does not get enough airtime in the policy documents. A child who has been screened and flagged as below benchmark has, by definition, already experienced some degree of struggle and perhaps failure in their early maths education. Walking that child into an intervention programme that looks and feels like more of what already felt hard is not a neutral act. It can actively deepen math anxiety.

In our early conversations with schools, this is one of the things we hear most consistently. Teachers want interventions that do not make the flagged child feel singled out or broken. They want something that rebuilds confidence alongside fluency, because you genuinely cannot have one without the other at this stage.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "A child who is afraid to get it wrong will never practise enough to get it right. You have to remove the fear before you can build the fluency."

That philosophy shapes everything about how XTables Champions is designed. The focus is on creating a genuinely enjoyable, low-stakes environment where repeated practice does not feel like punishment, and where progress is visible to the child as well as the teacher.

The new state mandates are going to require schools to justify their intervention choices. That means pointing to a programme that has a clear mechanism for building fluency, a way of tracking individual student progress, and an approach that is grounded in how children actually learn and retain number facts.

From what I have read across the Louisiana Department of Education guidance and the broader 2026 state math strategy updates, the interventions that will hold up to scrutiny share a few characteristics. They target automaticity, not just accuracy. They provide frequent, short practice opportunities rather than infrequent long sessions. They are engaging enough that students actually use them. And they generate data that a teacher or intervention specialist can act on.

XTables Champions is built around exactly this model. It is a multiplication fluency programme designed for primary-age students, built to reduce math anxiety while driving genuine, measurable gains in fact recall. For schools building out their Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) for math, it sits naturally as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention tool for students flagged by numeracy screeners.

It is also worth saying that, as a young company, we are not going to pretend we have decades of large-scale outcome data. What we do have is a product built on solid educational principles, real feedback from the schools we are working with, and a genuine commitment to doing this properly.

If your district is in one of the states affected by the 2026 mandates, the time to build your intervention stack is now, not after the screener results come in next year. A few things worth doing immediately:

1. Review your current MTSS framework and identify where math fluency sits in your tiered response plan.
2. Audit the intervention tools you already have. Do they specifically address automaticity and fluency, or are they broader maths programmes that may not satisfy the mandate requirements?
3. Start the conversation now about how you will document and demonstrate impact. Compliance will require evidence, not just activity.

The schools that will handle the 2026 mandates most smoothly are the ones that treat this as a planning challenge today rather than a compliance scramble next year.

If you are a school leader, curriculum director, or administrator working through what the new numeracy mandates mean for your intervention strategy, I would love to hear from you. We are having these conversations with schools right now, and we are genuinely interested in understanding what is happening on the ground across different districts.

Get in touch with the XTables Champions team at xtableschampions.com to tell us about your school's situation and find out how our fluency programme can support your MTSS planning for 2026. Whether you are at the early stages of reviewing your options or already building your intervention plan, we are happy to talk it through.