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two out of every five American high school seniors scored Below Basic on the science portion of NAEP

Two out of 63 university school of education elementary math programs surveyed by the National Council of Teacher Quality met or exceeded standards for training math teachers

Kindergarten teachers, for example, ignore the need to show kids that numbers represents quantities.

teachers seem to think that "reading… is an aptitude" while "math is an attitude."

Only one out of 63 elementary math programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education has been rated as having "potentially positive" effects on student achievement

One out of every three American fourth-graders read Below Basic proficiency on the 2009 NAEP.

The graduation rate is 68% for Latinos, 59% for African American students and 56% for students who are learning English. This compares with 83.4% for whites and 89.4% for Asians.

Among eighth-graders statewide, about 4,200 dropped out during the academic year; more than 13,000 finished eighth grade but didn't show up for ninth, the traditional beginning of high school.

L.A. Unified's estimated graduation rate for the four-year period is 55%. However, the state's new system places the district's rate at 64.2%.

Working with the Dana Center, the community college association was able to get all 50 two-year college presidents to sign on.

The Texas project is inspired by the Carnegie Foundation’s work, developed with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, in which students needing math remediation weren’t all put on a path toward calculus.

Kay McClenney is a University of Texas at Austin project director who helped develop a recent report showing the scope of the remediation problem at the state’s community colleges.

Some adaptive-learning software, which tailors lessons and exercises to individual student progress, also uses visual representation to demonstrate relationships.

online drawing programs that allow students and instructors to draw and manipulate shapes and graphs—like the Geometer’s Sketchpad, made by Emeryville, Calif.-based Key Curriculum Press, or the independently run GeoGebra, which has established dozens of institutes across the globe—immediately give users a sense of the relationships that govern geometry, algebra, and even calculus.

While software from Bellevue, Wash.-based DreamBox Learning also uses visual approaches, it differs from MIND’s software because it lets students in grades K-3 choose their own visual representations. After completing a problem one way, students will often be prompted to solve the same problem by choosing a different visualization to reinforce the concept.

its ability to import data from thrice-yearly Washington state standardized testing.

content services like Learn360, from Woodbury, N.Y.-based AIM Education Inc., offer the ability to combine resources into playlists of media set specifically for the needs of individual students, to help give some of that multidimensional understanding of content.

Institutions are equally affected. A recent report by the Community College Research Center put the annual cost of remediation at $1.9-billion to $2.3-billion at community colleges and $500-million more at four-year colleges.

There is growing recognition that the traditional semester-long course sequence used by many community colleges doesn't work, says Michael Lawrence Collins, associate vice president for postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit that studies education and work-force issues. It's inefficient to have students take up to a year and a half in remediation when many need just pieces of what they're being taught.

The Virginia system is betting on that promise. Its colleges will soon replace their semester-long developmental-math courses with nine units, which can be taken as one-credit classes or Web-based lessons with variable credit hours that allow students to complete more than one unit in a self-paced computer lab and classroom. The number of units that students are required to complete will depend on their placement-test scores and intended program of study. Students focused on the liberal arts will have to show competence in only five units, for example, mastering basic algebra concepts such as linear equations. Students who plan to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, math, or business administration must complete all nine units.

Although he has help from a tutor in the class, it's a lot to juggle, he says. Mr. Wyrick does like how the Web-based class allows him to peek at students' quizzes in real time and track their progress a lot faster than by sorting through homework and test papers himself. "It allows me to intervene even before they ask for help," he says.

There is one certainty. The Virginia Community College system is not the only one anticipating the outcome. Equally curious are researchers and other colleges searching for successful ideas. "There is a risk," Mr. Collins says, "but there is also power in being that bold."

The Virginia Community College system is poised to find out. Starting in 2012, it will adopt a new systemwide developmental-math curriculum that will allow students to focus only on those math concepts they haven't already mastered rather than taking a series of semester-long math courses.

Half of all incoming students in the system need developmental education—and three-fourths of those students fail to graduate or transfer within four years.

With so many adults returning to higher education, remedial education must be transformed to meet their needs. Institutions should provide a wide range of options for students based on their competency, recognizing that many don’t have time for semesterlong courses.

A study by the Board of Regents in Ohio -- one of the few states that actually have cost data for remedial education -- found that although 38 percent of incoming freshmen were taking remedial coursework. This translated to only 5 percent of actual full-time students, and around 3.6 percent of undergraduate instructional costs.

The lack of clear college-ready standards, poor assessment practices, the lack of customized learning options and the cost in time and money to students make it clear that postsecondary institutions are not committed to ensuring the success of millions of students who seek a college credential.