Americans think schools need to teach math skills to prepare students for future success—but they don’t always agree on which skills are the most crucial, and the subject stirs up complicated emotions, according to a sweeping survey of U.S. adults.
The report, produced by Gallup in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has put $1.1 billion dollars into grantmaking to improve math education, surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. adults and an additional 2,831 workplace managers about their attitudes toward math and their perspective on the subject’s role in their personal and professional lives.
The results come as U.S. math scores have stagnated after declines during the pandemic. More than 60 percent of math teachers say their lowest-performing students are two or more grade levels behind, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey from this year.
Several states are in the midst of large-scale attempts to transform the way the subject is taught, taking varied approaches.
Alabama, for example, has focused on shoring up foundational math, passing a 2022 law that requires districts to screen K-5 students for math difficulties and provide math coaches to elementary schools. In California, the state’s board of education has attempted to deepen teachers’ focus on problem-solving, adopting a controversial new framework in 2023 that aims to make math culturally relevant and applicable to real-world situations.
Americans have varied views on how the subject should be taught, and what its purpose should be, the Gallup survey found. Read on for three takeaways.
1. Most Americans think the math taught in schools is important for success in the real world—with one big exception.
Most U.S. adults think that math skills in general are important for the workforce—61% say these skills are very important, while 35% say they are somewhat important. But not everything that students learn in school is equally relevant, they say.
Almost all survey respondents agreed that elementary school math—foundational knowledge and skills—is very important. Nearly 4 in 5 survey respondents said it was key to success in the real world, outside of K-12 school.
But when asked about higher-level math, that proportion decreased.
In part, that’s because high school math focuses on concepts that respondents said they don’t actually need to know. Of the 16% of Americans who said high school math wasn’t important, about 80% said that it was more advanced than what they needed to use in their real life.
The curriculum in U.S. schools has long been “balanced too heavily” toward theory, said Zarek Drozda, the director of Data Science 4 Everyone, a national coalition of education leaders to advance data science education in K-12 schools.
“Students are telling us very clearly that the curriculum is not relevant for their life post-graduation,” Drozda said, referencing a separate, 2023 survey of more than 37,000 students across 150 countries that found more than half of respondents wanted to develop more data skills.
Several states, including Utah, California, Georgia, and Oregon, have moved to incorporate more data science throughout K-12 math standards in recent years.
2. U.S. adults wish they had better data literacy skills. But managers say their employees need a better grounding in foundational arithmetic.
Some adults in the survey identified a greater need for data literacy, too.
When asked which math skills they wished they had learned more about in middle or high school, about 1 in 5 said they wanted to know more about data science, such as how to manage spreadsheets or large amounts of information.
The most-cited skill, though, was financial math.
When the survey asked workplace managers what skills they wished their employees had, the top of the list looked similar—with one big difference. Forty-one percent of managers said they wished their direct reports had stronger foundational math skills, such as arithmetic. But in general, Americans don’t think they need more practice with this. Only 7% said they wished they had learned more about it.
Why the disconnect? It’s possible that employees are thinking about the skills that could propel them into new careers, said Sarah Powell, a professor who studies math education in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
“For example, if they knew more about data science, software, or statistics, they could have different career pathways open up for them,” she wrote in an email.
But managers are probably focused on the way employees’ existing math skills support—or hinder—their company’s work.
“They likely see accounting errors and foundational calculation errors; they have probably seen how arithmetic skill either helps or causes problems,” Powell said.
This finding suggests that even as technology like AI advances, schools can’t “abandon” teaching K-8 basics, said Drozda.
3. Younger Americans have more negative feelings toward math than older Americans.
The oldest Americans feel the most positively about math—61% of respondents ages 65 and older were mostly interested, excited, and/or happy about the subject.
But the proportion of people who feel this way falls steadily with each younger age group, bottoming out with respondents ages 18-24. Only about a third of them reported exclusively positive feelings about math.
One possibility for this downward trajectory is that something has changed over the past few decades—either in math instruction, or in the economic conditions shaping the labor market that students face after they exit school.
Drozda blamed a lack of data literacy instruction, a mismatch between what students learn in classrooms and the competencies they know they will need for the workforce. “Gen Z students experiencing today’s curriculum are not seeing the value,” he said.
Powell suggested that curricular pacing and pedagogical approach might play a role. “It could be due to math instruction in schools that is increasing math anxiety and decreasing math confidence—math instruction that is not ensuring that students have a strong foundation in one skill before moving onto the next thing,” she wrote. Some math curricula take a more inquiry-based approach, encouraging students to derive multiple solutions, while others favor explicit instruction, which emphasizes modeling and practice.
But a more mundane explanation could be contributing, too, she added.
“People who are 55+ have been practicing math for 50+ years,” she wrote. “First in school, then probably through 30+ years of career or functioning in society. Research shows that when you have higher math performance you also demonstrate higher math confidence. So, this result could be due to many, many years of math practice.”
