That’s one of the top-line findings from a from the Urban Institute, which sought to understand whether devoting resources to children’s health and social development yields greater benefits than devoting resources to their cognitive development; the study also looks at what aspects of a child’s cognitive development play relatively larger roles in their adult outcomes. 

Researchers found that math scores have a significant predictive impact on earnings into adulthood. That finding holds true for children of all races and ethnicities – including for Hispanic children who consistently experience the largest gains – and for girls, who tend to see a higher earnings boost than boys. 

“Math scores seem to matter a good bit,” says Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits at the Urban Institute and one of the lead authors of the policy paper. “Everything matters a little, but cognitive skills seem to matter a lot.”

The findings, which replicate a longstanding correlation between math and adult success, come as school districts across the country consider ways to provide more effective math instruction, especially in the early elementary years, and build a stronger connection in the K-12 setting to local workforce needs.

Specifically, the analysis shows that improving math scores by 0.5 standard deviation for children up to age 12 is associated with larger increases on earnings by age 30 than other equivalent improvements. 

The impact also increases as children get older. For example, a half standard deviation increase in preschool math scores raises earnings by 2.5 percent, while a half standard deviation increase in middle childhood raises earnings by 3.5 percent. A 3.5 percent increase corresponds to about $1,200 a year in additional earnings for the average adult. Notably, girls see a greater increase in adulthood earnings from an improvement in math scores than boys – more than three-quarters of a percentage point at every life stage.

The same cannot be said for the earnings impact of improving reading scores, which actually diminishes as students get older, falling from 0.9 percent (about $300) to 0.5 percent (less than $200) from ages 5 to 11. Meanwhile, the impact of health and social relationships are consistent but modest as children get older. “It’s not an enormous impact, but it’s an impact,” Acs says. “Would you pass up a 3 percent raise?”

“It consistently shows that things you do early in life do ripple through,” he continued. “And even when you might not see a clear causal pathway,” he says, “it’s a good framework for understanding how early life stuff matters.”

The analysis bolsters previous research touting a correlation between math and earnings later in life and gives policymakers much to think over as they choose among interventions aimed at benefiting children in the short or long term, as well as when might be the most effective moment to unleash those targeted interventions. 

“It is useful to see what are the curricular options and where you can intervene in kids’ lives early on if you want to have a long term impact,” Acs says. “And it does show that improvements in childhood and elementary school do matter and carry on into earnings.”

For example, Acs says, it may be worth making bigger investments in math in later grades given that improvements in middle school have a more significant impact on earnings than in preschool. And for school leaders looking to make a dent in the earnings gap between men and women, it’s important to know that increasing math scores in childhood consistently raises the adult earnings of girls by a greater percentage than those of boys – even if in absolute dollar terms, increasing math scores raises boys’ earnings, too. 

In the wake of the recent “science of reading” overhaul that shifted how educators teach students to read, policymakers are increasingly setting their gaze on math pedagogy. improved slowly between 1990 and 2013 and then plateaued, only to fall sharply during the pandemic. On average, students lost in math between 2019 and 2022. The most vulnerable students fell even further behind, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities. 

Recovery has been stubborn and slow. Students recorded the largest drop ever in math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year, to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

“We always talk about this amazing predictive power of early mathematics,” says DeAnn Huinker, professor of math instruction at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and director of the Center for Math and Science Education Research. “And I think we’ve taken math identity and agency away from kids, and just squashed the love that you find in 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds when they’re exploring numbers. Kids just really get turned off of mathematics, so I think we’re fighting that right now.”

Education policy experts, lawmakers and business leaders agree that the nation needs to drive improvements in K-12 math to remain competitive in an increasingly technical global economy. On the most recent internationally benchmarked , known as the PISA, Americans scored lower than students from 36 other countries. And Defense Department officials are concerned about Americans’ contempt for math, warning that it has serious implications for national security, including .

Looking ahead, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the number of jobs in so-called “math occupations” is set to increase by 29% by 2031, or by roughly 30,000 jobs per year – a faster clip than for other occupations. 

Though the debate over how to correct course is ongoing, experts say that the way schools are currently teaching math doesn’t work very well; further complicating the problem is the fact that many teachers who seek out positions in early elementary grades – the important foundational math years – do so because they don’t like math. Teachers should move away from procedural learning that involves rote memorization, Huinker and others say, and focus instead on conceptual understanding, which helps students recognize underlying math relationships, and developing a positive math identity.

“The number one goal is to really get at this deeper understanding of mathematics,” she says. “We want kids to make sense of the mathematical ideas that they’re exploring and learning about. So not rote learning, not memorizing, not worksheets. We do a lot that still is perhaps bad practice in early mathematics.”

Huinker says she hopes research like that from the Urban Institute’s analysis crystalizes for policymakers and school leaders the importance of getting math instruction right – especially in the early years.

“One thing that’s starting to really be more acknowledged is the importance of early mathematics and its predictive power for the long term,” she says. “There’s so much emphasis on reading and literacy, which is super important, but it kind of always overshadows mathematics. The crux of all of this early childhood, elementary and middle math is ensuring that kids feel empowered with agency to make sense of mathematics, to question, to explore, to really think of themselves as confident in that.” 

