Keith Devlin on “An Apollo Program for Math”
Keith Devlin is a senior researcher at Stanford University, author, and “the Math Guy” on National Public Radio. In February, Devlin blogged about an idea of his to reverse the poor performance of high school students in one generation:
The US ranks much worse than most of our economic competitors in the mathematics performance of high school students.
We now have the knowledge to turn that around. We could raise the level of mathematics performance across the board, within a single school generation, so that we are number one in the world. All it would take is a one-time, national investment of $100 million over a five-year period. That’s what it would cost to build and put in place a system that could achieve that change, with the existing school system and the existing teachers. Once built, that system would be self-
