Calculus does not have to be made easy — it is easy already. That banner used to grace the Los Angeles classroom of someone once called the best teacher in America. Jaime Escalante, the unconventional calculus teacher who was depicted by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, died last year of cancer at the age of 79.
Half a year after his death, the Obama administration weighed in on the state of science, technology, engineering and mathematics（STEM） education in this country. The report, “Prepare and Inspire,” reviewed the sobering statistics about how our K-12 schools suffer by comparison to their counterparts in other developed nations. It called for recruiting and training 100,000 STEM teachers.
But achieving these goals is not going to be easy. The report noted that 25,000 STEM teachers leave the workforce every year, mostly because of disgruntlement with their jobs and lack of professional support. To attract and retain enough science and math teachers, it will require an elevation in their status and a thorough revamping（翻新）of attitudes toward the entire profession.
The onus（责任）to improve schools should be on federal, state and local educational strategists. The first step should be to tap the strengths of the existing teaching pool. We must identify today’s Escalante — the top 5 percent of the nation’s STEM teachers — and, as recommended in the administration report, induct them into a STEM master teachers corps that would receive salary supplements and federal funding to support their activities. Second, we need to give all teachers the tools they need. We should form the equivalent of an Advanced Research Projects Agency to help develop educational technologies, including “deeply digital” instructional materials that encourage active participation. Finally, we should shift our emphasis from standards to implementation. Developing new standards does have a role, but it is the difficulty of putting them into practice, given the day-to-day pressures that teachers are under.
To meet all the goals set by the White House report would require an extra $1 billion each year. Against the nearly $600 billion spent annually for public education, it is not a huge sum. Still, with local districts faced with declining tax revenues and unfunded mandates, some of the money will have to come from the federal government.
That goes against the grain during a time when teachers’ salaries and benefits are being cut. Yet the costs of doing nothing are a matter of simple calculus. If we do not improve STEM education, the U.S. will continue a decades-long slide from the middle of the pack in student achievement toward the very bottom.
1.The example of Jaime Escalante is cited to show（ ）.
2.The author comes up with the following solutions EXCEPT （ ）.
3.It can be inferred that the biggest barrier to the education reform lies in（ ）.
4.According to the passage, “...the costs of doing nothing are a matter of simple calculus” means that（ ）.
