Adoption and implementation of the standards will require a systemic, nationwide effort. Faculty, with strong support from administrators, are primarily responsible for implementing educational reform. Professional mathematics organizations must lead the effort to promote this implementation by making their support highly visible at their meetings and in their publications and by providing professional development opportunities. Furthermore, business, industry, governing bodies, accrediting agencies, and public and private funding agencies must unite behind the efforts to reform higher education. Their voices are heard and respected in the local and national communities.
Individual faculty have the power to implement educational reform.
A collegiate mathematics educator reports that she received a grant from her college to reform the developmental and liberal arts mathematics courses. The first step in the reform process was the comparison of the current curricula with the recommendations made in a draft version of Crossroads in Mathematics. She noted that it is necessary to strengthen the students' exposure to extended real-world problems, particularly in the areas of data analysis and measurement. This chapter describes an integrated national plan of local, state, and national actions that will ensure that reform takes place in a lasting and pervasive way. The document is designed to attract national attention to the issue of implementing reform in introductory college mathematics and thereby provide support to mathematics faculty and impetus for them to become involved.