She said the government's new Investing in Educational Success programme would help schools share their expertise, as would the Network For Learning service, among other professional development projects.
"There is a problem and this is the response to the problem," the minister said.
She said the current debate was about the way basics were learned, and schools needed to find a balance between learning basic facts and creative strategies.
The report primarily criticised the introduction of changes to maths teaching with the Numeracy Project, introduced in 2000.
It said the project was aimed at moving away from Victorian-era rote learning. But the NZI report says the pendulum has now "swung too far" in the other direction, and results had not improved.
The project over-complicated teaching, it said, asking children to learn multiple methods for solving maths problems before learning basic facts, such as times tables, or written methods such as column addition.
"Relational learning is important, but so is gaining fluency in the basics and written methods, which frees up children's working memory to develop the deeper conceptual mathematical understanding the Numeracy Project intended," it said.
The report cited teachers with poor maths skills as a related issue, and wanted to introduce a voluntary certificate of competency.
It quoted a 2010 study that found a third of new primary teachers could not add two fractions (7/18 + 1/9).
"When teachers can't do simple fractions, that's shocking," said NZI executive director Oliver Hartwich. "Teachers have to take some of the responsibility."
Dr Hartwich said the think-tank was not calling for a return to the old days, but for a move away from what an "experimental approach".
"We think the Numeracy Project should be heavily modified, if not abolished altogether," he said.