One of my favorite sayings is the Noah principle: “no more prizes for predicting rain; prizes only for building arks.” 

Given the catastrophic pandemic of the past few years, it would be easy to focus on the devastating floods that inundated our schools and communities. The huge learning losses were just one consequence. The connection losses were just as significant, if not more so. 

These losses were particularly severe for adolescents, for whom peer relationships are central to identity development. 

They lost everyday interactions with their peers and the connections strengthened by cooperative learning techniques, extracurriculars, and clubs. That isolation, coupled with the loss of treasured high school rituals such as prom and graduation, contributed to a mental health crisis from which students are still recovering—a crisis of connection and belonging. The is clear: trusting relationships with peers and teachers are key to learning, but students’ connections were largely confined to their nuclear families during the pandemic. 

Now it is up to us to help remedy the damage—not by looking backward at the flood but forward to the future. 

As we move from observing the rain to building the ark(s), we must resist the temptation to “boil the ocean”—to think we must solve huge, seemingly intractable problems all at once. Instead of getting paralyzed by “recover from the pandemic,” “improve graduation rates,” or “increase college success,” break the challenge into doable, bite-size pieces and make things work. Let’s start by focusing on elevating the human connections that drive all learning. For the Urban Assembly, a school support agency in New York City, that means the following: 

Rebuild caring student-adult relationships in schools

When children and young adults develop their social-emotional skills, experience positive environments in the classroom, and have high-quality interactions with adults and their peers, they learn how to be successful in life. Relationships are key to learning, whether that’s a relationship to the curriculum, to their teachers, or even to a vision of themselves in the future. 

These relationships can take many forms, from direct instruction of relationship skills to systems and structures that create a predictable and supportive school climate and culture. Whatever the form, it’s important to see it as a fluid and individualized process. You can’t assess a basketball team only by looking at the final score and skipping the game. Yes, the score is important, but if you want to understand how well the team plays, you’ve got to watch the game and all the dynamics of teamwork on display.

That’s what it takes to understand student learning. For example, our (used in over 1,500 schools in New York City and more than 20 communities across the country) builds schools’ understanding of the social-emotional processes that help support student success in school and beyond. It’s not just about student work, just like it’s not just about the box score. It’s about the process, and the program helps make that process more visible to students and educators. 

Help leaders connect

At the Urban Assembly, we know that the answer to challenging times is community. That’s why we created Principal Learning Communities, where school leaders share best practices around solving problems and mitigate the isolation of leadership. We are creating a causal cascade of care that extends from school leaders to teachers and school staff, and ultimately to students. 

Offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success

Not college for all, but postsecondary success for all, with relevant options for the broad diversity of learners. Some graduates will go on to two-year programs, others to four year colleges, others straight into careers. Our vision is to offer meaningful choices and provide solid preparation that lets students take advantage of those opportunities.

To that end, we have radically reimagined postsecondary preparation. Our Early Career and College Awareness explicitly introduces ninth- and 10th-grade students to selfdiscovery exercises and helps them learn about and engage with various career opportunities and educational pathways. At the same time, our programs help school counselors to provide ongoing student support.

Make education more relevant and meaningful

It’s time to reimagine what it means to be well-educated. Yes, understanding the enduring themes in Shakespeare’s plays will always lend insight into the human condition. But now, more than ever, we must help students connect those insights to the real world. All of our 23 schools, which we support in partnership with the New York City Department of Education, are organized around themes and collaborations with dozens of public entities and private companies such as Cisco, Northwell, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Hands-on internships and apprenticeships are the norm. For example, students at the Urban Assembly School for Collaborative Healthcare can earn their medical assistant and EMT certifications by completing internships at Brookdale Hospital and St. Barnabas. One out of every five students graduates with an industry-recognized certification in addition to their high school diploma, and every student has a postsecondary plan that includes college.

At the Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction, every student is enrolled in an architecture or design pathway where they develop cutting-edge thinking and modeling skills that are in high demand from industries. Internships at the nonprofit and the create real-world opportunities for students to practice what they’ve learned. As a result, 100% of students who graduate have a postsecondary plan, and 75% of those plans involve opportunities in art, architecture, engineering, and construction. 

Urban Assembly schools, which serve all students, are designed to nurture students’ individual interests, build connections with mentors who work in fields they aspire to join, and give students access to the sense of purpose that will sustain them in school and in life. When students contribute to solving real-world problems, they can honestly say, “I, too, have something worthy to offer.”

Scale what works

Our social and emotional learning resources have been used in all public schools in New York City. Through , 1.2 million of the city’s students have access to DESSA, a strength-based social and emotional learning feedback tool. Plus, a guided intervention program helps educators provide targeted, highly responsive support to each individual student. 

As ark builders across the country help students recover from the pandemic, we need to embrace a bolder vision of schooling. School can be a central hub of our communities, a place of meaningful connections between students and adults, and a place that connects learning to the real world. That’s our vision, and that’s the future of learning.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .