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.” 

There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word. 

The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts. 

The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia. 

The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8^th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8^thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points. 

To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track. 

The table below shows the state-level results in 8^th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards. 

You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the , 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests. 

Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8^th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. 

To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success. 

Missouri students are showing progress on standardized tests administered by the state, with results in some categories approaching — and even exceeding — pre-pandemic levels.

But in other areas — most notably English language arts — students continue to struggle.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education revealed preliminary scores in the Missouri Assessment Program, or MAP, to the State Board of Education Tuesday.

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Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a board member from Pasadena Hills, said she was “a little deflated that we didn’t see more growth and progress.”

DESE is implementing programs to address low levels of literacy, an issue throughout the United States, with interventions based on the science of reading and .

Westbrooks-Hodge said the intervention has worked like triage care; it “stopped the bleed” and scores are static.

“We made lots of great investments in the last two years, and I think we’re going to see the fruit of that as our score starts to increase,” she said. “All of these interventions are working. They’re stabilizing our educational system, and now we can start layering growth on top of that.”

English language arts scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, according to data presented Tuesday, with 56% of students scoring in the “basic” or “below basic” range. This percentage has held steady since 2022.

Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner of quality schools, said it takes “continuous, sustained focused implementation with fidelity at the local level, up to five years, before we start to see results on large-scale measures.”

She noted that teacher shortages could be impacting the scores, as a battle of the 2023-24 school year.

When looking at scores across all subjects and grades, there is an observable improvement since 2021’s tests. That year, 24% of scores were in the “below basic” range. That’s fallen to 22% this year, still higher than the 19% below basic in the  last pre-pandemic tests in 2019. The number of scores in proficient and advanced ranges are one-percent less than 2019’s achievement.

Math scores are exceeding pre-pandemic levels, with a one-percent boost in the advanced category compared to 2019 when looking at grades 3-8. Sireno noted that middle-school math has exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

Sireno expects additional analysis, especially as educators look at local-level data.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

About 600 schools have joined a pilot program to give Indiana’s Learning Evaluation and Assessment Readiness Network (ILEARN) tests in four stages next school year, instead of just end-of-year tests that are used for state report cards. 

In the pilot, the state will give three new “checkpoint” math and English tests spread through the school year to third- through eighth-graders that let teachers see right away how well students perform, allowing lessons to be adjusted.

“The checkpoints will be very intentionally for the school…the local teacher…to improve the learning in that classroom,” said Indiana state education superintendent Katie Jenner.

The mid-year scores won’t be reported publicly or count toward school or district report cards, which will remain based on the end of year tests.

“It’s not punitive,” Jenner told the state school board. “It’s in support of student learning, which is why we’re all here.”

The checkpoint tests will fill much of the role of the diagnostic tests districts buy from private providers and regularly use during the year, like NWEA’s Measures of Academic Promise (MAP) tests and Edmenutum’s Exact Path tests, state officials said.State Rep. Bob Behning, author of a bill passed this spring giving final authorization of the pilot.

“I frequently hear education leaders complain about the fact that their kids look like they’re doing great, but when they take ILEARN, they don’t,” said Behning. “The reality is this test will be aligned directly to statewide assessments, so there will be that much more correlation and much more predictability.”

If the checkpoint tests go well, he said, the state might stop giving more than $14 million in grants each year to districts to pay for other diagnostic tests, which it has done since 2015. Districts could use just the free ILEARN checkpoints and stop buying other tests.

“We know already that some of the benchmark providers are not happy with this direction,” Behning said.

Kevin Briody, chief marketing officer for Edmentum, one of a handful of vendors approved for grant money, did not object to the new tests and said his company supports improving tests to help teachers.

NWEA representatives, however, would not answer whether their company is worried about losing business.

Mid-year standardized tests are common nationally and go by several names-— diagnostic, formative or through-year tests. Though districts often pay for such tests on their own, Indiana is one of 13 states either using or exploring a plan to give them, according to a report by Education First, an education advocacy organization.

That report, cited by Indiana Department of Education officials in presentations on the plan, was partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

How states use through-year tests varies, though most, like Indiana, use just the final test to rate schools and districts. A few states  — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana and Montana  — are considering or using results from all tests during the year to set a final student school and district rating, that report found. 

According to the plan outlined to Indiana’s state school board last year, the “checkpoint” tests will be given every nine or 10 weeks during the school year with flexibility for districts to pick testing days. 

Each test will have 25 to 30 questions covering four to seven learning standards in the subject.

At each checkpoint test, students and teachers will see if they are on-track or off-track for passing the final test as well as how they compare to other students in the state.

Students who “fail” a checkpoint test can receive help in tested skills and re-take the test later to see if they have learned them.

Giving students a chance to re-learn skills and then be tested on them again is a step toward schools potentially using a “mastery” or “competency” learning and grading system, a concept with growing support among some state officials. Such systems have students keep working on skills until they “master” them, rather than having a class move on to other material after a set period of time and just giving low grades to students that lag behind.

“If a school really wanted to get into a true kind of mastery, competency-based (approach), they could use these assessments to really understand where students are at different points and act accordingly,” said state school board member Scott Bess.

So far, the tests seem to have support statewide. The state’s plan to make the final, year-end ILEARN test shorter because of the added tests eased concerns about testing taking too much time, said Terry Spradlin, executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association.

“It makes kind of good sense, so we’ll be supportive of that for sure,” he said.

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The Alaska board of education approved lowering the test score standard for student proficiency, after school leaders cited the state’s nationally high bar.

Student success on standardized tests is categorized by what are known as cut scores, which are the range of results that show indicate a score is above or below proficiency for a grade level.

Alaska’s standards for proficiency have been among the highest in the nation, and some educators and officials have said that the state has set the bar, or the cut score, too high in some areas.

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At its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, the school board approved a series of adjustments to those standards for the Alaska System of Academic Readiness, known as AK STAR tests, which was proposed by the Department of Education and Early Development. It also updated regulations for administering assessments to students with disabilities.

DEED Commissioner Deena Bishop said the new cut scores are a better reflection of the kind of growth that is possible for typical students to achieve in the months between assessments. She said the adjustments may lower the expectations for proficiency, but that does not mean Alaska’s standards are now low.

“We’re still in the top third of all states in the nation for expectations and high standards,” she said. “We’re just not at the top anymore.”

Some members of the public were critical of the changes, and said the state should be supporting teachers and students rather than lowering expectations.

Timothy Doran, a former educator and administrator who now serves on the Fairbanks North Star School District Board, said he wants to see the state review its assessment standards before it changes cut scores, but added that he appreciated DEED’s process.

“We’re setting a cut score based against a standard which is 10 years old and have not been reviewed for whether they’re appropriate,” he said. “We’re applying it to a test for which we have not looked to say, ‘What’s going on here? Are students understanding these questions? Have we set that bar so high that students can’t get over it?’”

Haines Borough School District Superintendent Roy Getchell praised the department for its efforts. He served on the policy review for the regulation change.

“Assessments in Alaska around the country have had too many setbacks, stops and starts that have really kind of eroded the confidence of our processes, which is why it was critical that we get it right out of the chute. And I’m much more confident that what’s being presented today is going to be right from the start,” he said.

Lisa Parady, who has a doctorate in education leadership and is executive director of the Alaska Council of School Administrators, said policy reviews like this one are a normal process, and that the state has seen a lot of assessment changes over the years.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes, and now we’re on a good path,” she said. “It’s incumbent upon every one of us to make sure that what we put out is accurate and right and aligned, so that our teachers can get what they need in terms of the results of this assessment.”

Alaska’s STAR test results were delayed this year because of the change to cut scores, the department said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

The average ACT test score was 19.5 out of 36 from the class of 2023, compared to 19.8 last year — the sixth consecutive drop, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test.

New shows Black students scored 3.5 points below this year’s average, continuing the growing trend of historically marginalized students being unprepared for college-level courses.

“These systemic problems require sustained action and support at the policy level,” said ACT chief executive officer Janet Godwin in a . 

“The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” she added.

Here are four key takeaways from the :

1. Black students had the lowest ACT test scores in nearly every category.

Black students had an overall ACT test score of 16 out of 36.

In English, Black students were more than three points below the average scores of 18.6 for English, 19 for math, 20.1 for reading and 19.6 for science.

American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and Latino students also scored below average in every category.

Stephen Barker, director of communications at , said the scores point to the systemic barriers minority and first-generation students face as they apply to college.

“There isn’t the generational support or knowledge to push kids and prepare them to take these tests,” Barker said. “Kids are throwing their hands in the air and saying ‘I’m gonna take it but I’m not ready’ and it’s stressful for them and bears out in these numbers.”

2. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students experienced the greatest ACT test score declines in the last five years.

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students saw the largest overall ACT test score decline in the last five years, scoring 16.3 out of 36 — a 1.6 point decrease compared to 2019.

The decline was followed by Latino and white students who decreased 1.3 and 1.1 points, respectively.

“What you don’t see in these numbers are all of the environmental challenges that are stacked on,” Barker said, adding how students, often women, are caretaking for families or working multiple jobs.

“We’re just throwing tests at kids and are surprised when it comes time to enroll them and they aren’t ready,” he said.

3. Male students scored higher in math and science compared to females.

Male students scored 19.4 in math and 19.8 in science compared to female students scoring 18.8 and 19.6, respectively — a difference of 0.6 and 0.2 points.

