Introduction for Secretary of Education Richard Riley

Baltimore Meeting, January 8, 1998

Introduction by Arthur Jaffe, AMS President
for Secretary of Education Richard Riley
Joint Mathematics Meetings, Baltimore, Maryland, January 8, 1998

It is a great pleasure to welcome the Secretary of Education, The Honorable Richard Riley.

This is a historic event, publicly symbolizing the interest of our Society, as well as our sister societies, in education, and also pointing to the synergy between our specialty, research in mathematics, with education at all levels. I am proud that our committee on education has concentrated not only graduate and postgraduate education, but also on the involvement of research mathematicians in K-12 issues. For our members, mathematics education means cradle to the grave. We are all "perpetual students."

We originally invited Secretary Riley when it appeared that his department would bear full responsibility for the development of the proposed 8th grade mathematics test. Since the time of our invitation, the agreement between President Clinton and Congress has moved the primary responsibility elsewhere; but it is clear that the Department of Education will have considerable influence.

Coming on the heels of the mediocre performance in mathematics by our 4th and 8th grade children as measured by the international TIMSS study, the proposal for a national test is viewed by many mathematicians as an opportunity to bootstrap the level of school mathematics onto a higher plane. However, others worry that such a test would become an upper bound to mathematics skills, a political football, so that to ensure good performance the test would be content light, and would make a bad situation worse.

We couple this concern about average performance with another central worry in our community: our schools do not pay adequate attention to our gifted students. We need to look up to the ceiling, as well as down to the floor. Not doing so, we run the risk of losing our capability to regenerate our scientific population in the future. In the past we have been helped so much by immigration. With the changes in the world, we cannot rely on that in the future.

So we await your talk with great interest! Secretary Richard Riley was born in South Carolina, just 65 years and 2 days ago today. So we can think of his visit as a special birthday party. Secretary Riley served in the Navy on a mine-sweeper. Later he served as a distinguished Governor of South Carolina. He is known for launching initiatives to raise academic standards. We are extremely grateful that he has taken the time and effort to join us.

We look forward to hearing Secretary Riley's insights and plans. He will speak on "The State of Mathematics Education: Building a Strong Foundation for the Twenty-first Century."

Text of Secretary's Riley's speech.