Activist parents go along too, so long as their own children get the benefits of the best courses and best teachers. These are nothing more than dead-end options, and remedial programs intended to compensate for lost years are, by and large, expensive failures. This requires nothing less than high expectations and commensurate instructional resources for all students in every grade. Effective instructional programs, like high performance manufacturing, seek to prevent failures rather than correct them. For decades, mathematics has been used as the great sorter and selector, as the critical filter for high paying careers.
Mathematics enables children to know that they are right without depending on adult authority.
No other subject confers so much power on children. Unfolding the intrinsic power of mathematics was the secret of Pat's success at Roosevelt. Students in ethnically diverse classes, in confronting a challenging curriculum, can see that mathematics can be approached in many different ways and that everyone struggles with tough problems. Experience can change beliefs. Skeptics can become believers.