Female students scored 19.2 in English and 20.6 in reading compared to male students scoring 18.2 and 19.7 — a difference of 1 and 0.9 points.

“I can tell you that I definitely see this disparity,” Medha Kukkalli, a first-year student at the University of Houston, told ����Ӱ��.

Kukkalli, who’s currently studying human development and family studies, said most of her classmates are women and her peers in STEM courses are predominantly men. 

4. Fewer students have taken the ACT test in the last five years.

Nearly 1.4 million students took the ACT test compared to last year — an increase of 40,000 students.

But there’s been a dramatic decline from the nearly 1.8 million students who took the test in 2019 — a decrease of about 400,000 students.

This comes as several universities have made standardized admissions tests optional, including the that doesn’t even consider ACT or SAT scores.

Kukkalli opted out of taking the ACT test because she said it wouldn’t reflect how successful she could be in college.

“It’s more about time management skills, having resilience, support systems and mental fortitude rather than solely whether you have a high ACT score,” Kukkalli said.

Barker said Kukkalli’s thinking is not surprising as the ACT and SAT tests experience a “brand crisis,” with the number of students taking standardized tests declining.

Today’s announcement of science scores from the 2019 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides more evidence for two ugly trends in the test often referred to as the nation’s report card.

As with other results from the past few years — including assessments in social studies last year and the core subjects of math and English in 2019 — scores for all age groups are either flat or down from 2015, the last time the test was given. And declines in performance are largely driven by students achieving at the lowest levels.

On the 2015 exam, younger students posted in physical sciences, life sciences, and earth and space sciences. Erika Shugart, executive director of the National Science Teaching Association, told ����Ӱ�� in an interview that “things looked like they were headed in a positive direction” at that time.

“What we see now is either a leveling off or a decline,” Shugart added. “I can’t speak to what’s going on there, other than it’s not in a good place.”

All told, eighth- and 12th-graders both achieved the same average scores as similarly aged students did in 2015. Fourth-graders saw a three-point drop in average scores, from 154 in 2015 to 151 in 2019. The performance of both fourth- and eighth-graders this year was slightly higher than that of the same age groups in 2009, but high school seniors’ scores stayed the same.

But those averages conceal much wider ranges of variation. In virtually every combination of the three age groups and three science domains, students at the lowest performance levels (i.e., those scoring at the 10th and 25th percentiles) experienced more pronounced downturns. This was particularly true for test takers in the fourth grade: While those scoring in the 50th percentile or above generally held their ground compared with fourth-graders in 2015 — and often performed significantly better than fourth-graders in 2009 — those falling below that benchmark saw decreases of as much as six and eight points compared with 2015.

Officials from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency charged with administering NAEP, said on a call Monday with reporters that the diverging results among children at different performance levels mirrored trends seen both on recent NAEP releases and other assessments, such as the international PISA exam.

While cautioning that the phenomenon was under ongoing study, and offering no empirical argument, NCES Commissioner James Woodworth remarked that success on such tests generally hinges on reading comprehension, and that pervasive literacy struggles among lower-performing students could lie at the root of the stagnant scores.

“Reading is a critical skill that’s needed to improve on all subjects across the board,” Woodworth said. “That is a critical part of this that could be — we’re working on ideas here, but could be — part of the cause of this split we’re seeing across all these subjects and all these different assessments.”

Data gleaned from survey responses provided more fodder for inquiry, as students and teachers gave relatively detailed descriptions of how much class time was devoted to science. In particular, nearly 80 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported that they spent four hours or less on science instruction per week. Thirty-nine percent of eighth-grade teachers said they spent “no time” or “very little time” on life science, while 30 percent said the same for earth and space sciences. Among 12th-graders, 43 percent said they were not presently enrolled in a science course (the same percentage as in 2015, and less than the 47 percent who said the same in 2009).

Recent research has shown that the amount of class time devoted to instruction may play a significant role in how science is taught. A by University of Vermont professor Tammy Kolbe found that teachers who spent five hours or more each week on science were dramatically more likely to incorporate forms of inquiry-based learning, a pedagogical method that encourages hands-on and collaborative approaches like group activities and discussions of engineering problems. Inquiry-based learning is recommended as a best practice by the Next Generation Science Standards, which were conceived and adopted by dozens of states over the last decade as a way of improving K-12 instruction.

Shugart said her organization advises districts to teach at least five hours of science each week, and that they use approaches like inquiry-based learning. Such practices are necessary to provide “a firm grounding” for students in the elementary grades, she argued.

“A lot of students are not being taught science in that manner. If we aren’t teaching students [for] enough time, and we’re not teaching students in the ways that we know are the best ways for them to learn science, how do we expect these scores to change?” she asked.