Education is an important part of NSF's mission. We support an array of research into effective practice at all levels of the educational system. Our most ambitious efforts are to reshape K-12 science and math education in whole states and major urban areas nationwide. If the school day is reconfigured and the curriculum refocused so that teachers are adequately supported and are given the time to teach well, and in-depth, and are encouraged themselves to continually improve their skills and knowledge, then both students and teachers benefit. If students are grouped according to the expectation that some can learn challenging math and science and others cannot, then those expectations are likely to be fulfilled.
All students can rise to the challenge.
Indeed, we cannot expect them to do well unless they are challenged. We also learned that U.S. teachers have far less time to think about what they teach and how best to teach it. As a physicist, I find it disturbing that mathematicians who reviewed videotapes of U.S. math lessons saw essentially no high quality math taught at all. Sadly, they found, in fact, that 87 percent of the math taught was of low quality. Only 13 percent of the math taught in the Japanese lessons was judged to be of low quality.