Texas Rethinks Elementary Math | Times Tables Software

When I looked into the research behind this shift, one pattern kept surfacing. Students who struggle with grade-level maths are very often not struggling with the grade-level concept itself. They're struggling because a foundational gap, usually from one or two years earlier, hasn't been addressed. And nowhere is that more visible than with multiplication fluency.

A student who doesn't know their times tables cannot reliably access long division, fractions, algebra readiness, or almost any meaningful maths from Year 4 onwards. That's not a controversial claim. It's something any experienced primary teacher will confirm immediately. But the default response in most school systems has been to keep pushing grade-level content and hope the gaps close on their own. They don't.

Texas, to its credit, is putting structural weight behind a different approach. The multi-grade diagnostic model being piloted through the Mathematics Academies is built on the idea that you have to meet students where they actually are, not where the curriculum assumes they should be.

When I read through what the TEA is looking for in its supplemental materials RFP, a few things stood out. The tools they want are ones that:

1. Respond to diagnostic screening data, not just grade-level placement.
2. Can serve students across multiple grade levels within the same classroom or intervention group.
3. Support the kind of targeted, repeatable practice that builds genuine fluency over time.

That's a specific brief. It rules out general maths platforms that just serve up curriculum-aligned exercises. What Texas is describing is a tool that adapts based on where a student's gaps actually are, and then helps fill those gaps systematically.

For elementary schools in Houston ISD, Dallas ISD, Austin ISD and beyond, this means the 2026-27 school year is the right moment to be actively reviewing what supplemental tools are in place, and whether those tools genuinely respond to diagnostic results.

Here's something I keep coming back to. The students who will enter the Mathematics Academies pilot in 2026 are in classrooms right now. Some of them are in Year 3 or Year 4, working through maths lessons with a multiplication fluency gap that is quietly compounding every week. The diagnostic screening hasn't happened yet. The intervention hasn't been assigned. But the gap is already there.

From the schools we speak to in our early conversations, this is one of the most consistent frustrations teachers describe. They know which students haven't secured their times tables. They know it's affecting everything else. But the time and tools to address it systematically, within a normal school week, are hard to come by.

That's exactly the problem XTables Champions was built around. We're a young company, and I won't pretend we have years of large-scale data to point to. What I can say is that the conversations we're having with educators reflect the same thing Texas is now formalising at a policy level: fluency gaps are foundational, they're persistent, and they need targeted, diagnostic-aware tools to address them.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"We built XTables Champions because we kept hearing that kids were falling behind in maths not because they couldn't understand new concepts, but because they'd never properly secured the ones underneath. That felt like a solvable problem."*

For a tool to genuinely support a multi-grade diagnostic model, it needs to do more than test. It needs to help students build and consolidate fluency through structured, repeated practice that adjusts to their current level, not their year group.

For multiplication specifically, that means identifying which facts a student knows automatically, which ones they're still calculating slowly, and which ones are genuinely insecure, then focusing practice time on closing those specific gaps. That kind of targeted fluency work is what makes a supplemental tool genuinely useful in the context Texas is describing.

XTables Champions is designed to do exactly that. Students work through their times tables in a way that responds to what they actually know, building fluency fact by fact rather than table by table. It's built for the intervention context: short, focused sessions that fit into a busy school week and give teachers visibility over individual progress.

The 2026-27 pilot is still ahead of us. That means schools have a window right now to put the right supplemental tools in place, gather some early data on their own students, and be in a much stronger position when the Mathematics Academies framework rolls out more broadly.

Waiting until the pilot is underway to start thinking about fluency gaps is waiting too long. The students who need this support are sitting in classrooms today.

If you're a curriculum coordinator, maths lead, or school administrator in Texas, and you're trying to get ahead of this shift rather than catch up to it, I'd love to hear what you're seeing in your school. And if you'd like to find out more about how XTables Champions supports diagnostic-led fluency intervention at the elementary level, get in touch with us at xtableschampions.com. We're genuinely happy to talk through what your school needs, without any pressure.