As the summer calendar zips by, Washington schools soon will be forced to add new math classes for struggling students.

The Legislature has required that high school students who fail the math portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning will have to enroll in extra math classes for the rest of their high school career.

That leaves districts like Spokane Public Schools scrambling to make plans. Administrators there won’t know until later this summer exactly how many students they’ll need to accommodate. That’s because students have yet another chance to pass the WASL in August.

Across the state, nearly half the high school sophomores taking the WASL for the first time failed the math portion of the test. That leaves a significant number likely to register for extra classes.

School districts haven’t been exactly leaping to share their schools’ WASL results. They’re facing not only tricky decisions about whether to add more math teachers, but also a more fundamental question: How should mathematics be taught?

Contemporary approaches have been nicknamed “fuzzy math” by critics because they ask students to devise solutions on their own and to focus more on explaining how they derived an answer than pursuing the correct one. Too often, they allow kids to use calculators but fail to teach basics such as memorizing multiplication tables and tackling long division. Even worse, they’ve been criticized for producing students who often must take remedial college math classes.

Everyone from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to State Superintendent Terry Bergeson to Bill Gates has been calling for changes in math education and graduation requirements.

Lately, a Spokane-area partnership of public schools and higher education programs has begun to collaborate on a project aimed at improving math and science education in this region.

School leaders who gather round this issue would do well to examine math curricula from more successful schools. They should keep an eye on programs as close as California and as far away as Singapore.

Students have long discovered math a satisfying academic pursuit, largely because it’s traditionally been so highly structured, so linear and so clear. One problem built on another. And a right answer resounded as an unambiguous success.

Washington public schools will face one difficult math test after another. As the days of summer melt away like Popsicles in August, the pressure will be on. If schools don’t act quickly, and well, the math question will continue to drip into one big sticky mess.