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Ask a district leader to name their top academic priorities and you'll almost always hear the same two answers: literacy and math. They show up together in strategic plans, school improvement documents, and board presentations across the country. When we analyzed five years of professional learning data, we found that districts are doing twice as much literacy PD as math every single year. Here's what's driving the gap, and what it might mean for districts trying to close it.
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Literacy PD receives twice the investment across districts.
From 2020 to 2025, districts offered about twice as many literacy professional learning sessions as math sessions — and roughly twice as many educators registered for them. The gap was widest in 2021-22, when literacy sessions outnumbered math 2.42 to 1, likely driven by the wave of Science of Reading legislation sweeping through states. It has never dropped below 1.80×, suggesting a sustained focus on literacy over math.
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31% of literacy PD registrations are tied to a named curriculum program such as LETRS, DIBELS, and Journeys among the most common. For math, that figure is 14.5%. When districts adopt a specific literacy curriculum, it generates sustained, high-volume PD. Math hasn't seen the same convergence: the most widely used math curricula reach a fraction of the educators that leading literacy programs do. If math sees a comparable curriculum adoption wave in coming years, the PD numbers may follow.
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70% of literacy PD and 65% of math PD is taken by elementary educators. For both subjects, middle and high school educators are receiving a disproportionately small share of professional learning relative to their numbers. The reasons likely differ by subject — early reading instruction is front-loaded in the primary grades by design, and math curriculum adoption has historically been concentrated at the elementary level. But for district leaders thinking about secondary outcomes in either subject, the data raises a question worth sitting with: are middle and high school educators getting the support they need?
The 2:1 ratio of both PD sessions offered and educators registering for those sessions points to the same conclusion: this discrepancy is about supply, not demand. Educators are taking advantage of what's being offered, but districts are not investing in math PD at the same level as literacy PD. At the same time, elementary educators account for the majority of PD in both subjects while secondary teachers receive comparatively less.
District leaders who understand these patterns are better positioned to make deliberate choices about where to invest their time and money, and whether the current balance reflects the needs of their students.
Methodology: Session-level attendance records from KickUp client districts across 22 states, covering school years 2020–21 through 2024–25 (4,465,386 attendance records; 277,481 unique sessions). Session names were classified as Literacy, Math, Both, or Neither using a three-stage process: (1) district-level content tags were used first when available; (2) remaining sessions were screened using keyword and regex matching against known curriculum and subject patterns; (3) sessions that remained ambiguous after keyword screening were classified using session name and description. Sessions covering both subjects were counted toward both Literacy and Math totals.
The balance between literacy and math PD in your district reflects real choices about where educator development time goes. KickUp gives district leaders visibility into those patterns — across subjects, grade levels, and years — so you can see whether your investments align with your priorities. Let's talk about what your data shows.
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